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
This week, ULI Toronto visited One Delisle for a behind-the-scenes look at what we believe is this city's next global landmark. The tour sold out in under 24 hours, and it was great to see so much interest from our industry peers. For those of you who made it out, thanks for taking the time! Here are some photos from the event, all courtesy of Multiplex Construction Canada.
It is very common for jurisdictions to mandate the use of a licensed architect when building homes and buildings above a certain size. This is true in Ontario, and it's true in places like France, though the thresholds can vary widely and change over time. Currently, the threshold is 150 m2 in France. Okay, so what? Well, it turns out this simple rule has second-order consequences, as they often do.
Here's a fascinating research paper by Antoine Levy titled Regulating Housing Quality: Evidence from France. One of the things he looks at is the distribution of floor area in new housing units over time, from before there was an architect requirement threshold (ART), to the moments where this threshold was gradually lowered:
Prior to there being a threshold (1976), the chart shows a positive skew, but with a clustering of homes somewhere around 100 m2. Importantly, the distribution shows a smooth progression. But once an ART is implemented, the distribution then starts to show a clear spike right before the threshold, followed by a cliff and a "missing mass."
This, of course, makes sense. The market is pushing up against the glass to avoid having to use and pay for an architect. And the "missing mass" is the market shifting supply to below the threshold, or sufficiently beyond it. I mean, if you're going to surpass the threshold, you may as well do it confidently.
Now here's where things start to get more interesting. Levy finds that this threshold acts as a focal point that segments the market. Households above the threshold tend to have higher incomes, and homes just past the limit were on average 8-10% more expensive to build. This additional cost cannot be justified by the addition of the architect's fee alone.
On the other side of the threshold, the concentration of demand "up against the glass" was shown to create economies of scale through more standardized home design and production. In other words, the threshold incentivizes the market to get really good at designing and building a certain scale of home.
It was also shown to unintentionally promote greater housing density, because what the threshold does is create a soft cap on housing consumption for a large segment of the market. As you can see in the bottom right chart above, it effectively pulls supply back and under the threshold, away from larger homes and larger lots.
It may seem fairly innocuous to mandate that people use an architect above a certain scale, and I will forever be a proponent of great design, but as Thomas Sowell once said, "there are no solutions, only trade-offs."
Cover photo by Alex Tyson on Unsplash