Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 841

Randy Shaw is the Editor of Beyond Chron, Director of San Francisco's Tenderloin Housing Clinic, and author of, Generation Priced Out: Who Gets to Live in New Urban America . In his recent piece in Beyond Chron , he makes the argument that, from San Francisco to New York, homeowners who oppose new multi-unit housing are in fact the ones driving gentrification. He admits that there are some exceptions and cites San Francisco's SOMA neighborhood as a place that became upscale because of new development. (I think it's more nuanced than that.) But the key point is that there countless examples of neighborhoods changing their socioeconomic position without the presence of new development. (There's investment, but at a smaller or individual scale.) Here's an excerpt from Shaw's article:

Banning apartments from single family home neighborhoods limits new residents to those who can afford to purchase a home. Banning new multi-unit construction also artificially reduces supply, driving up home prices for existing owners.

That’s how most San Francisco neighborhoods, and those in other high-housing cost cities, gentrified. It happened with little or no multi-unit construction. Yet homeowners have adeptly shifted blame for the gentrification of urban neighborhoods from their own land use policies to builders—even when no building has occurred.

But in the end, do these details even matter? What we have here are competing self-interests. Developers, obviously, want to build. And many people benefit when this does happen. But others don't see it that way.

Richard Florida is currently running a four-part CityLab series on the economic performance of America's cities. What makes this study somewhat unique is that it looks at cities proper, rather than at their larger metro areas. In some cases there may not be that much of a difference. But in other cases, the performance of the city proper could be very different from that of the broader area.

Here are the fastest and slowest growing cities from 2012 to 2017:

Here are the fastest and slowing growing job markets:

And here is the growth in share of adults with a graduate degree:

It's interesting to see Seattle at the top of the population growth list. It is not a sprawling sunbelt city. It is an expensive tech hub. And it is also interesting to see Miami's strong employment and education growth. Years ago, Paul Graham wrote an essay arguing that tech hubs have two prerequisites: capital and nerds. He went on to argue that Miami has lots of the former, but not much of the latter. Maybe that's changing.

Parasitic architecture sounds like a bad thing because of the connotations, but you could make an argument that it is, in fact, the exact opposite. It is a way to better leverage existing structures and reclaim under-utilized urban spaces. Perhaps additive architecture would be a more appropriate name.

Here's one example. WARchitect recently completed this "skyscape apartment" on top of an existing 5 storey apartment building in Bangkok. It's about 1,600 square feet. And the entire space is organized according to the structural grid of the apartment building below.

Many/most structural systems have excess capacity because of a built in factor of safety. So for a small addition like this, I'm guessing that they probably just loaded up the existing column grid. It also looks like there were already stairs leading up to the roof of the building.

Years ago I looked at doing an addition on top of an existing apartment building here in Toronto and it ended up being a lot more complex than I may be making it out to be in this post. Mind you, we were looking at adding on a few floors, which triggered all sorts of issues.

But now that Toronto is allowing accessory dwelling units along its laneways, is it time that we also look at the rooftops of our existing buildings?

Photo: Rungkit Charoenwat