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In Ontario, couples with children overwhelmingly live in ground-oriented ownership housing. This form of housing is still the majority for all other households (at least according to 2021 Census data), but apartment rentals make up a much larger share.
Given these figures, it is not surprising that the Missing Middle Initiative has found that family migration patterns within southern Ontario tend to correlate strongly (r = 0.71) with where ground-oriented ownership housing is being built, which largely means outside of the Greater Toronto Area.
This is an important finding if you're worried about Canadians not having enough babies. But this correlation doesn't tell us exactly what's going on. The data suggests that families with children have a clear preference for ground-oriented ownership — even if it means moving farther out — but what other options do they really have?
Three-bedroom apartments remain a relatively elusive housing type because demand is low. But as we have talked about, demand is a function of price, and multi-family buildings are more expensive to construct than low-rise housing. So how much of this perceived consumer preference for ground-oriented housing is actually just people driving until they qualify?
In other words, how many people are simply solving for X amount of space/bedrooms at Y price? And what would happen if we made large three-bedroom apartments in walkable transit-oriented communities the most affordable option? It still wouldn't be for everyone, but I bet that we would see demand adjust.
More importantly, it would give people options.
Charts from the Missing Middle Initiative; cover photo by Jason Ng on Unsplash
It's that time of year again.
Monocle has just released their annual Quality of Life Survey. This is their 18th annual ranking of the world's top cities according to what they do best: whether it be housing or nightlife. What I like about this survey is that it does things a little differently. Most liveability surveys tend to be a list of the world's most boring cities. It's as if uneventfulness is the measure of quality of life.
This is not that.
For example, number 3 on the list is Athens. And it's there specifically because of its nightlife. Monocle refers to it as "one of Europe's few truly 24-hour cities." Also on the list, at number 7, is Mexico City. This is a city that is required to have women-only subway cars because the men apparently can't behave in public.
Of course, it's an incredible city in so many other ways. It has leafy neighborhoods filled with the kind of mid-rise buildings that Toronto is now desperately trying to add to its major streets. And according to the survey, the city's population grew by about 600,000 people between 2019 and 2023 — many of whom came from the US and Canada.
Jumping to the top of the list, Monocle's city of the year and best all-rounder is a city that we talk a lot about on this blog: Paris. This is perhaps not surprising given the city's bold moves to pedestrianize streets, plant trees everywhere, build more than 1,000 km of bike lanes, and generally enhance the overall urban experience.
But it's not just that:
All of this, combined with the policies of the country’s most pro-business president in a long time, has helped Paris to draw and foster enough talent to snatch London’s double crown as Europe’s top venture-capital city and its leading technology hub. “Paris lends itself far more to an office-based culture than cities such as San Francisco or London,” says Jordane Giuly, the founder of fintech company Defacto. He points out that the French capital’s gentle density is conducive to cross-pollination between start-ups and preferable to the vast distances that one needs to traverse in its rivals.
In Ontario, couples with children overwhelmingly live in ground-oriented ownership housing. This form of housing is still the majority for all other households (at least according to 2021 Census data), but apartment rentals make up a much larger share.
Given these figures, it is not surprising that the Missing Middle Initiative has found that family migration patterns within southern Ontario tend to correlate strongly (r = 0.71) with where ground-oriented ownership housing is being built, which largely means outside of the Greater Toronto Area.
This is an important finding if you're worried about Canadians not having enough babies. But this correlation doesn't tell us exactly what's going on. The data suggests that families with children have a clear preference for ground-oriented ownership — even if it means moving farther out — but what other options do they really have?
Three-bedroom apartments remain a relatively elusive housing type because demand is low. But as we have talked about, demand is a function of price, and multi-family buildings are more expensive to construct than low-rise housing. So how much of this perceived consumer preference for ground-oriented housing is actually just people driving until they qualify?
In other words, how many people are simply solving for X amount of space/bedrooms at Y price? And what would happen if we made large three-bedroom apartments in walkable transit-oriented communities the most affordable option? It still wouldn't be for everyone, but I bet that we would see demand adjust.
More importantly, it would give people options.
Charts from the Missing Middle Initiative; cover photo by Jason Ng on Unsplash
It's that time of year again.
Monocle has just released their annual Quality of Life Survey. This is their 18th annual ranking of the world's top cities according to what they do best: whether it be housing or nightlife. What I like about this survey is that it does things a little differently. Most liveability surveys tend to be a list of the world's most boring cities. It's as if uneventfulness is the measure of quality of life.
This is not that.
For example, number 3 on the list is Athens. And it's there specifically because of its nightlife. Monocle refers to it as "one of Europe's few truly 24-hour cities." Also on the list, at number 7, is Mexico City. This is a city that is required to have women-only subway cars because the men apparently can't behave in public.
Of course, it's an incredible city in so many other ways. It has leafy neighborhoods filled with the kind of mid-rise buildings that Toronto is now desperately trying to add to its major streets. And according to the survey, the city's population grew by about 600,000 people between 2019 and 2023 — many of whom came from the US and Canada.
Jumping to the top of the list, Monocle's city of the year and best all-rounder is a city that we talk a lot about on this blog: Paris. This is perhaps not surprising given the city's bold moves to pedestrianize streets, plant trees everywhere, build more than 1,000 km of bike lanes, and generally enhance the overall urban experience.
But it's not just that:
All of this, combined with the policies of the country’s most pro-business president in a long time, has helped Paris to draw and foster enough talent to snatch London’s double crown as Europe’s top venture-capital city and its leading technology hub. “Paris lends itself far more to an office-based culture than cities such as San Francisco or London,” says Jordane Giuly, the founder of fintech company Defacto. He points out that the French capital’s gentle density is conducive to cross-pollination between start-ups and preferable to the vast distances that one needs to traverse in its rivals.
For their full list of the 10 most livable cities in the world, click here.
Yesterday morning I reshared this tweet of a recently completed mid-rise building at 58, rue de la Santé in Paris. And the response was overwhelmingly positive. There was a long list of people saying: please build this in my city, I want to live here, I want to invest in projects like this, and more.
Based on the echo chamber that I live in on the internet, it would seem that most people like this project, and are wondering why Paris can build it, but we generally can't. So let's take a closer look in the hopes of learning something. Here's an image from Google Street View:
The developer for the project is RIVP (Régime Immobilière de la Ville de Paris). They are a major social housing developer in the city and are semi-public company, primarily owned by the City of Paris. They build, manage, and renovate social housing, and have somewhere around 66,000 housing units under management in the île-de-France region.
The project contains 14 social housing apartments and one commercial unit at grade. It's 8 storeys tall (R+7 is the nomenclature commonly used in France which means rez-de-chaussée plus 7 additional floors). And on its main elevation there are only two small stepbacks at level 7 and 8. Otherwise the building goes straight up.
The site area is 191 m2 or ~2,055 ft2. This is the equivalent of a single-family housing lot measuring around 20 feet x 100 feet, which would be fairly common in Toronto. Except in this case, it's not just for one family; it's for 14 of them and a commercial user on the ground floor.
The total area, according to the above site signage, is 909.40 m2 or ~9,789 ft2. That crudely works out to about 60.6 m2 per unit (I'm including both the residential and commercial units in this very rough calculation). This is exactly similar to what I would expect to see here in Toronto in terms of an average suite size.
The floor space index for the site (i.e. its density) is 4.76x. This is not particularly high and is probably on the low side compared to what you'd typically find in Toronto for new mid-rise developments. The key difference here is that they're achieving it on a relatively small site.
The total height of the building is 23.46m. Divided by 8 floors, that works out to a floor-to-floor height of 2.93m. This is a bit tighter than what I would expect, but it seems to be because the ground floor is relatively compact, whereas Toronto developers are encouraged to be greater than 4.5 meters tall.
The project architect — MAAJ Architects — specifically mentions on their website that they used concrete in order to keep the height of the building down. They also show the building as being taller and having 16 apartments, so I'm guessing height was constraint.
The big question that remains is: how much did it cost to build? And I unfortunately don't have a good answer for this. Precise hard costs are generally hard to find and total development costs are almost never published.
That said, the architect does show on their website a hard cost figure of 2,630,000 € HT for 1,242 m2 (again, it looks like an earlier design of the project was bigger). These figures work out to €2,117 per m2 or €196.70 per ft2 or C$289 per ft2.
Don't quote me on these figures. I don't have inside information or first-hand experience in this market. But if it's even remotely accurate, then I'd say it's at least 30-40% cheaper than what a comparable build — with hand-laid bricks — would cost in Toronto.
Cover photo by Arthur Weidmann
For their full list of the 10 most livable cities in the world, click here.
Yesterday morning I reshared this tweet of a recently completed mid-rise building at 58, rue de la Santé in Paris. And the response was overwhelmingly positive. There was a long list of people saying: please build this in my city, I want to live here, I want to invest in projects like this, and more.
Based on the echo chamber that I live in on the internet, it would seem that most people like this project, and are wondering why Paris can build it, but we generally can't. So let's take a closer look in the hopes of learning something. Here's an image from Google Street View:
The developer for the project is RIVP (Régime Immobilière de la Ville de Paris). They are a major social housing developer in the city and are semi-public company, primarily owned by the City of Paris. They build, manage, and renovate social housing, and have somewhere around 66,000 housing units under management in the île-de-France region.
The project contains 14 social housing apartments and one commercial unit at grade. It's 8 storeys tall (R+7 is the nomenclature commonly used in France which means rez-de-chaussée plus 7 additional floors). And on its main elevation there are only two small stepbacks at level 7 and 8. Otherwise the building goes straight up.
The site area is 191 m2 or ~2,055 ft2. This is the equivalent of a single-family housing lot measuring around 20 feet x 100 feet, which would be fairly common in Toronto. Except in this case, it's not just for one family; it's for 14 of them and a commercial user on the ground floor.
The total area, according to the above site signage, is 909.40 m2 or ~9,789 ft2. That crudely works out to about 60.6 m2 per unit (I'm including both the residential and commercial units in this very rough calculation). This is exactly similar to what I would expect to see here in Toronto in terms of an average suite size.
The floor space index for the site (i.e. its density) is 4.76x. This is not particularly high and is probably on the low side compared to what you'd typically find in Toronto for new mid-rise developments. The key difference here is that they're achieving it on a relatively small site.
The total height of the building is 23.46m. Divided by 8 floors, that works out to a floor-to-floor height of 2.93m. This is a bit tighter than what I would expect, but it seems to be because the ground floor is relatively compact, whereas Toronto developers are encouraged to be greater than 4.5 meters tall.
The project architect — MAAJ Architects — specifically mentions on their website that they used concrete in order to keep the height of the building down. They also show the building as being taller and having 16 apartments, so I'm guessing height was constraint.
The big question that remains is: how much did it cost to build? And I unfortunately don't have a good answer for this. Precise hard costs are generally hard to find and total development costs are almost never published.
That said, the architect does show on their website a hard cost figure of 2,630,000 € HT for 1,242 m2 (again, it looks like an earlier design of the project was bigger). These figures work out to €2,117 per m2 or €196.70 per ft2 or C$289 per ft2.
Don't quote me on these figures. I don't have inside information or first-hand experience in this market. But if it's even remotely accurate, then I'd say it's at least 30-40% cheaper than what a comparable build — with hand-laid bricks — would cost in Toronto.
Cover photo by Arthur Weidmann
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