Lately, I’ve become very interested in live/work uses. This is not something that I have written much about over the years, but it is now on my mind for a few reasons. One, many of us tried working from home for the first time over… Read More
Toronto’s chief planner Gregg Lintern (who you can follow over here on Twitter) was recently in the Toronto Star talking about the city’s plans to allow more multi-unit dwellings in our low-rise single-family neighborhoods. I was careful to say “more” because they are already permissible… Read More
Eric Jaffe, of Sidewalk Labs, recently wrote about an interesting research paper — from the Journal of the American Planning Association — that looked at the developer response to an inclusionary zoning policy change in London. The full research paper can be found over here.… Read More
We talk a lot on this blog about laneway housing and ADUs, including, of course, the one that Globizen built earlier this year. But beyond being exceedingly cool (see above), what has this policy change meant at the macro level? To what extent is it… Read More
There is a commonly held view that short-term rentals (such as the ones you might find on platforms like Airbnb) are bad for housing affordability because they take long-term rentals out of the market and they help to drive up property values. And there’s evidence… Read More
The postmortems surrounding Zillow’s exit from the algorithmic home-flipping business are starting to surface. Here’s an article from the WSJ and here’s Matt Levine’s take on it. The latter piece is very Levine-like and is called, “Zillow tried to make less money.” The obvious story… Read More
I was having a conversation this week with a few friends in the industry about the future of parking. We were specifically talking about Toronto, but I would imagine that much of this holds true for many other cities around the world. Here in Toronto,… Read More
So, this seems dumb. San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors recently voted 8-3 in favor of rejecting a new 495-unit residential project at 469 Stevenson Street in SoMa. The property is currently a parking lot used by Nordstrom. Of the project’s 495 units, 73 were to… Read More
CityLab recently published this article about “why Hong Kong is building apartments the size of parking spaces.” It’s about the city’s “microflats” which are typically in the range of 150 to 300 square feet. Supposedly there about 8,500 of these apartments across Hong Kong and… Read More
Matt Levine’s latest column is a good follow-up to yesterday’s post about Zillow exiting the algorithmic home-buying business. In it, he talks about the differences between being a market maker and being a trader of homes. Part of his argument is that if you’re a… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 