There is an ongoing debate in Toronto, and many other North American cities, about how to encourage more families to live in multi-family buildings. And here that has generally translated into (1) mandating a certain number of larger family-sized suites and (2) creating design guidelines to better equip both suites and buildings for families.

But what we often ignore is the very real economic reality of buying a large family-sized suite. If you look at the latest Q3-2022 data from Urbanation, the average price of a new condominium in the entire Greater Toronto Area right now is about $1,427 psf.

So if assume that a good family-sized suite is, oh I don't know, 1,200 sf, the average price would be about $1.7mm, before you add in any parking (if necessary).

If this is too big and you can get away with something more similar to a post-war bungalow -- let's say 900 sf -- you're still at nearly $1.3mm, again before any parking. At these sorts of prices, you have a few options, particularly if you're willing to sprawl outward. And I think it's important to recognize this.

The other hurdle remains our industry's requirement to pre-sell suites in order to obtain financing and start construction. What this effectively means is that you need buyers who can say to themselves, "I'm probably going to need a family-sized suite for the 1.4 kids I may have in 4-5 years." This isn't for everyone.

So if we are truly serious about encouraging more families in multi-family buildings (which is an obviously good idea), I think it can't just be viewed as a design problem and/or the result of greedy developers who just want to profit maximize by building smaller suites. We need to be looking at both the cost structure behind these homes and new ways to finance them.

There's an interesting debate happening online right now. A recent article by Derek Thompson (of the Atlantic) made the claim that today's urban renaissance is great for young college graduates, but not so good for kids.

Here’s a quick synopsis:

Cities have effectively traded away their children, swapping capital for kids. College graduates descend into cities, inhale fast-casual meals, emit the fumes of overwork, get washed, and bounce to smaller cities or the suburbs by the time their kids are old enough to spell.

Raising a family in the city [New York City] is just too hard. And the same could be said of pretty much every other dense and expensive urban area in the country.

Michael Lewyn (of the Touro Law Center) responded to this argument with a post titled "the myth of the childless city." While it is true that the US fertility rate is at an all-time low, the numbers -- at least some of them -- suggest that cities aren't all that childless: