Sustainability
March 3rd, 2010
There was an interesting article in the Star recently (with a misleading headline) about how Chicago’s chief financial officer arranged leases on profitable city-owned infrastructure with private companies, and so raised billions of dollars of capital for the city. These assets included some parking garages, all the city’s parking meters, and the Chicago Skyway, a 7.8 mile toll bridge and road connecting two expressways.
Leasing is certainly a better option than selling valuable city assets outright. The city raises needed money, and then, eventually, the assets return to the city and it can either start managing them again and get the revenue directly, or re-lease them.
It’s not ideal, though. Leases tend to be very long term (e.g. 99 years), so it’s not much different from privatization in the short term. And it might not make a lot of economic sense to sell or lease an asset that makes good money (such as Toronto Hydro), as economist Jim Stanford explains in the article:
“Think of Toronto Hydro,” said Stanford. “The city typically earns an annual profit of about 10 per cent on its equity investment. Some of that (but not all) is paid to the city as a cash dividend; but even the profits that are retained inside Toronto Hydro are still new wealth for the City.
“If you sell off an asset that earns 10 per cent, in order to pay down debt (or avoid new debt, which is equivalent) on which you pay 5 or 6 per cent interest, have you made a good decision? Obviously not.
“Your balance sheet is no stronger: debt is lower, but so are your assets.”
On the other hand, reading the article (especially the mention of the Skyway), I wondered whether it might make a sense to set up a lease on city assets that don’t earn any revenue but have revenue-generating potential, with a private company that is able to earn revenue with them. In return, the city could get a big dose of capital funding. I am thinking of the Don Valley Parkway and the Gardiner Expressway, which were handed over to the city to manage (and pay for) as part of the Harris government’s downloading.
September 10th, 2009
I went to an open house at City Hall last night about Toronto’s new zoning bylaw project. It doesn’t sound all that exciting, and the event was pretty sparsely attended, but the project is in fact both huge and very important. It will, literally, determine the shape of the city as it evolves.
The goal of the project is to finally amalgamate the 43 existing zoning bylaws from the former municipalities of the old Metro Toronto into a single coherent set. These zoning bylaws determine the size, shape, placement and use of every building in Toronto (unless, of course, they are overwritten by the Committee of Adjustment or the Ontario Municipal Board). The bylaws currently in force are still the original ones set up in each of the cities after the Second World War (the first was in Etobicoke in 1949), all of which have been repeatedly and massively amended over the years — a total of over 10,000 amendments.
Making sense of this massive tangle of laws is a necessary but Herculaean task, so it’s understandable that the current effort is focused on creating a single coherent zoning bylaw that encompasses the existing bylaws, rather than trying to make significant improvements. On the other hand, it is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create zoning that is better focused on creating a more attractive and sustainable city, so to some extent this is an opportunity lost. If it’s not done now, it’s hard to imagine when it will ever be done.
There are, fortunately, a few useful changes towards making a better city. First, the new bylaw will include standards for bicycle parking for most types of new buildings, including condos and apartments, office buildings, and shopping. These standards will apply across the city, and much higher standards will apply in the cycling-heavy downtown core. Unfortunately, the currently proposal does not include standards for some types of buildings, notably institutional ones (hospitals, schools) for which such standards are also necessary.
The new zoning also takes a more coherent approach to minimum parking provisions, requiring a lot less parking for condos/apartments or office buildings that are in the downtown core or on heavy transit lines. Many new projects don’t need the amount of parking required by zoning, and developers would be glad not to pay the extra cost to provide it. But the overall reduction in minimum parking requirements is disappointingly limited — the planner in charge of the project, Joe D’Abramo, estimated it at about 10% less compared to previous requirements.
But parking is just the tip of the iceberg. The new bylaw is vast and complex, with a lot of it in technical language, but it will have a big impact on issues like green space, water drainage, sunlight on streets, density, the width and vibrancy of sidewalks, and many other questions that will shape the overall feel of our city as properties are built and rebuilt. I’m worried that the only people with the time and expertise to understand and analyze the impact of this project will be people with specific interests in commercial or residential real estate. Will the project be simply too big, or too detailed, for people who are interested in the overall shape and direction of the city to digest? The project seems generally well-thought-out and positive in its direction, but without the ambition to make significant improvements.
There are two more public consultations coming up, in North York and Scarborough, and there is also an extensive website with feedback options. One of the most striking aspects of the website is an interactive map that will give you the zoning that will apply to every single property in the city, including references to the previous zoning and any special exceptions.
I know too little to do much further analysis, but here are some issues that struck me as interesting and possibly worth looking at. Maybe some readers will be able to investigate them in depth. (Note that all of these apply only to new buildings — old ones are always grandfathered in).
September 1st, 2009
What would our city look like in a world that had gone beyond fossil fuels? It’s an important question, for if we can’t paint a picture of the future we want we’re not …
May 16th, 2009
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGJt_YXIoJI[/youtube]
The Congress for the New Urbanism has announced the winner of its 2009 video contest. This short film Built to Last was made by the award-winning documentary teams First + Main Media in Julian, CA and Paget Films …
April 20th, 2009
Across Ontario many communities are struggling with the loss of their small schools. Heritage schools are especially in danger; they have been for a long time and for a multiplicity of reasons. These places are unique, not only have they have played a significant role in defining the identity of generations of students, but they also define the character and quality of community life.
School enrollment has been rapidly decreasing for the last 25 years.In Toronto alone, elementary school enrollment decreased by over 35,000 students last year, a decline that is projected to continue. Peak baby boomer numbers, the reason so many schools were built in the fifties and sixties, will probably never be seen again.
Even with one of the fastest growing immigrant populations in North America, small Toronto schools can’t be filled fast enough, especially not in established residential areas where families tend to be older, exactly where heritage schools are likely to be found. Due to this declining enrollment school boards across Ontario have been forced to consolidate their small schools, and because heritage schools are more likely to need extensive maintenance they are most often chosen for closure. Despite the higher quality of craftsmanship of pre-WWII schools, these schools were built to meet different building and fire codes, and are often unfairly categorized as irredeemably unsafe.
December 2nd, 2008
For the most recent issue of Spacing (coming out next week) I reviewed a book by Mary Soderstrom called The Walkable City. It’s full of interesting nuggets of information, and here is one of them: …
October 13th, 2008
The first half of my visit to China took me to the working class city of Changchun and the modern city of Dalian, both in Manchuria, in the northeast. The second half of my visit took me to Shenzhen as well as a side trip to Hong Kong. While both Changchun and Dalian had populations comparable to Toronto and relatively short, but interesting histories, the next city I visited, Shenzhen, was to be a completely different experience altogether.
Shenzhen (pronounced shen-jen), has an urban population of over 8,000,000 ( a municipal population of 12,000,000) and is one of China’s (and the world’s) fastest growing cities. Amazingly, 30 years ago, it was nothing more than a fishing village of a few thousand people. After the death of Mao in 1976, China slowly entered an area of economic reform. Shenzhen, right across the border from Hong Kong, was chosen as one of several Special Economic Zones, an early experiment with capitalism. Soon enough, people from across the country arrived here to find work and prosperity. The sudden growth turned Shenzhen into an urban anomaly - a city without a historical identity, Mandarin speaking in a Cantonese region in the near-tropical Guangdong Province, the first place where capitalism was allowed to thrive nearly unfettered in a still-communist country.
It is very hard to try to find a “heart” or core of this city. There’s many clusters of these post-modern skyscrapers (though there are a few that are a bit more scaled back and more “Toronto Modern”). In the older sections, these highrises sprout out from a low-rise forest of “shake-hand” buildings - apartment buildings so crammed together that one can literally shake hand out the window to a neighbour next door. In some of these districts, there is an abundance of street life, with informal street markets, small businesses operating in ground floor units, and entire districts of restaurants, where often a block or two of a specific street will only have one sub-specialty of food, such as seafood or Northern Chinese cuisine. Interestingly, cramped and low-income apartment blocks (all housing is private sector) can be right across the street from gated upper-class towers; in some parts of the city, the income disparity can differ within a few metres.
In newer, middle class residential areas (such as the Nanshan District, where I stayed), apartment buildings are tall and set back from busy arterial roads and expressways. These newer, wealthier areas are still very dense; tall condominium towers dominate; yet the streetscape is much more suburban. Indeed, all the main roads are built for cars, only more so in the outer districts. Even in these outer districts, there are tall office towers, along some of the major roads, the science fiction cityscape is striking.
Pedestrians can only cross these “superstreets” at pedestrian overpasses. These overpasses, which are very common in developing countries such as India, Mexico, and China, to me symbolize the desire to modernize to American standards - where the car is king.
A Pedestrian overpass on Shennan Road.
September 26th, 2008
Clever graffitti really should inform more of the debate in our federal election. There I was, tearing my hair out trying to understand how anyone can think that giving young people longer criminal sentences is the most important issue facing the country, when crime rates are dropping and global warming threatens the future of all youth (plus everyone else).
But then I came across an on-line mini-lecture by Dan Gilbert — best-selling author, Harvard Psychology professor and author of the title of this rant. Sadly (for me), he has some pretty good reasons why we are blind to the danger posed by rising greenhouse gas levels, while the threats of tooth decay, terrorism or youth crime trigger immediate responses.
It’s well worth a listen, but he sums it up as: “ Global warming is a deadly threat only because it fails to trigger the brain’s alarms. It leaves us sleeping in a burning bed. It remains to be seen whether if we can learn to rouse ourselves to battle an impersonal, slow and quiet enemy that is indeed more dangerous than any our ancestors ever imagined.â€
Alas, the record of our ancestors on this score is not promising. But not entirely hopeless either. Archaeologist/historian Ronald Wright sums up the historical evidence in his brilliant little book A Short History of Progress with a single line stolen from a piece of graffiti: “Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up.â€
I’ve tacked this line onto the wall by my desk because I think it is both clever and wise – and the placement seems appropriate for an academic thesis that started as a piece of street art whose creator the get-tough-on-youth-crime crowd would have us jail.
Clever because it plays upon our familiarity with the expression “Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.†So it highlights the possibility of avoiding paying the price by actually learning from our mistakes, even while cynically doubting that this is probable. But at least our unknown graffiti artist retained enough hope to bother writing his warning on a wall.
September 23rd, 2008
TTC chair Adam Giambrone is sounding the alarm on the potential for provincially-mandated privatization of public transit just hours after the launch of Metrolinx’s launch of its $50 billion, 25 year regional transportation plan. …
August 5th, 2008
Over the past few months you may have noticed a change on Toronto’s streets — an evident shift from traditional cars towards much smaller gas powered or electric vehicles. Gas-powered scooter sales are up, and …
