EQ Journal

Category

What if…

(Blogger Graeme Nichols challenged me and 19 other people to answer the question: ‘What if?’ For example, what if the NCC, the National Capital Commission, had said ‘yes’ to putting the Palladium on their lands at Lebreton Flats in downtown Ottawa instead of being constructed on the suburban Kanata site where Scotiabank Place (as it [...]

Rent Curves

How Developers can Make More Money and Urban Design can Improve by Exploiting Vertical Rent Curves It has always amazed me that many developers, those veritable profit maximizers, don’t understand that neo-urbanist principles* can improve their returns while at the same time making them better city-builders and I suppose better corporate citizens. For example, most [...]

Livable Cities Versus Mono Cultured Suburbs

This article was originally written for the Conference on Social Harmony, Ottawa Public Library, December 4, 2001 It wasn’t long after my wife and I and our five kids moved to a western suburb of Ottawa in the late 1980s before a group of our neighbors circulated a petition in the neighborhood. They were concerned [...]

Highest and Best Use

A Guiding Philosophy for Neo-Urbanist Designers Why Nimby’ites are Wrong to Oppose Higher Densities and Mixed Use Negative Property Taxes Urban Catalysts/Anti-Catalysts Highest and Best Use “Highest and best use for a property is achieved when the value created by its development for a specific set of physically possible, permitted uses (its functional program) and [...]

Why Not to Work From Home

I tried working from a home office for 14 months. Just so you know, at the time we had five kids, a nanny plus my mother-in-law there so it was not the best test case ever. Still, even if there was no one at home, I would not be tempted to try again because: 1. [...]

Property Rights

Introduction Many of us think that when we own a property, like a home for example, we own that property in an unfettered way. In many jurisdictions around the world today, individual ownership to a property is held in the form of a fee simple title to that property, which is the highest form of [...]

Democratic Abuse

The Growing Imbalance between City Planners, Developers and Community Activists— Democratic Abuse and Re-Engineering Approvals Introduction Once upon a time, town government or city-state government was based on the Athenian model of participatory democracy. Citizens and land owners met with town elders to plan the development of their communities—who lives where, what type of activities [...]

Why Landowners Won’t Sell

I have been puzzled for awhile as to why certain landowners, those with well-located, vacant property, often won’t sell, almost at any price. Many of them have to pay significant property taxes and insurance costs. They also have to maintain their properties. (For example, if they allow litter to collect or the grass to remain [...]

Introduction to Architecture and Urban Design

Modernist Urban Design and Spatial Apartheid In 2000, I wrote these notes as a way to introduce first year architecture students to the then heretical notion that architects had abandoned urban design to urban planners who, through the adoption of near universal zoning codes, had put an artificial straight jacket on cityscapes. Rereading them today, [...]

Go Green! Live Closer to Where You Work!

A while ago, I was watching TV with my eldest daughter, Rachel, and we caught a Rick Mercer commercial called the “One Tonne Challenge”. Rachel turned to me after the commercial and asked: “How do I personally go about reducing my carbon footprint, Dad?” That is one of the problems with well-meaning initiatives like this—they [...]

Two Nation-States

Suburban v. Urban II Another way to look at the urban-suburban dichotomy is to view them as different nation-states with their own currencies. The urban housing economy experiences: multiple offers on properties, less choice, higher costs, fewer amenities, more noise, less room for automobiles, more rapid increases in price year over year, lower commuting times [...]

Urban versus Suburban

The City of Ottawa’s policy on densifying the national capital region is working, at least if price differentials are any indication of success: a new 3-bedroom townhome on Centrepointe Drive (located inside the greenbelt in what used to be Nepean) sold recently for around $401,000. A similar new townhome built by the same company in [...]