Yesterday morning I reshared this tweet of a recently completed mid-rise building at 58, rue de la Santé in Paris. And the response was overwhelmingly positive. There was a long list of people saying: please build this in my city, I want to live here, I want to invest in projects like this, and more.
Based on the echo chamber that I live in on the internet, it would seem that most people like this project, and are wondering why Paris can build it, but we generally can't. So let's take a closer look in the hopes of learning something. Here's an image from Google Street View:
The developer for the project is RIVP (Régime Immobilière de la Ville de Paris). They are a major social housing developer in the city and are semi-public company, primarily owned by the City of Paris. They build, manage, and renovate social housing, and have somewhere around 66,000 housing units under management in the île-de-France region.
The project contains 14 social housing apartments and one commercial unit at grade. It's 8 storeys tall (R+7 is the nomenclature commonly used in France which means rez-de-chaussée plus 7 additional floors). And on its main elevation there are only two small stepbacks at level 7 and 8. Otherwise the building goes straight up.
The site area is 191 m2 or ~2,055 ft2. This is the equivalent of a single-family housing lot measuring around 20 feet x 100 feet, which would be fairly common in Toronto. Except in this case, it's not just for one family; it's for 14 of them and a commercial user on the ground floor.
The total area, according to the above site signage, is 909.40 m2 or ~9,789 ft2. That crudely works out to about 60.6 m2 per unit (I'm including both the residential and commercial units in this very rough calculation). This is exactly similar to what I would expect to see here in Toronto in terms of an average suite size.
The floor space index for the site (i.e. its density) is 4.76x. This is not particularly high and is probably on the low side compared to what you'd typically find in Toronto for new mid-rise developments. The key difference here is that they're achieving it on a relatively small site.
The total height of the building is 23.46m. Divided by 8 floors, that works out to a floor-to-floor height of 2.93m. This is a bit tighter than what I would expect, but it seems to be because the ground floor is relatively compact, whereas Toronto developers are encouraged to be greater than 4.5 meters tall.
The project architect — MAAJ Architects — specifically mentions on their website that they used concrete in order to keep the height of the building down. They also show the building as being taller and having 16 apartments, so I'm guessing height was constraint.
The big question that remains is: how much did it cost to build? And I unfortunately don't have a good answer for this. Precise hard costs are generally hard to find and total development costs are almost never published.
That said, the architect does show on their website a hard cost figure of 2,630,000 € HT for 1,242 m2 (again, it looks like an earlier design of the project was bigger). These figures work out to €2,117 per m2 or €196.70 per ft2 or C$289 per ft2.
Don't quote me on these figures. I don't have inside information or first-hand experience in this market. But if it's even remotely accurate, then I'd say it's at least 30-40% cheaper than what a comparable build — with hand-laid bricks — would cost in Toronto.
Cover photo by Arthur Weidmann
I have written before about how Thursdays have become my construction site visit day. And that is still very much the case. It's something I look forward to — seeing our progress, testing my discomfort with heights, and learning what not to do in the future.
One of my rules for site visits is that you can never take too many photos. Because invariably, at some point in the future, something will come up and you'll wish you had a progress photo to look back to.
I find that having text somewhere in the image is the easiest way to search for stuff later. So if it doesn't already exist, I think someone should make a flip card-like contraption with common construction words on it that you can use when taking site photos. You know, with fun words like schluter.
Taking this logic even further, the best practice is a full 3D scan at each inspection stage. A digital twin is naturally going to be better than photos for finding where a particular pipe is going or what the waterproofing detail looks like in the location where you're now experiencing a leak.
We've been using Matterport, but I'm writing today to see if any of you have any other construction software that you would highly recommend. It could be for this exact purpose or for any other construction-related purpose. If you do, please leave a comment below.
Urbanation just released its Q1-2025 condominium market survey results for the Greater Toronto & Hamilton Area (GTHA). Here's how things are looking:
The entire GTHA recorded 533 new condominium sales and the City of Toronto recorded 215 new condominium sales in the quarter. Once again, and as you can see above, this is the lowest level since the early 90s.
For all intents and purposes, I think you can look at these sales figures as mostly representing a zero. The numbers are relatively small and a sale doesn't necessarily equate 1:1 to an eventual new home. The sale needs to be within a project that achieves its requisite pre-sales for construction financing.
Yesterday morning I reshared this tweet of a recently completed mid-rise building at 58, rue de la Santé in Paris. And the response was overwhelmingly positive. There was a long list of people saying: please build this in my city, I want to live here, I want to invest in projects like this, and more.
Based on the echo chamber that I live in on the internet, it would seem that most people like this project, and are wondering why Paris can build it, but we generally can't. So let's take a closer look in the hopes of learning something. Here's an image from Google Street View:
The developer for the project is RIVP (Régime Immobilière de la Ville de Paris). They are a major social housing developer in the city and are semi-public company, primarily owned by the City of Paris. They build, manage, and renovate social housing, and have somewhere around 66,000 housing units under management in the île-de-France region.
The project contains 14 social housing apartments and one commercial unit at grade. It's 8 storeys tall (R+7 is the nomenclature commonly used in France which means rez-de-chaussée plus 7 additional floors). And on its main elevation there are only two small stepbacks at level 7 and 8. Otherwise the building goes straight up.
The site area is 191 m2 or ~2,055 ft2. This is the equivalent of a single-family housing lot measuring around 20 feet x 100 feet, which would be fairly common in Toronto. Except in this case, it's not just for one family; it's for 14 of them and a commercial user on the ground floor.
The total area, according to the above site signage, is 909.40 m2 or ~9,789 ft2. That crudely works out to about 60.6 m2 per unit (I'm including both the residential and commercial units in this very rough calculation). This is exactly similar to what I would expect to see here in Toronto in terms of an average suite size.
The floor space index for the site (i.e. its density) is 4.76x. This is not particularly high and is probably on the low side compared to what you'd typically find in Toronto for new mid-rise developments. The key difference here is that they're achieving it on a relatively small site.
The total height of the building is 23.46m. Divided by 8 floors, that works out to a floor-to-floor height of 2.93m. This is a bit tighter than what I would expect, but it seems to be because the ground floor is relatively compact, whereas Toronto developers are encouraged to be greater than 4.5 meters tall.
The project architect — MAAJ Architects — specifically mentions on their website that they used concrete in order to keep the height of the building down. They also show the building as being taller and having 16 apartments, so I'm guessing height was constraint.
The big question that remains is: how much did it cost to build? And I unfortunately don't have a good answer for this. Precise hard costs are generally hard to find and total development costs are almost never published.
That said, the architect does show on their website a hard cost figure of 2,630,000 € HT for 1,242 m2 (again, it looks like an earlier design of the project was bigger). These figures work out to €2,117 per m2 or €196.70 per ft2 or C$289 per ft2.
Don't quote me on these figures. I don't have inside information or first-hand experience in this market. But if it's even remotely accurate, then I'd say it's at least 30-40% cheaper than what a comparable build — with hand-laid bricks — would cost in Toronto.
Cover photo by Arthur Weidmann
I have written before about how Thursdays have become my construction site visit day. And that is still very much the case. It's something I look forward to — seeing our progress, testing my discomfort with heights, and learning what not to do in the future.
One of my rules for site visits is that you can never take too many photos. Because invariably, at some point in the future, something will come up and you'll wish you had a progress photo to look back to.
I find that having text somewhere in the image is the easiest way to search for stuff later. So if it doesn't already exist, I think someone should make a flip card-like contraption with common construction words on it that you can use when taking site photos. You know, with fun words like schluter.
Taking this logic even further, the best practice is a full 3D scan at each inspection stage. A digital twin is naturally going to be better than photos for finding where a particular pipe is going or what the waterproofing detail looks like in the location where you're now experiencing a leak.
We've been using Matterport, but I'm writing today to see if any of you have any other construction software that you would highly recommend. It could be for this exact purpose or for any other construction-related purpose. If you do, please leave a comment below.
Urbanation just released its Q1-2025 condominium market survey results for the Greater Toronto & Hamilton Area (GTHA). Here's how things are looking:
The entire GTHA recorded 533 new condominium sales and the City of Toronto recorded 215 new condominium sales in the quarter. Once again, and as you can see above, this is the lowest level since the early 90s.
For all intents and purposes, I think you can look at these sales figures as mostly representing a zero. The numbers are relatively small and a sale doesn't necessarily equate 1:1 to an eventual new home. The sale needs to be within a project that achieves its requisite pre-sales for construction financing.
Since the beginning of 2024, Urbanation has tracked a total of 5,734 pre-construction condominiums that have been put on hold, cancelled, placed into receivership, or converted to purpose-built rental.
So where does this leave us? It leaves us with:
69,042 condominium homes under construction across the GTHA
10,934 unsold condominiums in pre-construction projects
11,073 unsold condominiums in projects under construction
1,911 unsold condominiums in completed projects (standing inventory)
One hypothetical could be that many/most of the projects currently in pre-construction never actually make it to construction, which would mean that the above 10,934 condominiums just disappear from the market. For argument's sake, let's assume this happens. That would leave projects under construction and standing inventory.
Of the condominium's currently under construction, 11,073 are unsold, which represents about 16% of the total. For the units that have sold, some will belong to end users, some will belong to investors who have an ability to close, and the rest will be buyers who, frankly, don't want to close or who can't close.
I don't know what this latter percentage might be, but let's say that 40% of the condominiums sold and under construction become a problem and need to be "reabsorbed" in the market. That is, they need to find new buyers. That would equal 23,187 condominiums (and hopefully I'm being very conservative). In this scenario we would have:
11,073 unsold condominiums in projects under construction
23,187 condominiums that become a problem and need to reabsorbed in the market
1,911 unsold condominiums in completed projects
Total of 36,171 "unsold" condominiums
So, how long will it take to absorb these new homes? I don't know. It depends on a bunch of factors, including immigration. But I think we need at least 2 more years just to physically deliver the homes that are currently under construction. Then there may be a period of reabsorption. That continues to suggest to me that 2028 could be the year where we're on the other side of this.
Cover photo by Brian Jones on Unsplash
Since the beginning of 2024, Urbanation has tracked a total of 5,734 pre-construction condominiums that have been put on hold, cancelled, placed into receivership, or converted to purpose-built rental.
So where does this leave us? It leaves us with:
69,042 condominium homes under construction across the GTHA
10,934 unsold condominiums in pre-construction projects
11,073 unsold condominiums in projects under construction
1,911 unsold condominiums in completed projects (standing inventory)
One hypothetical could be that many/most of the projects currently in pre-construction never actually make it to construction, which would mean that the above 10,934 condominiums just disappear from the market. For argument's sake, let's assume this happens. That would leave projects under construction and standing inventory.
Of the condominium's currently under construction, 11,073 are unsold, which represents about 16% of the total. For the units that have sold, some will belong to end users, some will belong to investors who have an ability to close, and the rest will be buyers who, frankly, don't want to close or who can't close.
I don't know what this latter percentage might be, but let's say that 40% of the condominiums sold and under construction become a problem and need to be "reabsorbed" in the market. That is, they need to find new buyers. That would equal 23,187 condominiums (and hopefully I'm being very conservative). In this scenario we would have:
11,073 unsold condominiums in projects under construction
23,187 condominiums that become a problem and need to reabsorbed in the market
1,911 unsold condominiums in completed projects
Total of 36,171 "unsold" condominiums
So, how long will it take to absorb these new homes? I don't know. It depends on a bunch of factors, including immigration. But I think we need at least 2 more years just to physically deliver the homes that are currently under construction. Then there may be a period of reabsorption. That continues to suggest to me that 2028 could be the year where we're on the other side of this.
Cover photo by Brian Jones on Unsplash
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