One of the questions that came up after my recent post about land pricing was: what is it going to take to develop underutilized land on the outskirts of city centers?
So today I thought I would talk about a new development project that was also discussed at the Land & Development conference I recently attended. I think will begin to answer this question.
The project today is known as the Rockport Weston Community Hub & Rental Building. And it’s going to include a community cultural hub, 26 live/work artist spaces, and 300 rental apartments.
It’s located in the Weston neighborhood of Toronto, which is designated as a “Neighborhood Improvement Area.” These are lower-income areas that the city considers to be “at-risk.”
Given this, rents are naturally lower here than in other parts of the city, which means that it’s basically infeasible to develop here. There has been no large scale development in this community since the 1970s!
To put some numbers to this, the developer said they were projecting rents somewhere around “two and a quarter.” So let’s assume for a second that the average apartment rents will be $2.25 per square foot.
At this rate, it means that a 600 square foot one-bedroom apartment will have a face rent of $1,350 per month. This may seem fairly high, but it almost certainly wouldn’t be enough to get a project like this off the ground under normal market conditions. At least, that’s the case here in Toronto with current cost structures.
So what had to happen was a fairly complicated public-private partnership, which you can read all about here. But at a high level, there seems to have been 3 main economic factors that allowed this project to move forward:
1) The developer was able to acquire the land for cents on the dollar. As I said in this post, land is expensive. So this helps a lot.
2) The developer was able to make use of extra parking in an adjacent building. Assuming that underground parking could cost around $50,000 per stall, this is a huge cost savings.
3) Lastly, the project is benefiting from the public invest made in the airport rail link that now quickly connects this site to both Pearson International and downtown Toronto.
The moral of the story is that infeasible sites require some sort of subsidy or top up to make them work. Or, there needs to be an exceptional circumstance. Because if the rents aren’t there, nobody is going to build. It’s as simple as that.
That said, here’s one idea…
This discussion reminds me of a post I wrote a while back called, The hypocrisy of parking minimums. Frankly, I don’t understand why a city like Toronto still has parking minimums. If anything, we should have parking maximums.
Underground parking is a huge cost that has to get carried by purchasers and renters in a new building. For example, let’s assume that 300 apartment suites would require 180 parking stalls (ratio = 0.6). Assuming $50,000 per stall, that’s a $9 million cost.
So the second takeaway is that it’s probably time we took a good hard look at how we think about and plan for parking in our cities. Especially since the entire mobility space is being quickly disrupted.
Image: Rockport
Today I spent the day at the Land & Development conference here in Toronto. If there was one running theme throughout the day, it was: “Holy shit, I can’t believe that X piece of land sold for $Y million. How will they (the developer) ever make the numbers work?”
Outside of the real estate development community, there’s often the perception that developers are building everywhere and that there’s lots of land left in cities, like Toronto. When you see all the cranes in the skyline, it naturally seems like we’re building a lot. Things seem easy.
But the reality is that it’s extremely difficult to find “land” in markets like Toronto and Vancouver. And by “land”, I mean properties that can be feasibly acquired/assembled, entitled, developed, and then brought to market. The way the speakers today spoke about land it’s as if it were a rare precious commodity.
I say all this, not to complain about how tough things are, but simply to shed light on the process. A developer’s job is to take a piece of property and figure out a way to create additional value. But to do that, they need to find a suitable piece of real estate. “Land” is an input.
This has implications for consumers, because inputs turn into outputs. And if one of the inputs is becoming scarcer, then it’s pretty safe to assume that the outputs, such as new housing, are also becoming scarcer.
Earlier this week I was on a panel discussion called Building Toronto Tomorrow. One of the questions was about whether or not Toronto is world-class city. It elicited a good discussion, so I thought I would talk about that today on the blog.
Shamez Virani, President of CentreCourt Developments, responded by saying that he thinks Toronto is the greatest city in the world and that he wishes more people would just accept how incredible this city is. I agreed with him.
I also responded by saying that I hate this question. I think it reeks of insecurity and I think it’s a bit of a red herring. It distracts from more direct and meaningful questions – questions such as our livability and our position as a global city.
Because the reality is that Toronto is one of the most livable cities in the world and, in my view, we are the only true global city in Canada. We are an important node in the global economy for the flow of goods, people (we’re particularly good at this), capital, and now information. There’s a lot to be proud of.
But that’s not to say that we’re perfect. Everyone knows we need better transit. And to name a few others (non-exhaustive list), I also think we need to:
Get a move on road pricing.
Loosen up our archaic alcohol laws and start using nightlife as a competitive advantage for attracting talent.
Acknowledge through our governance structures that cities are what drive today’s information economy.
Stop thinking about the Canadian/Toronto value proposition as being about cost savings. That is, buy this from us because our currency is weaker than yours. This is anti-innovation and there are much better ways to create sustainable value. (Innovation is still a weak spot.)
Focus on developing an information economy that leverages the unique talent and knowledge base of Toronto. For example, I think we’re in a great position for real estate + tech innovation.
Do everything we can to encourage big tech IPOs in this city. They are critical to developing the ecosystem.
There’s a saying in Silicon Valley that you “make what you measure.” It means that whatever you decide to focus your attention on, is invariably what you end up making – regardless of whether or not you happen to be focusing on the right metric.
In the context of Toronto, I think we’d be better served if we focused on and quantified our position in the global economy, as opposed to chasing some idea of “world-class.” The latter will grow as the former grows.
I also think that this needs to be balanced against our livability. Sometimes there’s a tension. But there are cities – the best example is perhaps Tokyo – who have managed to pair a high quality of life with one of the strongest positions in the global economy.
Is there anything else you think we should be doing? We can talk about it in the comments below.
Image: Building T.O Toronto (BuzzBuzzHome Event)