On Tuesday night I attended a great industry event that Quadrangle Architects organized about mid-rise buildings. 

Mid-rise buildings (somewhere around 4-12 storeys) are all the rage in Toronto these days. But there are many challenges associated with this building typology and this was an event to talk about them and hopefully push things forward.

One of the speakers at the event was Jeanhy Shim of Housing Lab Toronto. And I’d like to share one of her slides here:

It reads:

Value = (rational benefit x emotional benefit) / price

I believe she admitted to taking it from someone at Bruce Mau Design. But that’s okay. That’s how ideas build. What I really like about it is that it attaches a value to the things that are difficult and sometimes impossible to measure: the emotional stuff.

As I mentioned in this post over the weekend, we are all obsessed with the quantitative side of our businesses. In the case of development, we look at prices, per square foot prices, apartment sizes, and the list goes on. And we often reduce our “products” to these sorts of key metrics.

But if you’re competing just on numbers, then you’re missing a big and important part of the equation. People consume things – and housing is no different – for a number of different reasons. We buy things because of how it makes us feel, how it reinforces our sense of self, how it improves or promises to improve our lives, and so on. These are all harder to measure than square footage. 

But we are living in a data driven world and more and more of this type of information will become available for city building. If you and your business can get your head around it first, you’ll have a huge advantage.