Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 987

Earlier this month, Shane Dingman wrote a piece in the Globe and Mail talking about TAS’ proposed development for 2 Tecumseth Avenue here in Toronto – the former home of Quality Meat Packers, a slaughterhouse. In the article there’s a quote from Mazyar Mortazavi, which I posted to my Instagram (as a story), but that I have been meaning to also post to the blog. So here it is: 

“It’s not a conversation about towers good, towers bad: Mid-rise is the most expensive construction typology and it delivers effectively luxury housing, so it doesn’t respond to the needs of affordability,” he said. “We didn’t buy Tecumseth to build a bunch of condos and move on. We bought it because we wanted to pursue a vision around city building. You need density … the question is how do we actually deliver density that’s relevant today and relevant 50 years from now?”

He’s of course right about mid-rise construction costs. There are diseconomies of scale and other construction inefficiencies that we have talked about many times before on this blog. The result is one of the Catch-22s of city building. Mid-rise and small scale infill is often seen as desirable, but we also say that we need more affordable housing.

It’s doublethink .

Image: 2 Tecumseth by KPMB Architects for TAS

The New York City Department of City Planning has a very cool “ metro region explorer ” online that allows you to explore population, housing, and employment trends in the tri-state NYC Metropolitan Region. Start here and then click on “Learn More” to cycle through the slides and data.

One interesting takeaway is that population growth continues to centralize in the region’s core. Since 2010, 60% of the region’s population growth has taken place in the five boroughs of New York City, and in particular it has occurred in neighborhoods with strong rail transit.

There has also been a slowing in terms of the number of residents leaving New York City. Historically, people moved to the city in their 20′s and left in their 30′s. That trend is slowing.

I suspect this has to do with a combination of factors, including the shift toward a city-centered knowledge economy; the desire for walkability and urban amenities; the phenomenon of people getting married later in life (if at all); and so on.

The people who do leave the city are also more likely to leave for other parts of the U.S. than other parts of the region. This has led to a decline in the number of prime age (25-54 years old) workers in the suburbs.

Check out the Metro Region Explorer, here . There’s a lot of good stuff in there.

Below is an interesting Kickstarter project by photographer and art director  Cody Ellingham . I think many of you will appreciate it. It is a photobook of Japanese public housing apartments, which are known as Danchi. All of the photos were taken by Cory at night, hence the dream part. The book is about the promise that these projects represented in the post-war years, but it is also about their decline in the subsequent decades.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cbje/danchi-dreams-a-photobook-of-japanese-public-housi/widget/video.html