We talk a lot around here about the surprising difficulty of building small-scale apartment buildings. Here's a post from earlier this year where I outlined a working list of policies, codes, and approaches that would need to change in order to unlock more of this housing type.

But my list was just that — a list — and the reality is that each individual item can be shockingly complex. To that end, here's a recent study, published by the Neptis Foundation, called "Ontario Building Code Missing Middle Study: Bridging the gap between houses and high-rises."

The authors are Conrad Speckert of Semibold Solutions (who has appeared on this blog in the past) and Jack Keays of Vortex Fire Consulting, and I encourage you to download a free copy. I haven't gone through it yet, but I will, because we are actively working on projects at this exact scale.

Enjoy the weekend.

Cover photo by Danish Prakash

Urbanation just released its Q2 2026 new condominium sales report for the GTHA (Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area). New condominium apartment sales posted their first year-over-year gain since 2023, with 702 home sales, representing a 52% annual increase. Anecdotally, I will also say that those of us in the industry can feel these winds changing.

These figures are still well below the 10-year average, but the market is starting to do what it needs to do, and what the new (and cumbersome) HST rebate is intended to do. Standing inventory is getting sold, and I suspect the second half of this year will look even stronger as the industry figures out how to actually paper and administer this rebate.

Importantly, the rebate is not helping pre-construction sales (though that's just one factor). Q2 saw just 50 sales. Basically, nothing. This makes sense because the new rebate requires the purchase agreement to be signed before March 31, 2027. That's not enough time for most pre-sale programs, but it does create a sense of urgency around standing inventory.

So, what we are seeing today is a new condominium market that has refound price discovery and is starting to clear out already-built standing inventory, but one that is not producing a meaningful amount of new housing starts. As Urbanation says in its release, "condo supply is set to see its largest ever decline in the coming years."

Cover photo by Narciso Arellano

Chart from Urbanation

Earlier this week, I tweeted that Toronto needs a Haussmann moment where we make some bold and uncomfortable changes in order to set ourselves up to be a dominant 21st-century global city. I mentioned Haussmann because his work is perhaps the most notable, but that is just one example.

In addition to Haussmann's renovation of Paris (1853-1870), I was also thinking about the Commissioners' Plan for New York City (1811), and Ildefons Cerdà's grid system of octagonal blocks for Barcelona (1859), as well as some more contemporary examples.

In recent years, Barcelona has revisited its grid system and pioneered a new set of "superblocks" that focus traffic along the periphery and create pedestrian-focused spaces on their interior.

The common thread among these examples is that they all represent a grand master plan. In the case of Barcelona and New York, it was a plan that served to guide development as the city grew. And in the case of Paris, it was a destructive plan that went back and redid what was deemed to have not been working. (In thinking about this now, it's probably best that I used Haussmann as the example in my tweet).

Toronto has never had such a plan. We flirted with the City Beautiful movement at the beginning of the 20th century — a movement intent on beautifying and introducing monumental grandeur to our cities — but, not surprisingly, we ultimately saw it as a superfluous and frivolous spending exercise.

Instead, Toronto has grown incrementally, becoming what I see as an accidental global city. We are no longer the ultra-conservative, deeply Protestant city that we once were, but at the same time, it's hard not to feel like we have a grid and public realm that doesn't reflect the city we have become today.

Toronto needs a bold master plan. And over the coming weeks, I'll put some of my ideas to paper. In the meantime, if you have any of your own, please feel free to share them in the comment section below.