I am still making my way through (and editing) my photos from Lisbon and Malaga. Here is one that I took from the Playa de La Malagueta. I also posted it to Twitter and Instagram and asked: Should we encourage the personalization and customization of outdoor spaces on multi-family buildings?
This building overlooks the beach and the Alboran Sea. If you look closely, you'll see that a number of the balconies have been modified to include different kinds of awnings and shade structures. And some look to have been converted to interior space.
A few of you seem to support this level of customization, provided that the overall design integrity of the building is maintained. And I would agree that in this particular instance, it seems to work, which is actually why I took the photo. It gives the facade life.
I recall seeing instances of this in Toronto, but generally speaking it's not encouraged or allowed. In condominiums, outdoor spaces attached to units are typically defined as "exclusive-use common elements."
The challenge, here, lies in the subjectivity of "maintaining the overall design intent of the building." I'm not sure how you codify that, unless you pre-design the options. Perhaps that's one way of doing it.
BILD (the Building Industry and Land Development Association) just released its June 2017 data for the Greater Toronto Area’s new housing market. You can read the full release here. But I would like to point out a couple of things:
About 91 percent of the 6,046 new homes sold last month were multi-family condo apartments in high-rise and mid-rise buildings and stacked townhomes, while only nine percent were low-rise single-family homes.
The average price of available new condo apartments continued to rise with an increase of more than $22,000 from May. June’s $627,000 average price marked a 34 percent increase from a year ago. The average available unit was 845 square feet with an average price per square foot of $742. A year ago, the average price per square foot was $587.
From this, it’s once again clear that Toronto is in the midst of an incredible transformation from a low-rise city to a more vertical city. New supply on the low-rise side of the market is heavily constrained.
I get the sense sometimes that many people in this city, and others, believe that access to a low-rise detached house should be a right. Go to school. Get a good job. And then buy that house with a backyard.
The data speaks to a very different reality.
Photo by Victoria Heath on Unsplash