Category: Development

• Project Profile: Montréal is really good at missing middle housing

  

  We often talk about the challenges associated with smaller scale developments on this blog. They are difficult to underwrite, there are diseconomies of scale and, after a certain point, developers typically start to require a certain minimum size. In other words, if you have a big development machine with a lot of fixed costs, you probably don’t want to build even 100-150 homes at a time. You want something like 250-300 homes as a starting point.

  But there is something so great about small infill projects, which is another topic that we like to talk about on this blog. Take, for example, the above 10,940 square foot project at 6001-6009 Rue St-Hubert in Montréal. Designed by L. McComber, the project includes 2 commercial spaces and 8 homes (specifically, 2 studios and 4 multi-level “townhouses”).

  Using rough measurement approximations from Google Maps, the lot looks to be about 15m wide x 26m deep. So the lot itself is somewhere around 4,200 sf, which is effectively a double lot based on the prevailing frontages in the area. According to this rough math, I’m guessing the FSI (floor space index) of this development is somewhere around 2.5x.

  It is certainly a beautiful project, but in my mind the two most noteworthy aspects of this development — at least for this audience — are the following:

  1. The architect essentially acted as the developer. They wanted to build and then own their own office space, and so they now occupy the ground floor of this project. As a partial end-user of the development, this likely means that they underwrote it slightly differently compared to if they were a pure developer.
  2. The project’s circulation space is outside and is largely housed in a central open-air courtyard.

  Here’s what #2 looks like:

  

  

  This second point about circulation is an important one because it’s an effective way to reduce hard costs, improve overall efficiency (rentable/saleable divided by gross construction area), and lower long-term operating costs. Of course, exterior stairs/circulation are quite common across Montréal’s walkups. So maybe this isn’t all that novel for them.

  But I still think it’s a perfect reminder that we shouldn’t use climate as an excuse. Montréal is both colder and snowier than Toronto. And just look how they’re building. I would happily live here. Would you?

  Photos: Raphaël Thibodeau via L. McComber

  2023.05.14

• Fourplexes are here — now what?

  The thing that we have been talking about for many months on this blog finally happened: Toronto City Council voted (18-7) in favor of allowing fourplexes as-of-right across all residential areas of the city. (If you’re curious, here is a map of which Councillors voted yes and which ones voted no. It’s not all that surprising.)

  This is a major accomplishment and milestone for Toronto. So congratulations to everyone who has been working to make this happen. But of course, now is when the rubber hits the road: Will the market actually build this new housing typology (for Toronto) at scale? Is it actually feasible?

  Jeremiah Shamess of Colliers came out this morning saying that the answer is no. These multiplexes aren’t feasible and it is “not going to solve our housing crisis or even come close.” He may be right, but I think a lot of people — myself included — are now looking closely at their feasibility.

  In fact, this morning I ran into a lender on the street — look what happens when you come into the office — that is seeing if these can be built using CMHC financing. And this is just one example of the work happening all over the city right now.

  There is also the question of scale. Small development projects are challenging. The general rule of thumb is that if you have the resources, you should build as big as you possibly can to drive economies of scale. So if these are actually feasible, who will want to build them?

  The margins on a build like this are almost certainly going to be somewhere between negative and marginally positive. But I still think there’s something to be said about being directionally right. There’s more work to be done and these policies will likely get adjusted, but I think that’s just fine as long as we’re moving forward.

  And that’s what we’re doing today.

  2023.05.11

• Not for sale!

  One of the things that I have wanted to do since I was in architecture school was visit the Venice Biennale. Partially because I would hear people say, ” so and so exhibited at the Biennale this year”, and that made it sound cool. But mostly because it’s the oldest cultural exhibition of its kind in the world — it was inaugurated in 1895 — and because there’s an entire section of it dedicated to architecture. So I’m excited to say that it looks like this month is going to be the month.

  The way I am told the Venice Biennale of Architecture works is that there are two main components. There are the national pavilions in the Biennale Gardens, and there is the Arsenale, which is where lots of different nations exhibit under one roof. Canada is one of the 29 countries that has its own pavilion and, if you aren’t familiar with its history, it’s worth watching this short video:

  At the time of writing this post, it only had 277 views, so I’m guessing that most of you have not seen it. I felt patriotic when I watched it, because the purpose of these pavilions is that they host each country’s official representation during the Biennale. It’s Canada to the world and that makes me proud. This year, Canada is being represented by Architects Against Housing Alienation (AAHA) with an exhibit called “Not for Sale!”

  Here’s an excerpt from the project description:

  Real estate speculation is a form of extortion. It converts homes into spatio-financial assets, changing the form, function, and aesthetics of housing to better serve the logics of wealth storage and speculation. The process is violent, resulting in an urban environment that is racist, sexist, and classist at a systemic level. This global phenomenon is nowhere more visible than in Canada, a country whose economy is now dominated by real estate.

  In other words, it looks like the pavilion is going to be turned into a scathing criticism of what I do for a living: real estate development. How neat! The other neat thing about the Venice Biennale is that One Delisle is going to be featured in an exhibition called, “Reconceptualizing Urban Housing.” Our team has been working on this project with Studio Gang since 2016, and so it’s a great honor to have it recognized on such a global stage.

  It also means that the Venice Biennale is going to simultaneously tell me that my work is doing some amount of good for Toronto, and that I’m also contributing to racism, sexism, and classism at a systemic level. I can’t wait.

  2023.05.08

• All lit up in the Junction!

  Friday was a busy day at Junction House.

  In the morning, we gave a hard hat tour to Toronto’s City Planning Division. They are currently revisiting the Mid-Rise Building Performance Standards, and so this was an opportunity to see what these standards translate to when you’re on site trying to actually build a mid-rise building.

  It was great to see the group so highly engaged and looking for ways to improve the delivery of this housing typology. Thanks for taking the time to visit Junction House.

  

  Then we had the “official lighting ceremony” for the placemaking art. And by official lighting ceremony, I mean that there were a handful of us playing around with a drone and trying to get cool pictures on our phones. However, did we have one actual videographer, so stay tuned for some proper video footage of the installation.

  Finally, in the evening after sunset, we got to see it illuminated for the very first time. And it was everything we had hoped for! An idea turned into reality, many years later. Shout out to the Urban Toronto community for spotting one of our earlier prototypes online and then encouraging us to make some design changes. We are happy we listened.

  

  

  But what do you all think? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment section below.

  2023.05.06

• What are the opportunity costs of not building new housing?

  

  The stated policy goal of inclusionary zoning is to to produce more affordable housing. We can debate who ultimately pays for this below-market housing, and we have many times before on the blog, but for the purposes of this post let’s just focus on its stated goal.

  Given this ambition, it makes sense to carefully measure the number of affordable homes produced. And that is ordinarily what is done: “We implemented this new policy on this date, and since then we have produced X amount of new affordable housing.”

  It is then likely that we will take X and form opinions on whether it was a successful policy or not. If X seems like a lot, then maybe we think it’s a good policy. And if X doesn’t seem like a lot, then maybe we think it was a bad policy, or perhaps just an ineffective one.

  But what is largely impossible to measure with any real precision is the number of new market-rate homes that are now not being built as a result of a policy. Let’s call this number Y. It is, of course, possible to come up with an estimate by looking broadly at rents across the city, plugging in some development costs, and seeing what pencils. But this is a rough approximation.

  It does not capture the countless times that a developer has looked at a possible housing site, only to come to the conclusion that it is not feasible to build. There is no official Y figure. And any amorphous estimates of Y are going to be easy to ignore by the general public anyway. Unbuilt homes? Opportunity costs? What?

  I am saying (okay repeating) all of this because I continue to feel like most people believe that development will just happen no matter what is thrown at it. There is a housing shortage, right? So developers should just do what they do best and build today. Surely they could if they were genuinely nice people and really wanted to. Hmm.

  What many people seem to ignore (or not know) is that development, and in turn new housing supply, operates under this very simple decision tree:

  • Find development site
  • Underwrite said site
  • If math works, seek capital/investors and then build
  • If math does not work, do not build
  • If math works, but capital doesn’t like it, also do not build (most can’t in this scenario)
  • Repeat

  Just because you aren’t seeing or noticing something, it does not mean that it doesn’t exist and that it’s not happening behind the scenes.

  2023.04.29

• Timing matters in development

  Early on in my career, I worked on a new office development where the decision was made to start construction having only pre-leased 25% of the building. (It may have actually been closer to 22% if my memory serves me correctly.)

  Our big constraint at the time was that this first tenant had to be out of their current space by a certain date, and the only way we could meet their deadline was to immediately start construction. Otherwise, we knew we would lose them to another development or to an existing building.

  To convince ourselves that this was a reasonable thing to do, we looked at all of the upcoming lease expiries in the market, and then came to the conclusion that there would be enough demand in the coming years to fill the rest of the building.

  Still, we were taking a leap of faith, even if it was an informed one. And it meant running the project entirely on equity until we could secure a construction loan. Thankfully, in this particular instance, our hypothesis proved true. The lease expiries did end up creating the demand we were hoping for and so we were able to fill the rest of the building.

  The project was a success.

  But that was then. And in hindsight, this move feels scary. What would have happened had we made this exact same decision at the end of 2019? Things would have been very different. Not because of a fundamentally different decision on our part, but because of a black swan event that was truly impossible to predict. Our timing would have been bad.

  This is just one example of the many risks associated with the building of buildings. Development never happens in a vacuum. You’re always solving for a long list of constraints. And sometimes you need to solve for things that you don’t even know exist yet.

  2023.04.28

• Junction House just got its placemaking art

  Today was a fantastic day for the development manic meter. This was finally installed at Junction House:

  

  

  

  If you happen to find yourself in the area, check it out at 2720 Dundas Street West. And if you’d like to know a little bit about how this placemaking art came to be, click here.

  2023.04.26

• It’s decision time on fourplexes in Toronto

  We talk a lot about “missing middle” housing on this blog and, most recently, we’ve been talking about Toronto’s proposed amendments to allow fourplexes across the city and to do away with density maximums (among other things).

  Well, it’s now time to make a decision. These proposed changes are headed to Planning and Housing Committee on Thursday, April 27th. If you’d like to attend in person or virtually, here’s a copy of the public meeting notice.

  The other option is to make a written submission. The good people over at “More Neighbours Toronto” have created this website which will allow you to quickly write the Committee.

  There’s an auto-generated response in support of legalizing multiplex housing — and that’s what I used for my boring email submission — but, of course, you’re free to edit the text as you’d like.

  If you check the agenda, you’ll see that there are already hundreds of email submissions in to the Committee, many of them coming from More Neighbours. Clearly this is a topic that, one way or the other, many people feel very strongly about.

  Click here to make an email submission.

  2023.04.25

• We’re building an airport!

  One of our partners shared this video with me today:

  And it is possibly one of the greatest 39 seconds of interview you’ll ever watch.

  It is a video of Jim Fahy interviewing James Horan about the construction of Ireland West Airport. The important context is that Horan was a parish priest in Knock, County Mayo, and he desperately wanted an airport so that pilgrims could more easily visit the Knock Shrine.

  However, critics felt that an airport in County Mayo was just not feasible. The area was too foggy and too boggy (I had to look this one up).

  But Horan successfully campaigned to have one built and he did somehow find the money. Though maybe not the following week. The campaign apparently took a lot out of him, and he died shortly after the airport opened.

  But in the end, he got it built.

  It takes a special kind of person to accomplish what most people view as boiling the ocean (i.e. an impossible outcome). And when you watch the video, it will become obvious to you that James Horan was that kind of person.

  2023.04.18

• Examining a circular floor plate in Rio de Janeiro

  

  I came across this apartment on ArchDaily this morning and I immediately thought to myself, “this looks like the Lagoa neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro.” (Rio is one of my favorite cities and we nearly spent a few weeks of winter 2021 in this particular area.) So I opened it up and it turns out I was right. It’s a recent apartment renovation, in this building, by Rio de Janeiro-based architects MZNO.

  I then got onto the floor plan:

  

  Circular building floor plates invariably create fan-shaped suite layouts like this one here. From my experience, these can create some really beautiful spaces up near the face of the building, but they tend to work better when you have a bit more space to play around with. You’re also going to end up with diagonal walls and probably a radial structural system. In this case, the suite is just under 1,000 sf.

  

  I wondered if this might have been two suites that were joined together, with the previous demising being the radial shear wall behind the couch (see above). There seems to be two entrances to the suite on this plan. But then I looked at active listings in the building and this seems to be a typical layout. So I think they just stripped things down to the existing structure in order to open up the plan.

  

  The other item that stood out to me on the plan was the long corridor off the primary bedroom. But again, looking at other plans in the building, I can see that it was initially designed as a walk-in closet. This makes more sense, but it’s also a compromise brought about by this being a relatively deep plan.

  The bedrooms are “tetrised” together to make efficient use of a limited amount of linear glazing. An alternative trade-off (in this second plan) would have been to give it more frontage, and then bury the office (escritório). But I suppose there’s a good argument to be made that it’s better to have more light in your office than in your bedroom.

  MZNO was probably thinking along these same lines when they designed the linear kitchen in the way that they did in the first plan. By aligning it perpendicular to the suite’s exterior glass, you’re able to gain access to a view and some light even when you’re toward the back of the suite.

  

  Finally, the other thing about circular buildings is that they allow you to do cool circulation spaces like the above. In this case, all of the common area corridors are single-loaded, and wrapped around a huge lightwell in the middle of the building. This maybe isn’t so good if you suffer from vertigo, but it’s obvious that these corridors are serving as an extension of people’s living areas.

  And since this is Brazil, they’re naturally filled with greenery.

  Images: MZNO & Loft

  2023.04.16