Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 804

Last week's general election in the UK was yet another example of the urban-rural divide that we are all seeing emerge around the world. Taking a look at this chart from the Centre for Towns, it's pretty clear that the type of community someone lives in (i.e. how urban), says a lot about the way in which they probably voted. In big cities, the vote share was 49% Labour. And in villages, communities, and small towns, the vote share was about 48-58% Conservative.

But what does this stem from? According to John Burns Murdoch of the Financial Times , the biggest predictor (for constituencies) of a swing vote over to the Conservatives during this last election was the share of the population in a blue collar job. Here is a graph from John's article. Circles with a black outline are constituencies that changed hands last week. Note Great Grimsby, which I wrote about here , in the top right corner.

These facts probably aren't all that surprising to most of you. But it is an important reminder of how concentrated the new economy is becoming in big -- or perhaps I should say, certain -- cities. The Brookings Institution recently referred to this as " a crisis of regional imbalance ." Because it's not just a case of urban vs. rural. Brookings found that from 2005 to 2017, more than 90% of innovation sector growth in the US could be traced back to just five metro areas. (You'll be able to guess most of the five. Only one stood out for me.)

This is the world we live in.

Robert C. Ellickson's recent paper, titled Zoning and the Cost of Housing: Evidence from Silicon Valley, Greater New Haven, and Greater Austin , really holds back when it comes to the shortcomings of zoning ordinances. Here's an excerpt:

Zoning, as practiced in much of the nation, gravely misallocates resources. Some distortions are micro, such as the mediocre siting of Anton Menlo housing [a project by Facebook], and the lack of walkable neighborhoods in New Haven suburbs. Others are macro. If Silicon Valley were more populous, it would be a world tech center even more attractive to IT workers. The misuse of zoning squanders land, adds to the nation’s carbon footprint, warps interstate migrants’ choices about where to reside, and helps price poor households out of wealthier neighborhoods that would offer better life prospects for their children.

The paper focuses on three metropolitan areas: Austin, Silicon Valley, and New Haven. Of these three, Austin is the most permissive in terms of allowing new and denser housing. Silicon Valley and New Haven, by contrast, have done a great deal to limit intensification by adopting exclusionary policies.

In 1970, home prices in Silicon Valley were only slightly above the national average. Today, they are by far the highest in the United States, which is, of course, partially a result of high demand (tech salaries) and low supply (zoning ordinances). Ellickson's paper examines the effects of the latter.

If you'd like to download a copy, click here .

Photo by  Carlos Delgado  on  Unsplash

This recent Spacing article by Geoff Turnbull and Laurence Holland makes a compelling case for "missing middle" type development along Toronto's collector roads. The idea being that we are already focusing on (and have policies for) infill along our Avenues and within our single family neighborhoods, but we have yet to pay attention to the scale of street that sits somewhere in between the two. Streets such as Hallam that were once commercial spines, but lost their economic purpose for a variety of reasons.

Here's a map, from the article , of Toronto's collector roads:

There are almost 800 kilometers of collector roads in the city. As the name starts to imply, these streets are designed to collect vehicles and funnel them toward arterial roads and "Avenues." But this scale difference changes things and creates a kind of in-between condition. They're less desirable from a residential standpoint (because they're not as quiet and secluded), but they're also not designed to become strong retail/commercial streets (despite the odd retail remnant). In fact, retail is probably prohibited on most. Which is why I like the idea of thinking of these streets differently.

Of course, we have work to do in order to make this scale of development economically feasible, and the authors do acknowledge that. But the more we continue to talk about the future of our low-rise neighborhoods, the more that intensification starts to feel inevitable.