Episode Summary

  1. Micro transit is a hybrid strategy of using traditionally public transit infrastructure but ub-ah-fying it. But creating more flexible, on-demand scheduling and response times. Pilot projects across the United States have seen modest success.
  2. Toronto is working on incorporating missing middle housing to their urban fabric with the goal of increasing housing supply, providing unique housing choices for all people, create human scale buildings, and making physical changes that are sensitive, gradual and "fit" into existing neighborhood patterns.
  3. Apartment conversions are on the rise. This could represent an early ripple in the ponds of commercial real estate that has potential impacts across how the industry does business.

Microtransit and a list of places experimenting with the strategy. (6 min read and list respectively)

Toronto's push into missing middle housing (4 min reads). Here's the presentation developed by Melanie Melnyk and Philip Parker. (17 slide deck)

According to Rent Cafe and Yardi Matrix, 2021 will be a record year for apartment conversions (6 min read)

Transcript

Episode 42 - Patterns of Development

Micro, Toronto, Conversion

This is patterns of development.

Hey. What's up everybody it's Kyle. Where, on this podcast, I share and discuss the urban planning, architecture, and real estate development patterns. My goal, my mission, is to deconstruct what's going on around us in our built environment, in our business environment, in our political environment and figure out how we can recognize patterns and replicate the success and maybe more importantly avoid the failures of others.

Ultimately, trying to learn, what are the patterns of development?

This week we've got some fun topics, we've got a "new" transportation strategy, we've got a Toronto case study, and we've got some data related to apartment conversions.

Let's go in order. Let's talk about this "new", new to me transportation strategy called "micro transit".

Some preliminary searching around micro transit has been dubbed many things,

Flexible transit.
On-demand transportation.
Demand-responsive transit.
Mobility on-demand.

Buzzwords. And micro transit itself is probably a buzz word. I've said all this stuff and we still don't know what it means. One of the better definitions I've found is actually from a software vendor who sells transportation support software, so maybe not the best, from a journalist stand point but I think it's a good definition:

"Microtransit is simply tech-enabled shared transportation that lives in the space between traditional fixed route transit and ride hailing technology. Its routes are nimble; its “schedules” aren’t really schedules at all, as they shift constantly based on rider demand; and its vehicles range in size from vans, shuttles, or buses."

So if transit strategies were to live on a spectrum you've got fixed route/ fixed schedule on one side. This is "traditional". Trains, buses, planes all run like this. On the other side we've got ride hailing -- our Ubers, lifts etc. I assume we're all familar with this the idea that a private individual rents out space in their car and does trips on demand for a private company.

And micro transit is this hybrid place in the middle. We've got public dollars supporting, a public owned system. But! This system is flexible and based on demand.

The classic question, "what problem are we solving?" This type of approach could help solve common pain points in contexts like:

  • First-and-last mile infrastructure.
  • Transit deserts.
  • Equity and accessibility and...
  • COVID-19 safety. As both supply and demand shift with regulated social distancing measures, transit can respond in real-time.

By using real-time bookings in combination with fixed routes this hybrid approach evolves into a dynamic, managed system.

According to the American public transportation association this model has been piloted since 2018 in a variety of different states with urban, sub-urban, and rural use cases. Gwinnett County, Georgia. Tompkins County, NY. Austin, Tx. Apparently this has even been tested just up the road from me in Grand Rapids, MI. I've got a link to all the places in the show notes.

Let's keep going north to Toronto.

I love to pull together use cases and urban planning news and I think Toronto is checking both boxes.

Melanie Melnyk and Philip Parker put together a deck and are working on expanding housing options to build density and address affordability issues in their community. Specifically this deck, which is in the show notes, is about a multiplex study.

And they waste no time. Slide 3 is titled Missing middle housing. For those of you who don't know. If it's not single family homes and not a mid-rise, what is it? Duplex, triplex, quad... that's our missing middle. It's missing because they're illegal to build in so many municipalities.

So here we go, Ms. Melnyk and Mr. Parker...making the case that these types of buildings should be built because they increase housing supply, provide unique housing choices for all people, create lower scale buildings, and the physical changes are sensitive, gradual and "fit" into existing neighborhood patterns.  And not only are they just saying we should do this they've gotten over 6,400 survey results with 83% of folks indicating that they would be in favor of having multiplexes in their neighborhood.

They go on in their deck to identify some key design questions that would be need to be answered and how they could create these structures either new or from converting old space.

Which...leads to the third item this week. Conversions in the United States are at an all time time. 2021, according to Yardi Matrix and Rent Cafe had a record number of apartment conversions. For a total of slightly over 20,000.

Top cities with the most conversions are Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Cleveland (flee to the Clev..another 30 rock joke) and Chicago.

This could be part of a reuse trend. In 2010, only 5,200 units were conversions. That's a 4x increase in a decade. I'd speculate that this trend isn't going to slow down as we still wait to see how the commercial real estate sector is going to play out from COVID.

Yardi Matrix and Rent Cafe go on to estimate that, according to their numbers, adaptive reuse projects slated for 2022 23% will come from office space. This presents interesting challenges for developers, banks, and cities. New construction is "the easy way." Everyone loves a green field and a blank slate. And this pipeline of conversion projects presents an interesting change in how everyone might be doing business.

Which leads to our patterns of the week.

  1. Micro transit is a hybrid strategy of using traditionally public transit infrastructure but ub-ah-fying it. But creating more flexible, on-demand scheduling and response times. Pilot projects across the United States have seen modest success.
  2. Toronto is working on incorporating missing middle housing to their urban fabric with the goal of increasing housing supply, providing unique housing choices for all people, create human scale buildings, and making physical changes that are sensitive, gradual and "fit" into existing neighborhood patterns.
  3. Apartment conversions are on the rise. This could represent an early ripple in the ponds of commercial real estate that has potential impacts across how the industry does business.

That's all for this week and I'll talk to y'all soon...