Cities that actively promote physical activities enjoy an economic advantage, research has suggested.
It says areas designed for physical activities have increased retail activity and revenue, and lower healthcare and crime costs.
The report’s authors describe active cities as urban areas with easy access via cycling or walking to parks, schools and workplaces.
The details have been presented at an Active Cities Summit in Bristol, UK.
The findings – compiled by a team from the University of California, San Diego – identified five “settings” in an urban environment that encouraged physical activity:
Open spaces and parks: ensuring residents lived near a green space; accessible and safe fitness trails
Urban design: mixed-used communities; streets designed for safe and enjoyable cycling and walking
Transportation: infrastructure to support cycling an walking; access to safe and reliable public transport
Schools: located near students’ homes; recreational and exercise facilities
Buildings and workplaces: encourage physical activity, eg visible stairs etc
Jamie Morton, “Bigger cities make brighter ideas“, NZ Herald. They seem to have mixed up the headline – the study has actually found that diverse firm ecosystems are more important than size:
Having a blend of brains and not just a bulk of them is what makes big cities like Auckland more likely to produce clever new inventions, Kiwi researchers have found.
A study led by University of Auckland researcher Dr Dion O’Neale, presented last week to a conference in Spain, investigated the relationship between the mix of technological specialty in more than 4000 places and cities, and the novelty of the patented products that sprouted from them.
It found that the rate of innovation didn’t necessarily reflect the number of researchers in a particular place – and that having a wide range of different work going on was often the real difference.
Study co-author Professor Shaun Hendy, the director of Te Punaha Matatini, a new Centre of Research Excellence hosted by Auckland University, said the same could be said of a rainforest.
“In natural ecosystems, you find rarest species in the areas with the highest biodiversity – the same applies to innovation,” he said.
“It’s consistent with this idea that has been around for a while, that new ideas are the recombinations of old ideas – and we’d suggest the more diverse technological base you have, the more opportunities you have got for combining things in new ways and coming up with novel ideas.”
So for the insurer, it was better to cut the owners a cheque for the $700,000, a quick cash settlement that lets both sides walk away.
Ka-ching, I suggest. Park nods agreement.
Without wanting to reveal too much, he says the owners in their mid-50s now have enough dosh to buy a new house closer to town and also stick what is left-over in a rental investment property. Plus they are free to sell their original home for whatever it might get in an as is, where is sale.
Of course the property is officially stuffed, fit only for demo, says Park. But you know the equation. Someone will snap it up for about its land value – around $160,000 – and turn it into cheap rental.
After all, the bungalow is still standing. It’s a substantial dwelling in a great location. So plug the worst cracks to make it water tight and legally habitable and you could let it for maybe $280 or $300 a week…
Thus the idea of Green Belts, the accidental innovation – aimed at adding green space to high-density ancient Vienna in place of the city walls, then adopted in unaltered form in England as an idea to improve urban life for all – has been transmuted into a protective device for the wealthy. If you really want to plan to protect and provide better access to green space and open countryside without artificially constraining land supply and forcing up house prices, then Green Fingers (or Green Wedges) would seem to be the best solution. That is what more egalitarian Scandinavians have. Copenhagen has its Green Fingers – really brown urbanisation along the radial routes out of the city with protected countryside each side. Denmark has not just got cheaper housing: according to the Dallas Fed’s data, the real house price has increased by a factor of 1.6 in Denmark compared to 3.4 in the UK since 1975 but new houses in Denmark are a lot bigger: 80% bigger in fact.
Generation Y is turning its back on cars and jumping on board buses and trains.
The high cost of home ownership, not being in a rush to have children, concerns about climate change, and the difficulty of obtaining a driver’s licence are all reasons behind the shift, according to new research commissioned by the New Zealand Transport Agency.
The study also suggests current assumptions may underestimate the extent to which today’s younger generation has embraced public transport – and how many more would do so if more money was spent on it.
If you’ve ever found yourself stuck in traffic in your metro area, you might want to print out the chart below, tape it to your wall, and use it for dart practice. It comes via a guest post at the Transportationist by Wes Marshall, and it explains so very much of your earthly woe.
The red line represents vehicle flow along a given road. Traffic steadily rises until someone decides the road needs to be widened. Then the original trend line (dotted red) gets replaced with an even greater travel forecast (dotted orange), as we’d expect by creating more road capacity. But the actual new level of travel developed by this widening (solid red) is even greater than the forecast predicted.
In other words, widening a road invites more cars onto it. That principle, known as “induced demand,” is captured by the grey arrows showing the gap between a travel forecast and an actual travel outcome.
RANCHO SANTA FE, CALIF. — Drought or no drought, Steve Yuhas resents the idea that it is somehow shameful to be a water hog. If you can pay for it, he argues, you should get your water.
People “should not be forced to live on property with brown lawns, golf on brown courses or apologize for wanting their gardens to be beautiful,” Yuhas fumed recently on social media. “We pay significant property taxes based on where we live,” he added in an interview. “And, no, we’re not all equal when it comes to water.”
Yuhas lives in the ultra-wealthy enclave of Rancho Santa Fe, a bucolic Southern California hamlet of ranches, gated communities and country clubs that guzzles five times more water per capita than the statewide average. In April, after Gov. Jerry Brown (D) called for a 25 percent reduction in water use, consumption in Rancho Santa Fe went up by 9 percent.
This was my favourite bit:
“I think we’re being overly penalized, and we’re certainly being overly scrutinized by the world,” said Gay Butler, an interior designer out for a trail ride on her show horse, Bear. She said her water bill averages about $800 a month.
“It angers me because people aren’t looking at the overall picture,” Butler said. “What are we supposed to do, just have dirt around our house on four acres?”
Major banks are set to drop deposit thresholds for apartments, making it easier for cash-strapped first-home hunters to get a foot in Auckland’s rampant property market.
The Weekend Herald can reveal that several major banks are reviewing their apartment lending policies, with tentative plans to reduce minimum deposit requirements from 20 to 15 per cent.
The proposal is aimed at owner-occupiers rather than investors. It is being pitched at the first-home-buyer market ahead of changes to Auckland Council’s Unitary Plan that will allow more high-density housing and apartment developments.
The changes are yet to be signed off but could mean someone buying a $500,000 inner-city or city-fringe apartment could potentially secure finance with $75,000 deposit – down from the current $100,000 minimum.
Words and images shape thoughts. But inside and outside of city government, too many of us stumble with finding the right words and images to explain the advantages of biking.
There’s a word for the wave of public misunderstanding and anger that often happens next: bikelash.
Fortunately, bikelash is a curable condition…
And finally, I give you this week’s hilarious economic paper abstract, from Martin Micheli, Jan Rouwendal, and Jasper Dekkers recent paper “Border Effects in House Prices“:
We estimate the effect of the Dutch-German border on house prices… Using different estimation strategies, we find that ask prices of comparable housing drop by about 16% when one crosses the Dutch-German border. Given that price discounts from the last observed asking price are substantially larger in Germany, we interpret our findings as indicating the willingness of Dutch households to pay up to 26% higher house prices to live among the Dutch.
Personally, I would have interpreted it as evidence of cross-border differences in tax, financial, and housing market policies, but I’m informed that the Dutch aren’t too keen on the Germans after a few unpleasant incidents in the first half of the 20th century.
Interesting to read about the drought in California and the attitude of some who think if you have the money then you can use as much water as you want. The recent Encyclical from Pope Francis spoke about water been a fundamental need yet at the same time the commodification of water is happening – I guess this is the result.
In regard to “Major banks are set to drop deposit thresholds for apartments, making it easier for cash-strapped first-home hunters to get a foot in Auckland’s rampant property market”. It’s an absolute no brainer that this act of throwing a 44 gallon drum of petrol on to Auckland’s property market fire will see apartment prices lift off into the wild blue yonder.
I suppose there had to be something to keep the investors stimulated, as one has to wonder quite how a first home buyer can afford to buy an apartment priced in excess of $500 K plus body corporate fees!
Having worked as an electrician on some of those blocks in Hobson St in the early 2000s (I admit with some shame) and having seen at first hand the quality of construction, I sincerely hope building standards have risen in the last fifteen years.
If the next apartment construction boom is driven by the same developer mindset, i.e. throw together the cheapest available materials as quickly as possible, then personally I wouldn’t spend $50000 on a new city apartment, let alone 500k.
The Australian apartment construction market has gone nuts. Read about it here.
“Since mid-2012, development site prices have have doubled,” he said. “Three years ago you could buy in North Sydney at a site price equivalent to $148,000 a unit. Now its not less than $300,000.”
“The big issue now is construction costs. That is a major factor starting to rear its head.
Yes; the rise of the successful city: it’s very winner takes all. The places that are working are booming. The service economy is highly mobile and it seems to be coagulating in certain centres and not others.
I was thinking something like the 19th century Anglo boom bust cycles. Prof. Belich describes it well. Especially “Replenishing the Earth: The Settler revolution and the rise of the Anglo-world, 1783-1939”
I have seen some graphs for urban land values in Australian (unfortunately behind a paywall at MacroBusiness) and the graph has recently gone vertical. This is unsustainable.
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Interesting to read about the drought in California and the attitude of some who think if you have the money then you can use as much water as you want. The recent Encyclical from Pope Francis spoke about water been a fundamental need yet at the same time the commodification of water is happening – I guess this is the result.
In regard to “Major banks are set to drop deposit thresholds for apartments, making it easier for cash-strapped first-home hunters to get a foot in Auckland’s rampant property market”. It’s an absolute no brainer that this act of throwing a 44 gallon drum of petrol on to Auckland’s property market fire will see apartment prices lift off into the wild blue yonder.
I suppose there had to be something to keep the investors stimulated, as one has to wonder quite how a first home buyer can afford to buy an apartment priced in excess of $500 K plus body corporate fees!
Having worked as an electrician on some of those blocks in Hobson St in the early 2000s (I admit with some shame) and having seen at first hand the quality of construction, I sincerely hope building standards have risen in the last fifteen years.
If the next apartment construction boom is driven by the same developer mindset, i.e. throw together the cheapest available materials as quickly as possible, then personally I wouldn’t spend $50000 on a new city apartment, let alone 500k.
The Australian apartment construction market has gone nuts. Read about it here.
“Since mid-2012, development site prices have have doubled,” he said. “Three years ago you could buy in North Sydney at a site price equivalent to $148,000 a unit. Now its not less than $300,000.”
“The big issue now is construction costs. That is a major factor starting to rear its head.
“You used to be able to build, six stories or under for $250,000 a unit. Now it is $300,000. And high rise has gone from $325,000 a unit to $400,000. And there is difficulty in engaging a builder, even at an elevated price, because they have so much work on.”
http://www.afr.com/real-estate/one-developer-is-selling-sites-not-apartments-into-the-sydney-boom-20150603-ghfgw2
Is Auckland just part of some ‘booming’ global property mania?
Yes; the rise of the successful city: it’s very winner takes all. The places that are working are booming. The service economy is highly mobile and it seems to be coagulating in certain centres and not others.
I was thinking something like the 19th century Anglo boom bust cycles. Prof. Belich describes it well. Especially “Replenishing the Earth: The Settler revolution and the rise of the Anglo-world, 1783-1939”
I have seen some graphs for urban land values in Australian (unfortunately behind a paywall at MacroBusiness) and the graph has recently gone vertical. This is unsustainable.