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A
Addressing the housing challenge is not building houses. Everything that we build, everything that we sell is part of a process of building communities and building cities.
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B
How's the real estate sector helping to shape our built environment for the better? This is the Urbanist Monocle's program, all about the cities we live in. I'm your host, Carlotta. This week we are back in Cannes to hear from some of the most interesting characters that were in attendance last week at the world's leading real estate event, mipim. We'll meet the executive director of UN Habitat to talk about how to tackle the global housing crisis. Check in with the New York City Housing Authority on the historic investment they are doing on housing. And hear from our friends at NG Media about their new Europe's most talked about cities research, which puts a focus on second cities. Plus, we talk with the president and CEO of Miami Dade Beacon Council on how the region has become a hub for entrepreneurs and technology. That's all ahead right here on the Urbanist with me, Carlotta Rebelo. So welcome to part two of a special edition of the Urbanist. Coming to you from mipim, the world's largest urban festival in Cannes. Last week we put the focus on the city leaders who are in attendance. So today we thought we'd bring you some of the other conversations were happening inside the Palais des Festival. Across Europe and around the world, housing affordability has become one of the defining urban challenges of our time. So it didn't come as a surprise that housing was the theme and focus on the first day of the fair. One of the keynote speakers was Anna Claudia Rosbach, the executive director of UN Habitat, the United nations program for urban development and Housing. I started by asking Anna Claudia to describe the severity of the problem that inadequate housing presents today.
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A
It's almost half of the world's population. So this is the magnitude of the crisis that we are facing. And it's unprecedented because now this crisis is affecting the north and the south, the east and the West. Most of all, countries are facing challenges in terms of housing. You know, historic affordability gaps. So today you have young people cannot afford to rent or buy houses. You have the aging population that cannot afford to stay. And also the levels of uncertainties that we are facing right now in terms of markets are going to respond to the crisis that we are facing right now and what impact it will have in terms of housing. Right? The prices, the migration flows and all the demographic shifts. So things are changing at all levels. And we have markets and governments that are trying to Adjust to that. But bottom line, at the end of the day, we have people without adequate roofs and walls around them. Not only that, you need the whole integration, you know, to the city, to services and everything.
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B
Well, that brings me to, which is, obviously, we know that while the challenge might be global and different levels are trying solutions. You have at a national level, at the local level, at the private developer or public developer, neighborhood specific level, how do you integrate all of that to ensure that? Because it's not just about housing, it's about creating community and a safe space to call home. How can we guide those conversations?
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A
I think one thing is that it became a common denominator. And we see that more and more in the political realm, politicians, but also the society bringing housing to the front of their needs and their aspirations. And this is important because it gives an opportunity for us to centralize housing more in the policy debate. But we learn a lot since UN Habitat was conceptualized 50 years ago. And we learned that addressing the housing challenge is not building houses. Everything that we build, everything that we sell, is part of a process of building communities and building cities. So I believe we advanced as a society to understand that we're not talking only about generating business. We are not also talking about policies that, you know, build some houses with some quality in peripheric areas of the cities far away and so on. We understood that the social value of compact cities, of proximity, of connection to the opportunities and the right to enjoy a city, the social and economic value, they go hand in hand.
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B
Now we're 10 years on, nearly from the adoption of the new urban agenda, looking back at the work that's been done over the past decade, and we know there's more work to be done. As we've been just discussing, how do you look back at what was agreed back in Quito?
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A
So for sure we haven't achieved what the expectations in Quito were. We are also reviewing SDG 11 this year. We are constantly custodians of SDG 11 and SDG 11.1 relates to housing, relates to informal settlements, and at least, you know, what relates to housing we haven't achieved, but also inequality and poverty in cities. Cities are still pretty much fragmented. However, I do think we evolved because we see so much innovation and so much creativity in cities. Solutions. Are there so many solutions at the city level from the private sector, you know, and organized communities and so on. So we did advance in terms of having solutions. If I look at urban planning, for example, the number of cities that have, you know, initiated, concluded Planning process that are more comprehensive, that are participatory. There's one SDG 11 indicator that has evolved, which is national urban policy. So we do have more countries with national urban policies, which is progress. Right. But what we don't have is the real implementation and at the scale that we need.
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B
Let's look ahead to a few months from now because the World Urban Forum is taking place in Baku and the focus this year is on resilient cities and resilient communities. Why was it important that that was put in focus for this year's agenda?
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A
I think this is a natural follow up of our new strategic plan that puts housing at the center, following, you know, the common perception that we are living in a housing crisis and that what we need to change is systemic. You spoke right, about housing not being isolated, housing being part of the communities of cities. So how we build, we review or rebuild urban systems that work for people. I mean, for housing. Right. The financial aspects we also discussed yesterday. It's not that we don't have money. I mean, there is money, there is international money, there is investment capital flowing still, fiscal space that can be opened up, but we don't have the systems that are working in a way that makes subsidies, incentives, private and public investment investments, you know, work for the housing needs, for the housing sector. So I believe the forum will enable us to look at the system as a whole. So how cities are being planned, how finance is structured, all the challenges that we have in terms of resilience, preparedness for climate events and impact, reconstruction, recovery, you know, the many aspects of housing and trying to bring us, you know, beyond our comfort zones, you know, overcoming the silos that we have now.
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B
We've been discussing a lot the housing crisis in the sense of the lack of supply in some areas, in others, you know, the informal settlement. One of the other aspects is as well, this idea, I guess, of healthy homes and quality of life and putting humans at the center of design. What are your views on that part of the conversation? Because sometimes density can prove to be a challenge if humans are not at the center of the planning.
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A
I think you said something right about putting people, and I would add nature at the center of planning because we say densities are needed, compact cities and so on, because we need to save land, we need to save the environmental surroundings, we need to save emissions and money at the end of the day. But the intention is not to live in overcrowding areas. We saw during COVID how overcrowded neighborhoods suffered from the pandemic. So how we can look at densities, but also have a balanced way in terms of promoting green spaces in cities or protecting the water bodies in cities, which are alternatives or mechanisms that we already identified that are important for us to tackle challenges. For example, the urban heat. Right. We need to have more green surfaces in cities. So it's a delicate balance. The world's quite challenged right now because it's not just build more or rebuild what we have, but also in a way that preserves human dignity, that preserves the health of our children, of our populations, and help us to be better equipped in cities. Because 70% of the population is going to live in cities in a couple of decades. Right. To be protected from all the changing in the environment.
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We stick with the topic of housing, but turn to New York, where the city is delivering historic levels of investment to public housing residents. And at the helm of that endeavor is the New York City Housing Authority. Joy Sinderbrand is the agency's senior vice president for capital programs, and she told me a bit more about their work.
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C
The New York City Housing Authority is also known as nycha, and NYCHA is the largest landlord in North America. We maintain about 175,000 apartment units, and this is in thousands of multifamily buildings all across New York City. We're really the place where New Yorkers have lived for generations, and we want those buildings to be around for generations to come. But they have missed several cycles of investment. And so our current capital need is estimated at about $60 billion.
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B
That sounds like quite a scary number.
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C
It is a daunting number. The capital investment we are doing, though, has been at record levels for the last few years. We've been investing about a billion to a billion and a half a year, and that's not going to keep up with the $60 billion. But what we're doing on the flip side is more importantly, leveraging public private partnerships to bring additional investment, billions of dollars into the development to make sure that they're comprehensively modernized and renovated for the residents.
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B
Well, tell me about that process of modernization, because I'm curious about what are some of the biggest challenges when it comes to it, because I know that a lot of the housing stock here that we're discussing is from mid 20th century. What are some of the challenges you encounter when trying to modernize, but still, you know, preserve its character, preserve the communities that have grown around them?
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C
We are always working in fully occupied buildings. There is an emergency in terms of housing in New York City, really only one and a half percent vacancy rate. And so our residents are not just living there by choice, they're also living there because there really is nowhere else for them to live at that price point. Our work is disruptive, we know that. Fortunately, we've been getting additional funding from the city and the state that's allowed us to mobilize these major programs that we've never been able to do before. So we recently finished replacing 300 elevator cars. That's not a program a typical property owner would ever consider, and they certainly wouldn't do them all at once and all in fully occupied buildings. So we are not just putting in a record amount of money, we're also doing it in ways that forces the industry to rethink about how it actually carries out projects like this.
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B
Well, you alluded there to the elevator cars. And I know that traditionally capital programs is about repairs and infrastructure and all of that, but I know that there's a big focus here as well on new building materials and different construction methods. So it's not just about what someone might think is a traditional purview of the program.
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C
Absolutely. We are trying to adapt the way we do all of our state of good repair projects so that resilience and sustainability are at the forefront. And certainly we are constrained in terms of funding, but we're able to say to ourselves, if we are going to replace this heat and hot water system, what should we be thinking about in terms of greenhouse gas reductions, in terms of potential resilience or protection from climate hazards? Should it go back in the basement? Does it need to be somewhere else? And that's now built into the way we do our daily business. It had been in the past that sustainability and resilience projects were really kind of to the side on their own. We wanted to be part of everybody's every day going forward is place making
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B
part of this refurbishment as well in terms of, you know, not just the buildings itself, but the surrounding areas, the areas inhabited by the community.
- [13:24]
C
Absolutely. After the New York City Parks Department, NYCHA is the second largest owner of open space in New York at 2,400 acres. And we have about a thousand acres of tree canopy. This is a huge opportunity. We're not only interested in preserving what we have, but really in improving it. And some of that comes in partnership with residents who run gardens and, you know, maintain bushes and flowers that they themselves love. But really what we want to do is make sure that our agriculture is maintained because we want to make sure we have a diversity of tree specific species so that one single blight won't take out all the trees at a development. We want to make sure we have resilient plants for our developments that are closer to salt water in the waterfront. That's definitely a big part of what we do. When I talk about the campuses, our priority is, of course, making sure that people are living in safe and healthy homes. But we do a ton of work on the grounds, the playgrounds, the basketball courts, adults exercise areas, we have seating areas, we have chess boards. We really try to work with the community to see what they want. And actually just completed our first dog run.
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B
You alluded to this earlier because we know one of the big challenges with modernizing and refurbishing housing stock is funding you mentioned. Of course, there's funding from a city level, state, and perhaps even federal. But one of the crucial elements that we know is bringing in the private sector. So what are some of the ways that you're working with the private sector to bring them into this objective? And I guess, is there perhaps one or two specific examples that you could share?
- [14:58]
C
The value of being such a large property owner also makes us able to work closely with the market to do the types of innovations that you're talking about. So working with industry to say, this is the product we need and if you can produce it, then we can guarantee that we're going to purchase a critical mass. Most recently that was done with window heat pumps. And this is heating cooling device that can be put into a window of a building without requiring any kind of major infrastructure retrofit. So we didn't want to have to upgrade the electrical infrastructure or change the plug in the wall. We really wanted to minimize the amount of building work to convert from a steam plant to window heat pumps. In development. We worked with a state partner, nyserda, to run this industry challenge. And two companies have made it to the pilot stage and we're now rolling those out across our portfolio. We have a first 20,000 coming down the pike. We're doing this similar exercise on induction stoves. You know, the apartment's not going to get any bigger, the space isn't going to change. We want to be able to plug it right in and make it work for residents. It doesn't always work. Sometimes the challenge basically tells us that the market can't provide what we want at a price point. That will work for us. But when it works, it works for not just nycha, it works for all New Yorkers.
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B
Now this is also a week where we see the release of a lot of research reports and studies about the built environment. One of them was ng's annual Europe's Most Talked About Cities report. And Cass Faicy, the director of Cities, Culture and place at ing, was the person behind it. I asked her why there was a focus on second cities this year.
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D
Well, it's the eighth year of our report and what we found is that the cities at the top tend to stay quite static. A couple of years ago we had Paris pass London for the top spot for the first time, powered by an Hidalgo's urban intervention she's making in the city and the Olympics. But largely it's pretty static. Whereas we found below that cities that are economically and culturally powerhouses, but they're not capitals, are sort of making movements. So we decided to focus on why that was happening and how they're moving.
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B
Well, one of the things that the report found is that second cities are gaining visibility faster than capitals in certain cases. Why do you think we're seeing that shift?
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D
So our research looks at digital visibility, so media and digital mentions online. And what we found was consistent in the second cities was the fact that they're being reported on by more traditional media outlets. And we find that capitals have very complex narratives, whereas second cities, it tends to be a little bit simpler. We find journalists use them as interesting case studies and they seem to be gaining traction in that area. So traditional media, but it's also the rise of large language models and the way that they have been trained to refer to traditional media in their search results, they're referring to trusted media sources. So perhaps a couple of years ago we saw the rise of influencers and TikTok and other sort of social media. Whereas now we're seeing LLMs drive a return to more traditional media formats. And we're seeing that in two ways. So search and research, I would say so Portugal, where you get great word of mouth on a safe place for single women travelers. People will ask a large language model, is that the case? And they'll pull up, you know, traditional media results as opposed to influencers. Another example would be using large language models for research on cities. The example I would use is your middle management. In a large multinational, you've been charged with finding a venue for executives to have in a way we can. You might have parameters like a sustainable venue, great transport locations. You can put all those parameters into a large language model and will return comparators of cities. And we're seeing that make a really big difference in how cities need to communicate.
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B
Talk us through the rankings then, because we have here a selection of in total, I think 70 cities that you've looked at. Any surprises there?
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D
There's 70 cities, we've expanded it this year. There are more, more and more cities that are competing with one another in the digital landscape. So number one we've expanded the ranking and number two, you can see Porto and Manchester are the co kind of leaders in jumping up the rankings. I think they're really interesting. Porto was awarded a major sort of tourism award in the last year. So that's clearly pushing it forward and perhaps it's capitalizing a little bit on the narrative around Lisbon's overture tourism. And Manchester is just a brilliant city at getting its own citizens behind everything it does. The citizens of Manchester are almost the city's best advocates. Milan's had a great year. It's had almost similar ingredients to Paris in terms of having, you know, Milan has an existing reputation, it's had sort of physical change. So all of the development that happened around the Olympics happening and then a very successful Olympics, so that's pushed it up the rankings and that's the same as we saw with Paris the last couple of years. So that means that now Italy has two cities right at the top in Rome and Milan. So that's great for Italy. And then the two German cities really pushing forward, Hamburg and Munich. I mean Munich's a really interesting one because it hasn't had anything particularly new happen but it's just got consistent consistency and it's got certainty which is what investors love. And Hamburg's come to the end of half and city's development which is a hugely successful port side development and that industrial reputation is pushing forward for them and you know, now a new venue. We always find that building something new, having a physical manifestation of change is a great way to communicate policy change or the bigger values of the city itself.
- [20:57]
B
Well that's a great checklist for anyone listening about what they should be doing to put their city on the map. Kaas just finally the name of the report is this second city shift and why established media driving the visibility of Europe's fastest rising cities. That leaves just one question, which is if the next decade belongs to second cities, where should we be paying attention to now that, you know, they might not be in the ranking yet or they might be at the bottom of the ranking, but that you can kind of sense they might creep up.
- [21:26]
D
I mean the first place that second cities driving forward will have an impact is those large cities. So if we're looking at London and Paris and people are needing to move out of Those cities, because they're too expensive. Those second cities are really. They're already capitalizing on that. And then the cities that might not be at the top yet, but are moving, I would say the Nordic cities, they're always very interesting. Oslo, Helsinki. Helsinki is driving a lot of change through development. There's a new museum. They're about to launch a competition around an energy center. So cities that are moving and developing and. And still maintaining democratic principles, so always going to push through.
- [22:06]
B
Next we return to the US and to the warm shores of Miami. The city and the county have seen remarkable change over the last decade, transforming its global reputation from a tourism hub to a serious center for technology, finance, and entrepreneurship. Rod Miller is the president and CEO of Miami Dade Beacon Council, and he stopped by the studio to tell me all about the work that the council does.
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E
So that work entails a couple of different things. So when we look at growing economies, we measure how many jobs we're bringing in, how much capital investment. But what that really means is how do we ensure that our residents have opportunities for upward social mobility, whether they're participating in the economy as an entrepreneur, as an investor, or as an employee. And what we do is we work with companies from around the globe to help them find out where they want to be in Miami Dade county, access the. The labor force that they need, provide the insights and research that they need so that a dollar invested in growing in Miami Dade county yields more than anywhere else in terms of their productivity and profitability.
- [23:06]
B
The county, and the city of Miami as well, has been going through this remarkable transformation over the past decade of trying to kind of shift a bit the global reputation from a tourism hub where people flock to for the incredible hospitality that you offer, to precisely that, to try to become a center for technology, finance, entrepreneurship. What has been the driving force behind that shift?
- [23:27]
E
The driving force behind that shift is simple. It's opportunity and it's our people. And so there's a recognition that we enjoy a quality of life. That's absolutely incredible. But what allows people to really enjoy that quality of life is agency and resources. So we knew that for people to be able to have the greatest agency, they also needed to be able to have the best opportunities for jobs. And what really fuels this is that we are an immigrant community. 54% of the population of Miami was born outside of the United States. 75% speak a language other than English as the primary language at home. So what that's done is that's given us global connectivity, immigrant moxie, because Immigrants are like, we got to figure this out and we got to figure out how to make this market really pop. And then the last thing I think that's really allowed us is we've got a great environment in general in Florida. The government doesn't really get in the way of business and taxes are low. But the last thing that I'll mention is that I compare Miami to my 19 year old kid, good looking, tall, like his dad, you know, smart. And so what you get with a kid that age is that you get lots of opportunities, lots of potential. What can a 19 year old kid do? They can do anything they want to, they just don't know it yet. And Miami's at that point where you compare us as a 130-year-old community to communities that have been around four or 500 years, like, you know, New York and others. We're at that point where now we're growing up and coming into our own and we can do whatever we want to do. And we're enjoying the opportunity to participate on the global scale in a different way.
- [24:47]
B
Well, you mentioned there the diversity and this crossroads where Miami county sits is quite interesting because you're kind of in between North America, Latin America, the Caribbean. Of course, the communities will shape so much of what the city and the county becomes. But how much do you think that reflects on the international perception? Like, how does it help Miami to position itself globally?
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E
Yeah, so when we're looking at what makes an economy competitive, and we define competitiveness as the mix of factors that make an economy or a place attractive to live and attractive invest, we look at things such as, you know, the quality of the talent. Right. Because we've got a global community. We've got people that have perspectives that come from a variety of different experiences. And what that translates into for companies is innovation. And so that's one of the ways that it plays out. Another one of the ways that it plays out, this global community, is that no matter where anybody's from, what kind of accent they have, they can hear it on the streets of Miami. So they feel very welcome and feel very at home. And because we embrace that diversity, that's part of our very DNA. At a time when places are increasingly populist and xenophobic, Miami is a place that says we don't really care. If you want to work hard and you want to build the American dream, this is the place to do it. And so we've really leaned into that reality. And then of course, because of our geographic positioning, we have a trade and logistics capacity that makes it a natural place for people to come and for companies to come. Between our port and airport, we support over a million jobs in the region. And so we're going to continue to see, I think, the growth for Miami for a very long time because of our diversity, but also because of our geographic positioning and our immigrant moxie.
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B
I wanted to bring in as well the aspect of mobility because we know it can have a, a huge impact in shaping where people choose to live, where they choose to work. And I'm curious about the role that transit and I guess even smarter urban connectivity is having in this long term economic development strategy in Miami.
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E
Most people don't know this. Miami is an incredibly large community. To drive from the top of Miami Dade county to the bottom, it take a couple hours. That's how large it is. And the beauty of that is you've got a diversity of economies and a diversity of different opportunities. But what it also means is that we have tremendous traffic challenges. So what we've been doing one is talking about the question of sustainability. We've had to deal with sustainability for our entire existence every time it rains, right. And so we were the first place in the United States to have a chief bay officer, to have a chief heat officer and focus on the heating of the city and those sorts of things. So we've done that from a transit perspective perspective. We've got a bus fleet that's 100% electric. And that was one of the things that the mayor of Miami Dade county pushed for. So there was this thinking like we don't have an extensive train network. We've got a train network, but it's not extensive. So how do we leverage, you know, bus rapid transit and other types of things to get people from one part of the county to the other? And then the other thing that I would think would be important to mention is we've got now a regional train system called the Bright Line, where one can get from Orlando to Miami in two hours versus the four hours that it would take via driving. So all of those things play an important role in people's connectivity to jobs and people's connectivity to opportunity.
- [27:53]
B
I think it always helps when you, the president and the head of an organization like yours to really love the place that you are representing. And that's coming across in this interview. You really have this passion for, you know, all the great things that the county is doing. So I need to ask you, what is your favorite thing about Miami Dade at the moment?
- [28:10]
E
My favorite thing about Miami Dade is when you're building an economy. So our work at the Beacon Council, we try to figure out how do we help companies land and we get in the weeds. We're their partners in the deal. But you want to create a better flywheel and a better economy so that whether you're involved in the project or not, it wants to be there. Well, now we've got the kind of momentum where every week there are announcements being made about new companies moving to Miami and we're involved in a. About half of them and the other half that we're not involved in are sometimes really big deals and people are like, is that bad that you guys weren't involved in that? I'm like, no. That means that the work that we've been doing in terms of trying to build something that works better is actually working. So I'm excited because yesterday I woke up and I saw that Starbucks was moving its headquarters from Seattle to Miami. I would love to say that that was a deal that we led, but it wasn't. It was happening because we, we've been doing the hard work of making it easy for businesses to invest, showing that we've got an ecosystem that's supportive of companies growth and that we are going to work with them for them to be successful in Miami and grow their businesses even more.
- [29:16]
B
And that's all for this week's episode of the Urbanist. You can follow us for new editions of the show every week and you can subscribe to Monocle magazine for reports on all things design, architecture and urbanism. Just visit monocle.com the Urbanist is produced by myself and by David Stevens, who also edits the show. Andertalk will be back next week. I'm Carlotta Rebelo. Goodbye and thank you for listening. City lovers.