On Tuesday night I attended a great industry event that Quadrangle Architects organized about mid-rise buildings. 

Mid-rise buildings (somewhere around 4-12 storeys) are all the rage in Toronto these days. But there are many challenges associated with this building typology and this was an event to talk about them and hopefully push things forward.

One of the speakers at the event was Jeanhy Shim of Housing Lab Toronto. And I’d like to share one of her slides here:

It reads:

Value = (rational benefit x emotional benefit) / price

I believe she admitted to taking it from someone at Bruce Mau Design. But that’s okay. That’s how ideas build. What I really like about it is that it attaches a value to the things that are difficult and sometimes impossible to measure: the emotional stuff.

As I mentioned in this post over the weekend, we are all obsessed with the quantitative side of our businesses. In the case of development, we look at prices, per square foot prices, apartment sizes, and the list goes on. And we often reduce our “products” to these sorts of key metrics.

But if you’re competing just on numbers, then you’re missing a big and important part of the equation. People consume things – and housing is no different – for a number of different reasons. We buy things because of how it makes us feel, how it reinforces our sense of self, how it improves or promises to improve our lives, and so on. These are all harder to measure than square footage. 

But we are living in a data driven world and more and more of this type of information will become available for city building. If you and your business can get your head around it first, you’ll have a huge advantage. 

I have a new favorite blog that I think you might all enjoy as well. It’s called BT | A | Works and it is the “architectural and urban research and development division” of Bing Thom Architects in Vancouver. 

I think it’s it’s important to have people in a firm who are researching and experimenting with ideas beyond the day-to-day tasks of a job. So I was excited to discover their work this morning.

Their most recent post is a look at ownership patterns of single family homes sold in 3 west end neighborhoods in Vancouver from September 2014 to February 2015 (a 6 month period). These are some of the most expensive areas in the city and, collectively, they found 172 properties sold with an aggregate value of around $520 million.

Given the presence of foreign buyers in Vancouver’s real estate market, one of the things they then did was identify “non-anglicized Chinese names” on the title records. This means names like “Li Xian”, but not names like “Andrew Shui-Him Yan”, because the anglicized first name suggests that they are probably not a new immigrant or probably not living abroad.

Here’s what they found:

In total, 66% of the properties in the sample (172 properties) were associated with a non-anglicized Chinese name. And for properties over $5 million, the percentage jumps to 88%. The other interesting thing worth noting is that 23% of the registered owners declared their occupation as “homemaker/housewife.”

I thought this would serve as an interesting follow-up to the post I wrote about a month ago called, Is Hongcouver better off than Vancouver? If you’d like to see the full BT | A | Works presentation, click here.

Lately I’ve been feeling that we’ve been having some pretty serious conversations here on Architect This City. Everything from condominium reserve funds to housing/tax policy. So today I thought we could change it up and talk about something a bit more fun: farmhouses.

Last weekend when I was in Prince Edward County, one of the places that I visited was the Drake Devonshire Inn. It’s been on my list for awhile, so I’m glad I finally got to experience it. It’s an outpost of the Toronto-based Drake Hotel (no relationship to Hotline Bling Drake) and they refer to it as their “contemporary farmhouse.” 

It was stunning.

As soon as I walked on the grounds, I couldn’t stop looking around, taking pictures, and examining all the art that they have sprinkled around the inn. Those are the sorts of things I do when I get excited by a building or place. I’m like a kid in a candy store.

I was so impressed that after I left I had to message my friend – who worked on the project and who I went to architecture school with – to tell her that she did an amazing job. Want to see for yourself? Click here for photos of the farmhouse. And click here for information on the design firm behind the farmhouse (+tongtong).

But beyond just a great space, the Drake Devonshire is also symbolic of something greater than seems to be taking place. Almost everybody I met in PEC seemed to be a Toronto transplant. They were done with life in the city and decided take off for the country. But along with them is coming pieces of the city. (The Hayloft Dancehall is another example.)

I used to think that this kind of city-to-country colonization was bound to happen in Niagara-on-the-Lake, which is only about an hour west of the city. But it turns out I was wrong. It seems to be happening to the east of the city in Prince Edward County.