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Here in Toronto, we have something known as "Type G" loading spaces. They're used for collecting garbage and they are generally required in multi-family buildings with 30 or more homes (though exceptions do exist). The problem with these spaces is that they're highly consumptive. Below is an excerpt from a recent article in Azure by Kelly Alvarez Doran and Mitchell May:
In order to accommodate a truck’s large arms to swing a garbage bin up and over its frame, residential buildings require what’s known as a “Type G” loading space, which measures at least 13 metres long, four metres wide and 6.1 metres tall. While the area of the loading space alone is significant, the required turnaround space — allowing trucks to navigate in and out of the building — is often double or even triple its size. Current City of Toronto regulations require this loading space to be designed in order to allow a garbage truck to enter the site, collect the waste, and exit the site without the need to reverse onto a public road — resulting in T- or L-shaped paved areas to accommodate the turns of a wide wheel base. Due to the site constraints and density of these developments, Type G loading is often internalized within the building’s footprint. The outcome? A truck’s manoeuvring effectively consumes the ground floor at the expense of retail space and street-level activity.
They go on to analyze what would happen if you took a typical Toronto main street and then intensified it with buildings requiring Type-G loading. The result, for a particular stretch of Dundas Street between Dufferin and Brock, was that you'd end up losing somewhere around 44 storefronts just to accommodate all of this loading.
Here's their diagram showing the Type-G loading areas in blue:
New developments are often criticized for how they perform at the ground floor. But a big part of this has to do with all of the back-of-house services and other requirements that they need to accommodate. Type-G loading is a big one and it's simply not feasible on smaller projects. Projects between 31-60 homes can apply for an exception, but I think this flexibility should already be built in.
Beyond increasing the unit trigger, what else could we do? Well, the obvious ones are (1) make the trucks smaller and more nimble and (2) centralize garbage collection. Our approach to garbage collection is decentralized. It is collected from every house and every building. But there is the option to cluster the pickups, which is what many European cities do.
Here's Barcelona via Google Street View. Note the bins.
Admittedly, this isn't nearly as convenient as having a truck come right to your door or building, and it's not the most attractive way to decorate a street. So I'm inclined to start with option one. And for that, there are cities like Tokyo we can look to. Tokyo is famous for its strict garbage collection rules and for its smaller, cuter trucks. Here's a comparison to North American trucks via ChatGPT (meaning, I can't be held liable for any inaccuracies in this chart):
We aren't quite Tokyo. Few cities are. But surely there are ways we can be just as functional and take up a lot less space. This would not only benefit our main streets, but also improve the overall viability of infill housing.
Spain is a beautiful country and lots of people want to visit and/or buy property there. But here's what Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez recently had to say about this:
Just to give an idea, in 2023 alone non-European Union residents bought around 27,000 houses and flats in Spain. And they didn't do it to live in them, they didn't do it for their families to have a place to live, they did it to speculate, to make money from them, which we – in the context of shortage that we are in – obviously cannot allow.
And by cannot allow, he means that Spain is preparing to implement a 100% tax on property purchases made by buyers of non-EU countries, such as the UK. It's not quite a foreign buyer ban, but it's certainly a punitive tax that should, in theory, dissuade the majority of buyers.
I am, however, unclear as to how this will interact with Spain's golden visa program. For over 10 years, Spain has been encouraging foreigners to buy real estate in the country (minimum value of €500,000) in exchange for permanent residency.
Will this program remain, and will these foreign buyers now be taxed at 100%? Or will permanent residency also exempt you? I don't know.
Whatever the case, it is yet another example of government trying to appear as if they're doing something meaningful about housing affordability. You might also remember that, last year, Barcelona came out with a complete ban of short-term rentals starting in November 2028.
But once again, I think it's important to remember that economics is the study of choice and that there are always tradeoffs. A decision in one place, will create second-order consequences somewhere else.
Our team has been spending a lot of time underwriting sites that would fit within the City of Toronto's new Major Streets Study. The last time I checked these policies were still under appeal, but the expectation is that they will eventually come into force and start encouraging small-scale apartments up to 6-storeys on all "Major Streets" across the city. This is meaningful progress for our city, and we're excited to be working on projects in this space.
At face value, 6 storeys on all major streets sounds like every great European city you've ever been to. But after studying countless sites, what I will say is that these policies are not designed to recreate Paris or Barcelona or Berlin. Instead, they are intended to be deferential to single-family houses. You see this in the required setbacks and in the maximum building depth, among other things. We all know why this is the case, and it was probably needed as a first step, but I think it's important to point out this subtlety.
Because there are at least two effects to this: one, the end future state will not be a uniform urban street wall, like what you'd find in Europe. That is not the goal of the current policies. And two, it unnecessarily makes the smallest sites more challenging to develop. That's a real shame, because more granularity is often a positive thing for cities. So we still have work to do. But I'm optimistic we'll get there, eventually. City planning typically works in increments.
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