Here's an interesting table via the Globe and Mail:
As of January of this year, residential real estate loans in Canada totalled approximately $2.07 trillion. On top of this there's another $350 billion in home equity lines of credit. This brings total loans secured by residential real estate in this country to about $2.42 trillion.
What this chart really shows, though, is how concentrated the mortgage market is. The "big six" banks make up about 74% of the market. If you include Desjardins, the total increases to 80%. That's pretty much the market.
Cover photo by Tiago Rodrigues on Unsplash
To celebrate the launch of their Guide to Cosy Homes (2015), Monocle Films produced a number of home tours.
Die Es, pictured above, is the home of South African architects Gawie and Gwen Fagan. They started building their home in 1964, just as they were starting their practice.
Because of this, they had little money and had to do a lot of the work themselves. They sold their car to buy a concrete mixer.
Although they didn’t set out to explicitly design a “Cape” house, it ended up that way, with heavy thermal masses, white walls, and so on.
The architecture also relates very closely to the surrounding landscape – as it should – in the way in which it frames views of the water and mountains.
The mediterranean climate also really comes through in the materiality of the home and the connections to outside.
If you’d like to watch the 5 minute tour of Die Es, click here.
A regular of this blog recently suggested (in the comments) that I take a look at the London-based design firm ZED Factory. ZED stands for Zero Energy Development.
The first project that caught my attention was ZED Pod. ZED Pod is a small, low cost energy efficient modular home that is designed to sit atop of surface parking lots. In other words, it’s a way to repurpose under-utilized surface parking without compromising existing parking ratios. All you really need are the air rights. And since the “land” is cheaper, the homes can be cheaper. They can also be easily relocated if the parking lot were to get developed in the future (though they are designed as permanent structures).
In some ways, there is something perverse about the way that driving and parking have such a profound impact on the urban landscape. Even when it’s buried underground and hidden from sight, the structural column grid needed to layout efficient parking will often carry up through the building impacting suite layouts. We’ll even restrict housing supply when parking requirements can’t be met. Should it be parking or people who come first?
But cars aren’t going away. And ZED Pod is a clever way of dealing with an existing urban condition – however suboptimal it may be. I found the concept interesting and I thought you all might as well.
Image: ZED Factory
