Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 996

The Seattle Times has an article up about “ widespread single-family zoning ” that will feel familiar to many here in Toronto who, I know, are having similar conversations about the amount of land dedicated to low-density housing.

The article, by Mike Rosenberg, estimates that 49% of all developable land in Seattle is dedicated to single-family housing; that 8% is dedicated to multi-family housing; and that another 8% is dedicated to commercial and mixed-use buildings. The rest of the land is institutional, open space, vacant, and so on.

Of all the residential lots in the city, the estimate is that 69% of them are occupied by single-family houses. This is compared to 1% in Manhattan. 

I tried to reverse engineer the 69% based on the land use areas in the article, but the math didn’t quite add up. In any event, the argument here is, of course, that single-family homes are too expensive in Seattle and that the city needs more land available for multi-family housing.

Housing supply is no doubt important, but looking at the above chart, having a low, or lower, percentage of residential land dedicated to single-family housing doesn’t seem to necessarily guarantee affordable housing.

Teralytics recently looked at data from 500,000 smartphone users to determine how, when, and where Puerto Ricans moved between August 2017 and February 2018 during and following Hurricane Maria – generally considered to be the worst natural disaster on record for the area. 

CityLab published the data here and along with the following maps:

It shows the locations and the top 10 counties that received Puerto Rican population during the above time period. Florida and the Northeast are at the top of list, which isn’t all that surprising. Privacy concerns aside, it is once again an example of the kind of granular data that we now have access to. Prior to this data being available, all we apparently had was estimates.

At the end of last year, Slate hosted a “ pre- design community meeting ” for the redevelopment of Corktown Plaza in Hamilton. It was the first time we hosted a meeting like this.

We learned things that evening and this May 24th we’ll be hosting our “pre- application community meeting.” See above for the full invite details. Lots of pre things.

At last year’s meeting we had no design. It was about learning. At this month’s meeting we will be presenting a design proposal for the site. So hopefully some of you will be able to make it out.

Regular scheduled programming will resume tomorrow on the blog.