According to recent data from CMHC via the Globe and Mail, here's (at least part of) the housing situation in Vancouver and Toronto:

• Metro Vancouver has 4,919 newly built unsold homes on the market (including houses, duplexes, row houses, and condominiums).

• Of this total, 3,195 are unsold condominiums. All of these figures exclude homes that were sold but where the buyers failed to close.

• Across Metro Vancouver, 37% of the unsold condominium inventory is priced above $1 million.

• In the city of Vancouver proper, 81% of the unsold condominium inventory is above $1 million, with more than 14% priced above $3 million.

• In the Greater Toronto Area, there are only 701 newly built unsold units on the market, and in the city of Toronto, 61% of these are priced at or above $1 million.

Initially, the 701 figure seemed low to me, but the way I interpret this "unsold" metric is that it's strictly a best attempt at a moment-in-time snapshot of developer inventory in newly completed projects that have never been subject to a purchase agreement.

Missing from these figures are unsold homes currently under construction, and recently closed homes that have never been occupied and are now on the resale market or are simply sitting empty. Again, if a buyer failed to close, these homes would not show up in the CMHC figures.

It also doesn't include homes in the pre-sale phase. However, I think this supply is mostly irrelevant because if the developer doesn't get to construction then that inventory quickly disappears from the market. It's not sitting there needing to be absorbed (though we developers would love for it to be).

The Globe and Mail article talks about how there are over 40,000 housing units that have been approved in Metro Vancouver but have not yet proceeded to construction, and that "newly built condos in Vancouver are too pricey to sell." But the salient question is one of product-market fit: What housing do customers actually want, and can afford, today?

As we have talked about many times before on the blog, I think we need to view this moment in time as an opportunity to reset our housing markets. In other words, it's an opportunity to look at how we regulate and tax new housing, and at what and how we build, all with the goal of better serving the housing needs of Canadians.

My specific view is twofold: We need to cut the regulatory fat around delivering new homes, and we need to better optimize for medium-density housing.

In today's episode of "this social housing project in Paris looks better than most market-rate housing elsewhere," we're looking at a recently completed boarding house in the 17e by CQFD Architecture.

The project has 6 storeys, a total area of 690 m2, 19 units, and a hard cost budget that was approximately €2.6 million (excluding tax). At this number, their hard costs work out to ~€3,768 per m2, ~€350 per ft2, or ~C$563 per ft2. So this was not a cheap build. Here's what it looks like:

When I first saw the project, I thought the total area would be larger than it is. At 690 m2, it's basically the size of a multiplex project here in Toronto. Except here in Paris, they've gone vertical and they've managed to fit 19 studio apartments, plus amenity space.

All of this is possible when you consider the efficiency of each floor plate. The typical floor includes 4 apartments, one stair, one elevator, and a short corridor. Add in a second exit stair and all of this blows up.

Also interesting is the efficiency of the ground floor. There's an entrance hall, management office, bike room, recreation room, outdoor garden, and a teeny tiny garbage room ("local O.M." on the plan). As I understand it, this is all that's required for refuse because of how frequently it's picked up.

If this were in Toronto, we'd probably need a dozen bins, meaning that the bike room and/or recreation room would need to shrink down.

I love dissecting plans and dimensions from different cities because it shows you the invisible hand of building codes, planning policies, and cultural norms. We get accustomed to certain conventions and then we assume that it's simply the way that things must be done.

But the rules we have are simply the rules that somebody decided to create. As Steve Jobs once said, "Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you." This implies that everything can be questioned and ultimately changed when there's a better solution.

Photos from CQFD Architecture

Floor plans from Metalocus

These charts, from the School of Cities at the University of Toronto, are an excellent use case for a ternary chart. A ternary chart is a triangular plot with three different variables that all sum to a constant. In this case, the charts compare driving, walking/biking (active transport), and taking transit, with the constant being 100%. The data is from the 2022-23 Transportation Tomorrow Survey.

What is clear from the first image above is that Old Toronto (also known as the former City of Toronto before amalgamation) is unlike any other municipality in Ontario. Its tight, pre-car urban fabric and transit coverage mean that nearly 65% of people walk, bike, or take transit! This is compared to about 43% for the entirety of the city today; meaning, Old Toronto is the only place where driving isn't the majority mode.

The second chart above shows mode share by age. What is interesting to see, though not surprising, is that younger people are more likely to walk, bike, and take transit. Here, the figures peak between the ages of 15-19 with over 66% of trips falling into these categories, which is just slightly above the Old Toronto figure. Then, as people get older and have greater incomes (which is another one of the charts), they move toward driving.

Of course, this doesn't mean that all older people must drive. There are lots of older people who live in Old Toronto where doing something other than driving makes up the majority of trips. Urban form, density, and access to transit play the most important roles in determining what modes of transport people will choose and what they find most convenient.

Cover photo by Mitch Hodiono on Unsplash

Charts from the School of Cities