Condos killing Toronto's fabric and history

In this article Christopher Hume asks the question if Condos are destroying the fabric that keeps Toronto together.

It's time we understood that heritage represents a rare resource, a civic asset, not simply an obstacle on the way to a developer's bottom line. Our willingness to sacrifice our history at every opportunity reveals a worrisome lack of self-confidence and sophistication.

Regardless of what will replace these houses, the neighbourhood – and with it the city – will be diminished by their disappearance.

Is Hume really on to something here? Will we look back at the last 20 years of the condo boom as another mistake in the planning and revitalization for our cities? Will it be connected with urban renewal, the process that cleared city blocks, but this time for the direct purpose of building condos? Condos have their place and can be an affordable option to new homebuyers, but why is the trend to tear down and rebuild, instead of converting existing structures? This might help explain why.

NIMBY SOHO (Part II)

On Thursday night, the full board voted to reject the idea, asking the department to explore car-free zones in a different form or perhaps on a different street.

The argument in favor of the plan, said Ian Dutton, a community board member who is a pilot and says he has seen pedestrian-only streets work well in Europe, is that the vast majority of traffic on Prince Street is foot traffic, yet nearly all the street space is given over to cars.

Opponents of the plan, among them Sean Sweeney, executive director of the SoHo Alliance, say that creating more space for pedestrians would make the area even more of a destination for tourists, attracting more visitors and vendors, which would force existing traffic onto adjacent streets and destroy any last remnants of the neighborhood’s residential character.

Here is a New York Times story on the CB2 meeting regarding the Prince Street proposal. CB2 voted it down. I am not sure if this is a clear sign that pedestrian mall/streets are not wanted, but rather, neighborhood politics as usual.

Where should the towers go?

The flamboyant exteriors of the recent crop of signature buildings represent yet another shift in architectural priorities. Whereas technological innovation once focused on the interior workings of the machine — from plumbing to structural innovations like steel frames — most of today’s architectural innovations are expressed through the buildings’ exterior forms.

Not everyone is happy with this state of affairs. Traditionalists, still stung by the rise of Modernism, see the current crop of signature buildings as a break with the historical street front. Mostly, they criticize these works on aesthetic grounds: as flashy expressions of architectural vanity.

It’s true that some of the new buildings are ostentatious. When workers broke ground two years ago on Herzog & de Meuron’s 40 Bond in the East Village, the building was hailed as one of the city’s first serious residential projects by an international celebrity firm. Today the cast green glass facade feels slick and mannered. An elaborate gate meant to resemble a three-dimensional work of graffiti is an embarrassing effort to tap into a bygone underground scene. (Nevertheless all of the multimillion-dollar units were sold before the building was close to completion.)

But the city has also been starving for innovative architecture. And to my mind the greatest residential projects of the last decade have managed to balance aesthetic freedom with a nuanced understanding of their surroundings. Rather than mimic period styles, such buildings are a physical expression of the needs and demands of the environments they inhabit.

While I am a traditionalist, I really like how this article talks about the class implications of architecture. While I am not against a "signature building" I firmly believe that those structures need to be located in city centers and not in low height and bulk residential neighborhoods.

+1 for Patterson

Congestion Pricing addresses two urgent concerns of the residents of New York City and its suburbs: the need to reduce congestion on our streets and roads, and thereby reduce pollution and global warming; and the need to raise significant revenue for mass transit improvements. We expect that revenue from the Congestion Pricing plan will support more than $4.5 billion in needed capital improvements for mass transit and meaningfully reduce traffic into the Central Business District of Manhattan. Before the constructive process of deliberation proceeds in both the City Council and the State Legislature, transparency requires that the public fully see what the system envisioned by the Commission will entail. While Commission Report highlighted other issues which need to be resolved, introducing this bill allows the City Council and Legislature to examine the details of the proposal and make an informed judgment on the Congestion Pricing program.

It has been a crazy past two weeks in Albany. During that time groups were pushing hard to convince our upstate legislators that congestion pricing is a thing to support. While our former governor was a supporter, today our new Governor David Patterson is not only backing congestion pricing, but will be introducing the Bill into the legislature.

NIMBY SOHO?

A Department of Transportation proposal to close six blocks of Prince St. in Soho to car traffic on Sundays is steering proponents and opponents on a collision course, as they paint vastly different portraits of what will transpire if the plan is enacted.

On Tues., March 11, the Traffic and Transportation Committee of Community Board 2 heard a proposal by D.O.T. on whether to make Prince St. between Lafayette St. and West Broadway into a car-free zone on Sundays between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m.

Soho has faced an increase in both vehicle and pedestrian traffic in recent years, and this fact figures heavily into the arguments for and against this proposal. The Soho Alliance is opposed to the proposal and expresses concern that it would worsen the traffic on the surrounding streets.

Check out the article and the DOT presentation over at Streets blog.

When going green has gone too far

Too much house?

Since 1990, construction of supersized homes of 3,000 square feet or more has doubled, to 24 percent of new homes. Combine that with the shrinking size of the American family, and the result is that average floor space per person has grown by three times since 1950.

As the heavy-breathing real estate market reached its zenith, square-footage mania spread from the suburbs into cities, mutating into a doubly wasteful disease: teardown fever. Normal-sized, sound, comfortable houses were demolished to free up urban lots for the biggest, flashiest structures that could be squeezed in.

It is funny when I read these articles cause growing up my parents did not have a huge house (yes I shared a room with my brother until my sister moved out). Even today when I return home for visits (after living in 700 sq ft the past 6 years) my parents house still seems pretty small. Other than the few luxuries (garage, washer/dryer, yard) why do people buy a house that really is just too big for their own needs? I am always impressed by the smaller row houses in Philadelphia and Baltimore because while these houses are not huge (usually 1,000 sq ft) they seem to provide enough space for a couple or small family. Levels seem to work well cause they give you the feeling of more space when the square footage might not be that much.