This morning I went through some of the floor plans for King Toronto, which are now up on BuzzBuzzHome. In case you’re wondering, they are currently showing an average price of $1604 per square foot.

Here is a 1 bedroom + atelier:

And here is a 2 bedroom + atelier:

Right away you’ll probably notice a few things. 

There are no dens in these plans. They have been replaced with ateliers, which sounds cool. I want my own atelier where I make things. But it may also be a clever way to get around calling them studies or nooks.

A lot of people in the industry have been commenting on how they’ve included the exterior living space in the calculation of total area. That seems logical to me, especially for a project like this where the terraces form such an integral part of the architecture.

The other thing I noticed is that the buildings are, actually, being referred to as mountains. This has been part of the project’s design narrative since the beginning. So I like the consistency. The above plans are for suites within the “east mountain.” 

But what I wanted to ask all of you today is whether you find the addition of a 3D plan helpful. It’s obviously not new, but it is still fairly uncommon, at least in this market. Do you think it’s worth it?

John Lorinc has a piece in the Autumn 2018 issue of University of Toronto Magazine that is worth a read. It covers families in Toronto being priced out of the low-rise housing market and/or making the conscious decision to live in an apartment or condo.

He raises an important question:

The big question hovering over this generational transition is all about city-building, and whether increasingly dense metropolitan regions such as Toronto and Vancouver can figure out how to turn all those newly sprouted forests of highrises into true communities that are both affordable and appealing to the wide range of people who call these cities home.

The reality seems to be that more people in this city – out of economic necessity and/or because of a lifestyle preference – are choosing to raise a family in multi-dwelling housing. I live in a condo and my neighbors are raising a child two doors down from me.

I am sure that we will continue to see more of this and I am sure that we will get better at designing for families. We are trying to do our part with the 2-storey homes that we have incorporated into our Junction House project. 

I would, however, like to respond to the underlying tone in the article that but for developers being stubbornly resistant to larger 3-bedroom apartments in this city, we would have a myriad of new condominiums filled with families.

The reality is that there are market and structural forces (including cultural biases) that steer what gets built.

There are affordability considerations. Larger condos cost more money than smaller condos. And that prices out many families, particularly if there are cheaper alternatives available in the form of low-rise housing. 

The reason we appear to be at an inflection point today is because the cheaper alternatives are disappearing. (This of course returns us to the broader question of overall housing affordability.)

There are also timing and financing considerations that likely create a supply-side bias. Most lenders require that a certain number of condo units be pre-sold before construction starts. 

This means that, as a developer, you need people that can both afford what you’re selling and that are willing to buy three to five years out, and perhaps even longer. That can be difficult for many families.

Lastly for this post, there’s the GST/HST New Housing Rebate in Ontario, which I have argued before on the blog could be incentivizing smaller suite sizes and could use a refresh for today’s home prices.

All of this is not to say that we shouldn’t be designing for urban families and that we shouldn’t be focused on delivering more affordable housing to this and other cities. Those are two very important things.

It is simply to say: there’s a lot going on here that needs to be unpacked. 

A good friend of mine just sent me this fascinating research paper called: Opposition to Development or Opposition to Developers? Survey Evidence from Los Angeles County on Attitudes towards New Housing. It is a study out of UCLA that was published earlier this year by Paavo Monkkonen and Michael Manville.

For the paper, they conducted a survey-framing experiment with over 1,300 people in Los Angeles County to test how strongly they felt about a number of common anti-housing sentiments; arguments such as traffic congestion, neighborhood character, and strain on local services. 

However, they also introduced another argument: large developer profits. And interestingly enough, they discovered that respondents were 20 percentage points more likely to oppose a new hypothetical housing development when the survey was framed around the developer making a lot of money.

Here is a table from the paper showing the various frames, as well as the percentage of people who supported, had no opinion, and who opposed. Note that under the “developer” frame, the opposition number is 48%.

So their “takeaway for practice” is as follows: “Housing opposition is often framed as a form of risk aversion. Our findings, however, suggest that at least some opposition to housing might be motivated not by residents’ fears of their own losses, but resentment of others’ gains.”

Photo by Cameron Stow on Unsplash