Noah Smith, who is a YIMBY urbanist you may know, has a recent piece on his blog called "The American suburbs are better than you think." I'll let you all read it on your own, but he goes after some of the common tropes: the suburbs force long commutes, the suburbs are lonely and isolating, and so on.

But in the end, he more or less lands where I landed in my recent post, "What do homebuyers and tenants actually want?" And that is, there are certainly lots of people who prefer the suburbs (and that's fine), but we need to get better at building housing within our cities, too. And until we do, we won't get a clear sense of consumers' revealed housing preferences.

Here's an excerpt from his post:

I’ve been a relentless advocate of building more dense, walkable cities in America. Not only would this raise GDP (because of improved clustering effects), but it would let Americans live where they want. The demand for life in cities like NYC exceeds America’s willingness to supply these environments; this raises rents in places like NYC, which pushes a lot of people into the suburbs who don’t want to be there. Forcing those city types into the ‘burbs raises rents for people who like suburbia. Basically, everyone would be happy if America had a few more Manhattans and a lot more Brooklyns.

As I said in my post, I'm all for giving housing consumers as much choice as possible. But the one thing that neither of us touched on in our posts is the simple fact that, as a general rule, urban living is significantly more environmentally sustainable than suburban living on a per-capita basis.

This is, of course, one of the points of urban greenbelts. They are meant to curb sprawl and encourage intensification. But if we don't unlock the right kind and amount of housing through intensification, then we are simply constraining supply across the board. We also know that otherwise, developers and consumers will "leapfrog" urban growth boundaries and continue sprawling.

As an urbanist and developer, I think of it this way: My job is to do what I can to build more dense, walkable communities and figure out (and advocate for) ways to build more attainable housing — specifically, housing that meets the needs of a wide variety of households. And in doing so, I believe that we will retain a segment of people in the city who might have otherwise moved to the suburbs.

Cover photo by Ivaldo Hadi

I'm trying to understand the new deal that was negotiated for the opening of the Gordie Howe International Bridge (scheduled for July 27, 2026) between Windsor and Detroit. The headlines read: "Tolls won't be split with the US until the $6.4 billion of debt is repaid. Net revenues will be split with the US for 15 years."

As I understand it, the nuance is that the gross toll revenue won't be split, but the net proceeds — after expenses like debt service, I hope — will be, for 15 years. This is different from the original deal, which had Canada keeping 100% of everything until it had paid off its $6.4 billion debt balance. Importantly, Canada also had complete authority over toll governance.

This is objectively a worse deal for Canada and we were bullied into it at the last minute with a classic geopolitical re-trade. But how much worse is it?

The public messaging is that net profits will likely be close to zero, and maybe even negative, in the early years of operations. So it's not inconceivable that no payments will be made to the US's local economic development fund until later years. If this is the case, the impact on Canada's net present value might be negligible. I haven't seen any of the math, but it's possible this was a small price to pay to get the bridge open.

From what I can glean, the most damaging aspects of this re-trade are the following: first, Canada lost sole authority to set its own tolls and govern the bridge — a bridge that we paid for in full! And second, it demonstrates that, at the present time, the US cannot be trusted to honour its agreements.

Re-trading, of course, happens all the time in politics and business, and the real estate industry is no different. But I would say that there's a difference between a bad-faith re-trade and a legitimate risk adjustment. Sometimes new information is discovered or the market changes in the middle of a deal, and one party needs a deal adjustment to be able to proceed.

At the same time, there are also bad-faith re-trades where one party simply wants to apply any leverage it may have, be a bully, and capitalize on deal fatigue. "Ugh, let's just get this open!" This is a short-sighted practice because it immediately destroys trust and damages your reputation. It may leave you better off on this one deal, but it makes the next ones that much harder.

Cover photo by Brad Switzer

During development downturns, at least two things tend to be true.

One, land on the periphery tends to get hit first and recover last. It's a kind of "last in, first out" principle. During a market expansion, core areas become expensive first, and then demand "spills over" to the periphery in search of opportunity.

These areas are, therefore, last (or later) to appreciate and first to fall when the market turns. This also means that they're last to rebound when the market recovers because, generally speaking, demand will start in the core and then move outward.

And two, execution becomes critical. If you don't get your product offering right and execute well, you can't rely on the tide of the market to carry you. We're seeing exactly this today.

It is, as we talk about on this blog, extremely difficult to make new projects work in the current market environment, and so few developers are launching and breaking ground, and many projects are getting cancelled.

But it's worth pointing out that there are still some projects moving forward, and that's because they got their product offering right and they executed well. And maybe they leveraged public grants or incentives to help tip the scales of feasibility.

Cover photo by Ali Köse