Create Streets recently published this review of the proposed Shoreditch Works development project in Hackney, London. And one of the interesting things they did as part of it was something they call a visual preference survey. What this means is that they showed a statistically representative sampling of over two thousand British people some before and after images so they could choose which they prefer.

Here's how they responded:

As you can see, from a visual perspective, there was/is strong support for the proposed development. At least according to these three views. This is despite the fact that the proposal is, of course, taller than what's there today. What I think this starts to show is that good design matters. People respond positively to beauty. And, that it's important to show what will happen at street level above all. This is how we all experience cities.

Visual preference surveys aren't all that common. I'm not sure I've seen one conducted for a new development. But it's a great idea and I plan to borrow it from Create Streets.

Cover photo from Shoreditch Works

Okay, so we know that Paris has transformed itself from a car city into a biking city. Between 2015-2020 the City doubled its number of bike lanes. Then in 2021, it announced that it wanted to become a "100% cycling city" and further add to its bike network. Today, it has one of the busiest bike routes in the world and more people cycle than drive. The Globe and Mail reported, here, that last year 11.2% of trips in Paris proper were made by bike, compared to only 4.3% by car. "You would not be wrong to call it a war on the car," Marcus Gee writes. However, the result was a "victory for the city."

At the same time, we know how people will respond to this data. Lots of people will read this article and immediately say, "yeah, but that's Paris, where the average highs and lows in January are 8 and 3 degrees, respectively. It simply won't work in Toronto where our January highs and lows average 0 and -7 degrees. We have snow to contend with; they don't." And of course, they wouldn't be entirely wrong in this argument. Cycling does tend to decline in the winter months in most cities. (Note: The months of April to November in Toronto are just as warm or warmer than Paris in the winter.)

But just for fun, let's look at Oulu, Finland which has been called the "winter cycling capital of the world." Oulu has a population of around 210,000 people, an extremely low population density of approximately 150 people per km2, and January temperatures that average between -7 and -15 degrees. And yet: 40% of residents report cycling on a weekly basis, more than 40% of trips to school are by bike, 22% of all trips in the inner city are by bicycle, and this number remains at 12% throughout the winter. These Oululainens are clearly hardy people.

Here's a video comparing winter vs. summer cycling in Oulu.

I'll be the first to admit that I don't generally cycle in January and February. Partially because it's cold and partially because I don't want road salts all over my business. But the correct framing isn't that it's not possible in a city like Toronto; it's that I'm too soft. That, and we need to invest in the right infrastructure if we want more people to do it.

Photo by Iris on Unsplash

The City of Toronto requires amenity spaces to be provided in new housing developments of a certain size. Here, for example, is the relevant excerpt from the recommended zoning by-law amendment that is expected to allow small-scale apartments along all major streets:

The triggers are 20 and 30 dwelling units, which represents a housing scale that Toronto doesn't build a lot of. I mean there's a reason it's called the missing middle. That is, of course, the point of the major streets study. It's to build more of it. But for that to happen, these amenity requirements have got to go.

Firstly, because it's not feasible at this scale. Think of it this way: two square meters of indoor amenity space x 20 dwelling units = 40 square meters of indoor amenity space or ~430 square feet. Multiply this by an average rent of $5 psf (and then 12 months) and that's nearly $26k of foregone revenue for the project.

This may not seem like a big number for a development project, but consider that at an NOI margin of 77% (i.e. if you deduct operating expenses), this revenue number works out to a net operating income of just over $20k. Capitalize this at 4% and you've just removed $500k of value from the project.

Another way to look at this would be to divide the $26k of foregone rental revenue by the 20 dwelling units. This works out to nearly $1,300 of annual revenue per suite — revenue that will then need to be made up by everyone who lives in the building.

The second reason why I think this requirement needs to go is because it's a suburban way of thinking. In the suburbs, people tend have their own backyards. And so the logic goes that in multi-family buildings, people should also have their own private (albeit shared) amenities.

That's fine if it makes sense for the project. But we shouldn't forget that the reason cities are so wonderful is that they are rich in amenities, culture, and the myriad of other things made possible by collective contribution. World-class museums and galleries, for instance, almost always require big city resources to be viable.

On some level, I think you could argue that there's an irony to this planning requirement. We mandate amenity spaces because amenities are of course good. But it hurts project feasibility, especially at smaller scales, which then limits the amount of new homes, density, and people we have in our existing neighborhoods.

And because we are limiting density, we are indirectly limiting the kind of private and public amenities that might otherwise be feasible if only there were more humans to support them. So I would strongly encourage the city to rethink its position on required amenity areas. At the very least, the triggering unit counts should be raised.

For more on this topic, here's a recent article from the Globe and Mail by John Lorinc.

Photo by Filip Mishevski on Unsplash

Yesterday morning I went cycling in High Park to try and condition myself for the Bike for Brain Health ride that I have coming up. The Park is such an incredible amenity and I love being so close to it. Of course, before I set out, I turned on my Apple Watch and Garmin computer so that I could track it all in Strava. This has become such a big part of cycling (and working out in general). We're all data obsessed. Everyone wants to track their route, their speed, their heart rate, and whatever else.

The result is that Strava collects mountains of data about the way people actively move about in cities — data on everything from cycling to backcountry skiing. Some of this aggregated/anonymized data is available to the public via their global heatmap, but much more of it is available to urban planners and active transportation groups around the world. In fact, this is part of what Strava does: they help city builders. Here are some urban case studies spanning Rio de Janeiro to Park City.

Looking at central Toronto, our heatmap looks like this:

What is immediately noticeable is that cyclists will go where they feel safe. And that generally means streets with dedicated bike lanes. Looking at the above map, you can see that some of the most popular north-south routes are Shaw Street, Beverley Street/St. George Street, and Sherbourne Street. All of these streets have dedicated bike lanes. In the east-west direction, it's also clear that Bloor Street and Danforth Avenue form a hugely important crosstown artery. It is widely used from Etobicoke all the way to Scarborough.

At the same time, these maps start to show where there are broken links in the network. Annette Street and a portion of Dupont Street are, for example, widely used until you get east of the Junction Triangle. Then it falls off. This is unsurprising because it's a stretch of Dupont that isn't very friendly to cyclists. I know I certainly try and avoid it. Instead, we see that cyclists seem to be shifting northward to Davenport, which has a nice bike lane.

This is just one example, and I'm sure there's a lot of other takeaways that can be gleaned from Strava's data. So if you're a city builder and you aren't already leveraging this dataset, you may want to consider applying for a Metro Partnership. I'll be sure to continue doing my part and feeding it data about my laps in High Park and my stops for burgers and croissant sandwiches.

Salt Lake City has two recently completed luxury multi-family developments. Or perhaps I should say, at least two.

The first is The Worthington by Chicago-based developer Convexity Properties. It has 31 floors and 359 apartments. Leasing started last summer and seems to be going well.

The second is the Astra Tower by Kensington Investment Company, which is being managed by Greystar. It has 41 floors, 377 apartments, and is 451 feet tall, making it the tallest building in the state of Utah. Construction was completed at the beginning of this year and, according to Building Salt Lake, it's already about 30% occupied with full stabilization forecasted for summer 2026.

It's interesting to compare these projects to multi-family developments here in Toronto.

First of all, the reported average rent for Astra is US$3 per square foot, which works out to ~C$4.19 psf for us Canadians at today's exchange rate. I would say that this is at least ~15% lower compared to where I would expect most Toronto developers are underwriting new projects. This suggests to me that it's more cost effective to build in SLC.

The product is also different. On Astra's website, they have two virtual tours.

The first is for a studio apartment at 554 sf and the second is for a one bedroom at 788 sf. These are meaningfully larger than new apartments in Toronto. Here, the first would have to be a one bedroom and the second would be at a minimum a one bedroom plus den, though probably a two bedroom.

Every market has its nuances. In the case of SLC, the model suites appear to be very clearly competing with low-rise housing. The one bedroom has a dedicated entrance foyer, there's a separate dining area, and the bedroom has carpet, among other things. It reminds me of earlier multi-family vintages in Toronto.

Of course, one really unique feature you get here is views of the Wasatch mountain range (see cover photo above). It's a special feeling being in an urban center where you have mountains all around you, and it's one of the primary reasons why an increasing number of people are being drawn to Utah.

Congratulations to the team on successfully completing such an ambitious project. It's exciting to see SLC continue to grow and urbanize.

Cover photo via the Astra Tower

Last month, the UK ended its non-domiciled tax regime. This change had been announced in 2024, but its effective date was April 2025. The way this program worked was that if you lived in the UK but were "domiciled" somewhere else, you could limit the amount of taxes that you had to pay in the UK.

Only income and gains earned in the UK and foreign income and gains brought into the UK were taxed. If foreign income stayed abroad, it was not taxed. There was still an annual charge for long-term residents of the UK, but at a high level, this is how the tax regime worked.

The advantage for a rich people is that they could decide to reside in the UK because, hey, London is pretty cool, but at the same time they could nominate a lower-tax country as their domicile. For non-rich people, this became a controversial program, and so it was swapped for tax regime based on residency.

The reason I mention this is because it seems to be having a direct impact on Milan's real estate market. Since 2017, Italy has had a flat tax regime that allows new residents to pay a fixed annual tax rate of €200,000, regardless of how much money they earn abroad.

This has proven to be attractive among rich people and, between 2017 to 2022, the program attracted 2,730 individuals according to the Financial Times. But then the UK made its change and so Italy decided to colloquially rebrand its program to "svuota Londra", which translates to "empty London" in Italian.

It became about taking direct advantage of what the UK had done. And it seems to be working even better. In 2024, approximately 2,200 high-net-worth individuals relocated from the UK to Italy, with Milan being the primary destination. This has created a notable uptick in the luxury property market — more transactions and higher prices.

Whether you agree with these policy decisions or not, they will have an impact on the fortunes of London and Milan going forward. In 2023 alone, it is estimated that individuals holding "non-dom" status in the UK paid almost £9 billion in taxes and contributed to the creation of some 44,000 jobs.

Part of this is now flowing south to Milan.

Note: None of this is tax advice.

Cover photo by ANASTASIIA BUCHINSKAIA on Unsplash

Brandon Donnelly 🇨🇦

@donnelly_b

I want to build this in Toronto.

Arthur Weidmann

@arthurweidmann1

Le 58 rue de la Santé à #Paris14, livré en 2024.

Archi : MAAJ

154

7:56 AM • May 14, 2025

Yesterday morning I reshared this tweet of a recently completed mid-rise building at 58, rue de la Santé in Paris. And the response was overwhelmingly positive. There was a long list of people saying: please build this in my city, I want to live here, I want to invest in projects like this, and more.

Based on the echo chamber that I live in on the internet, it would seem that most people like this project, and are wondering why Paris can build it, but we generally can't. So let's take a closer look in the hopes of learning something. Here's an image from Google Street View:

The developer for the project is RIVP (Régime Immobilière de la Ville de Paris). They are a major social housing developer in the city and are semi-public company, primarily owned by the City of Paris. They build, manage, and renovate social housing, and have somewhere around 66,000 housing units under management in the île-de-France region.

The project contains 14 social housing apartments and one commercial unit at grade. It's 8 storeys tall (R+7 is the nomenclature commonly used in France which means rez-de-chaussée plus 7 additional floors). And on its main elevation there are only two small stepbacks at level 7 and 8. Otherwise the building goes straight up.

The site area is 191 m2 or ~2,055 ft2. This is the equivalent of a single-family housing lot measuring around 20 feet x 100 feet, which would be fairly common in Toronto. Except in this case, it's not just for one family; it's for 14 of them and a commercial user on the ground floor.

The total area, according to the above site signage, is 909.40 m2 or ~9,789 ft2. That crudely works out to about 60.6 m2 per unit (I'm including both the residential and commercial units in this very rough calculation). This is exactly similar to what I would expect to see here in Toronto in terms of an average suite size.

The floor space index for the site (i.e. its density) is 4.76x. This is not particularly high and is probably on the low side compared to what you'd typically find in Toronto for new mid-rise developments. The key difference here is that they're achieving it on a relatively small site.

The total height of the building is 23.46m. Divided by 8 floors, that works out to a floor-to-floor height of 2.93m. This is a bit tighter than what I would expect, but it seems to be because the ground floor is relatively compact, whereas Toronto developers are encouraged to be greater than 4.5 meters tall.

The project architect — MAAJ Architects — specifically mentions on their website that they used concrete in order to keep the height of the building down. They also show the building as being taller and having 16 apartments, so I'm guessing height was constraint.

The big question that remains is: how much did it cost to build? And I unfortunately don't have a good answer for this. Precise hard costs are generally hard to find and total development costs are almost never published.

That said, the architect does show on their website a hard cost figure of 2,630,000 € HT for 1,242 m2 (again, it looks like an earlier design of the project was bigger). These figures work out to €2,117 per m2 or €196.70 per ft2 or C$289 per ft2.

Don't quote me on these figures. I don't have inside information or first-hand experience in this market. But if it's even remotely accurate, then I'd say it's at least 30-40% cheaper than what a comparable build — with hand-laid bricks — would cost in Toronto.

Cover photo by Arthur Weidmann

I like cycling and I like brain health, and so today I signed up to participate in the Bike for Brain Health event that is taking place here in Toronto on Sunday, June 1, 2025. It's for an important cause:

Funds raised for the Bike for Brain Health are used to provide crucial funding for breakthrough research into cognition, Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, and aging brain health; medical programs and services for older adults living in our community; and education that supports healthy aging and healthcare solutions for a growing aging population.

One hundred percent of all donations go directly to the Baycrest Foundation, some of which support the cost of the event. Proceeds are then invested in leading-edge cognitive neuroscience research, advancements in the mitigation of age-related illness and impairment and the care and treatment of patients living with dementia, Alzheimer’s and other brain function related illnesses.

And it's always fun to ride on the Don Valley Parkway without any cars.

The last time I participated, many years ago, I did the 50 km route on a single-speed bike. I ended up getting a flat tire along the way and was completely exhausted by the end of it. When I got back to base camp I think I had 3 or 4 hamburgers before going home to nap for a few hours.

This year I signed up for the 75 km route. I'm not sure that I'm better conditioned, but I do now have a bike with gears and I do have really tight fitting clothes. Surely this will help. I also have two weeks to get out and train. Hit me up if you'd like to lap High Park and "Mount Olympus."

And if you'd like to support my cycle and donate to Baycrest, here's my personal page.

Every May, Toronto hosts something called Doors Open, which entails buildings around the city opening up their doors for free to the public. It's an opportunity to visit buildings of architectural, historical, and/or cultural significance that might normally be closed to the public.

This year, over 150 buildings are participating, including a number of sites that are new this year. You can find the complete list here.

When I was in architecture school, I used to always make a point of going. But I honestly can't remember the last time I participated. That's a shame, and so this year I'm going to try and check off some sites.

If you're around the weekend of May 24-25, you may want to do the same. The new St. Lawrence Market North building is on the list, as is the Consulate General of the Republic of Bulgaria.

I sometimes describe Toronto as a city where you need to scratch beneath the surface to find its true architectural beauty. It doesn't hit you in the face as much as it does in some other cities. But it's there. And initiatives like Door Opens Toronto are a great way to help you see it.

Cover photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash

The other day I was speaking to a Korean friend of mine and he was telling me about Seoul's new GTX-A commuter railway line. This line opened at the end of 2024 and is part of a broader Great Train eXpress initiative that includes 3 lines (A, B, and C) and that is intended to establish a new "30-minute commute zone" surrounding Seoul. A is the first line to open. C is scheduled for completion in 2030. And already, three more lines are now being planned: D, E, and F.

What this first line has accomplished is pretty extraordinary. GTX-A connects Paju in the north to Seoul in the south. Paju sits at the northern border of South Korea (and therefore houses many US and South Korean Army bases) and has a population of over half a million people. Prior to GTX-A opening, this commute used to take approximately 90 minutes by conventional subway and up to 90 minutes by car, depending on traffic.

Today it takes exactly 22 minutes! If you're interested in seeing a complete walking video of this commute, click here.

The GTX system is a higher-speed railway line. Meaning, the trains are designed to operate up to a maximum speed of 180 km/h. Average speeds vary depending on the segment and stop spacing, but it seems to operate at an average speed of around 100 km/h. Paju to Seoul, for example, is around 33 km. So at 22 minutes, that's a blended average of 90 km/h. This means that there's no faster way to travel between these two points.

What this also means is that, as new GTX lines continue to come online, the geography of the Seoul urban region will continue to get redrawn. Suburban regions that were previously far out, are now going to get "pulled in" and function as more integral parts of a contiguous city. This improved access should also alleviate housing pressures by effectively opening up more supply.

I mean, 22 minutes is nothing. It can take longer than this to travel 3 blocks on a Toronto streetcar during rush hour. GTX is a prime example of the magic of rail and what's possible once you accept that highways (and tunnels underneath them) aren't going to be what efficiently move the most number of people around a big global city.

Cover photo by Ethan Brooke on Unsplash