Some of you might remember that I grew up going to a French school here in Toronto. My mom had rightly decided that I should be able to speak both of Canada's official languages. But truthfully, I never really loved it as a kid. I started midway through elementary school and so I always felt a little insecure about my French abilities. Which is partially why in the fall of 2023, I decided to enroll in night classes at Alliance Française. I've been doing it ever since and I can feel my French getting markedly better. There's also something deeply nostalgic about being in a French class.

Generally speaking, the classes are pretty relaxed (sometimes we learn grammar and sometimes we just talk about delicious cheeses), but at the end of last year I decided to register for the DELF exam. DELF stands for Diplôme d'études en langue française and it's a diploma for non-native speakers of French offered by France's Ministry of Education. It's offered at various proficiency levels and I registered for level B2, which France describes in the following way:

One of the reasons why I registered for this particular level is that it will soon become the minimum level of language proficiency required to become a French citizen. Currently you need the equivalent of B1, but starting January 1, 2026, I understand it will jump up to B2. I, of course, don't know if I will ever need this, move to France, and/or seek to become a citizen, but it became a goal. I told myself that I wanted the diploma that proves one's French is good enough to be an actual citizen. I guess it was a way to conquer my childhood insecurities.

So I'm happy to report that I ended up taking the exam in early March and that last week I received my passing grade. I scored just under 90%. (My weakest section was the handwritten essay.) After I got the news, I came home to the below book sitting on the kitchen counter with a bow and thoughtful handwritten note from Bianca — in French I would add — congratulating me on achieving this goal. One of the first things I said was, "wait, when did you buy this? How did you get it so quickly?" And she responded with, "I ordered it a long time ago, because I knew you'd pass."

The book is called Paris Haussmann and it's a comprehensive look at Haussmann's 19th century plans for the city. It covers every scale, from the city's boulevards (morphological scale) down to individual floor plans for each building type (typological scale). It's a truly extraordinary book and it's also highly relevant to one of the things that Globizen is focused on right now, which is the building of infill housing on Toronto's major streets. The urban context isn't exactly the same, of course, but there's a lot to be learned from this human-scaled building type. So even if you aren't trying to overcome some childhood insecurity related to the French, I highly recommend you check out this book.

Cover photo via Pavillon de l'arsenal

The other night, I went down a Parisian real estate rabbit hole on Twitter. And one of the things that kept coming up was this half joke: The biggest developer in Paris today is the mayor. The reason for this is that the city is targeting 40% of all homes to be public housing by 2035 (of which 30% will be social housing and 10% will be moderately affordable).

Supposedly this is to stem the steady outflow of people from the capital as a result of housing being too expensive. But it means that a lot of new public housing will need to be created. As of January 1, 2021, the official estimate was 260,563 "logements sociaux" in the capital, which translates into 22.4% of all principal residences.

To hit this 40% goal, the city is going to need to create somewhere around 140,000 new public housing dwellings between now and 2035. So how does it plan to do this? By being a developer, of course. A big part of the strategy seems to be to convert existing buildings (d'adapter l’existant). And to execute on this, the city is leveraging something known as "le droit de préemption."

The way it works is like a right of first refusal clause (ROFR), except that it's not something that was contractually negotiated between market participants, it's just the law. What it means is that if a property owner goes to sell their building and they receive an offer, the city has an automatic ROFR and can choose to buy the building at whatever that third party was willing to pay.

Over the last two years, the city has elected to do this 84 times and has spent over €1.1 billion, according to Business Immo. And since the beginning of this year, they've done it 9 times, spending about €67 million on the following properties:

For those of you who are visual learners like me, here's the first property on the list:

It's certainly ambitious.

But, for the most part, it does not create a lot of net new housing, even though the city is also aiming to buy office buildings, parking garages, and other non-residential buildings. APUR previously estimated that for every 1 unit of new public housing, 0.6 existing units are being demolished. So the most accurate way to think about this initiative is that it represents the socialization of Paris' housing stock into public hands.

This runs in contrast to what we've been talking about recently with cities like Minneapolis and Austin, who have instead added a lot of new market-rate housing in order to temper rents and increase affordability. Paris is reducing its stock of market-rate housing.

At the same time, the city also enacted new policy prohibiting homes that consume more than 450 kWh/m2 from being rented. This is intended to force landlords to renovate, but it will certainly have a further impact on supply, at least in the short term.

It's also worth noting that all of this is happening at a time when Paris' housing market is in broad decline (less transactions, higher days on market, lower prices, and so on). Like Toronto, it started around the middle of 2022. And it's something that Paris hadn't seen since the 2008 financial crisis.

Chart by CoStar via Business Immo; cover photo by Salomé Watel on Unsplash

Here's some unsurprising but important news via Urbanation:

• New condominium apartment sales last year totalled 4,590 homes. This is a 78% decline compared to the latest 10-year average of 20,835 homes, and the slowest year for new condo sales in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GHTA) since 1996. See above chart.

• Only 802 new condominium apartments were sold in Q4-2024.

• Six projects launched in Q4-2024, totalling 1,829 homes, of which only 10% were sold. A total of 1,506 new condominium apartments started construction during this same quarter.

• A total of 29,800 condominium homes were completed in 2024 -- a record. This year, 30,793 homes are expected to complete, which if it happens, will create another new record.

• In total, 78,742 new condominium homes are currently under construction across the GTHA, as of Q4-2024.

This may seem like a lot. But 30k of these homes are expected to complete and occupy this year. That leaves around 48k under construction, plus whatever new starts end up happening in 2025. So as Shaun Hildebrand points out in the above release, at some point around 2026-2027, we are going to see a dramatic fall off in completions and new housing supply.

Even if starts magically ramped up this year (which would be unexpected), there would still be a period of relatively low completions that would need to work its way through the system. Development is, by nature, excruciatingly slow to respond to changes in demand. There's always a lag. So overall housing supply is something we're paying close attention to right now as we execute on our real estate strategies.

Chart via Urbanation