What do you think of this beautiful low-rise apartment building? It is called Spadina Gardens and it was built (allegedly illegally) on Toronto’s Spadina Avenue in 1906, shortly before the City enacted an outright ban on “disease-breeding tenements” (i.e. apartment buildings) in all residential neighborhoods.… Read More
Let’s consider a scenario where we have a relatively affordable 20-unit apartment building in a rapidly growing global city. This particular building happens to be of an older vintage and so let’s say that the in-place rents are about 40% below market. Next let’s assume… Read More
Today, Slate Asset Management announced its latest condominium project: Corktown. Named after its neighborhood, Corktown is located in downtown Hamilton just south of the GO Centre station. If you’re a longtime reader of this blog, you might remember that I first wrote about this site… Read More
Housing supply is one of those topics that a lot of people can’t seem to agree on. Some people, including annoying city bloggers from Toronto, will tell you that we’re not building nearly enough new housing. While others will tell you that, no, everything is… Read More
The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) just published its latest housing supply report for Canada’s 6 largest city regions (downloadable over here). One figure that stands out is the increase in housing starts in the Calgary CMA — it was up almost 63% last… Read More
Deeply affordable housing is mostly infeasible to build. This is why you don’t see the market naturally building this kind of housing on its own. It, for the most part, doesn’t make any economic sense to do so. So this is also why the US… Read More
Here are a few Ontario / Toronto housing supply charts taken from this recent blog post by Mike Moffat (an assistant professor at Ivey Business School): So what do these tell us? Well, 2015 was a banner year for the supply of new apartments/condominiums in… Read More
If you’ve been following the Toronto housing market and/or following any panicky resale agents/brokers on Twitter, you’ll know that things have shifted over the last few months. Here’s what broker (and my friend) Christopher Bibby had to say about the market in his most recent… Read More
San Diego-based Jonathan Segal is a unique kind of builder in that his firm doesn’t have any clients. They act as both the architect and developer for all of their projects. This gives them a lot of control over the building process, but also more… Read More
Never Too Small remains one of my favorite YouTube channels. And I have written about their videos before on the blog. The homes that they feature on their channel are generally below 600 square feet or so, and most of them are well below this… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 