Over the past 5 years or so, real estate headlines in the Greater Toronto Area have often focused on the rapid appreciation of low-rise housing. High-rise housing simply wasn’t appreciating at the same rate – at least in aggregate terms.
But 2017 has brought a different story.
If you look at BILD’s “New Homes Monthly Market Report” (data provided by Altus Group as of July 2017), you can see that high-rise pricing is now on a similar trajectory to low-rise pricing.
Here is that graph:
This sharp uptick in pricing is also apparent when you look at the average price per square foot of new high-rise inventory. As of July, it was $764 psf across the GTA. See below.
At the same time, average unit sizes have also jumped up to 871 square feet. So not only are new high-rise homes becoming more expensive on a normalized basis, they are also getting bigger, which further increases prices.
I recognize that we’re only seeing data up to the end of July, but, from the looks of it, 2017 is shaping up to be an extraordinary year for the condo.
Of course, part of the reason this is happening is because remaining inventory for both low-rise and high-rise product is hitting 10-year lows. We’re back to the topic of supply.
If you’re curious how some of these numbers have changed from the month prior (June 2017), check out this post.
Miriam Zuk and Karen Chapple of the University of California, Berkeley, recently published a research brief called Housing Production, Filtering and Displacement: Untangling the Relationships.
It’s a nuanced look at the impact of both market-rate and subsidized housing production on affordability and displacement within the San Francisco Bay Area.
The report is essentially a response to the debate around whether increasing market-rate housing production alone can address affordability and displacement concerns, or whether the only way to do it is through subsidized housing. What they found was that both matter, but…
“What we find largely supports the argument that building more housing, both market-rate and subsidized, will reduce displacement. However, we find that subsidized housing will have a much greater impact on reducing displacement than market-rate housing. We agree that market-rate development is important for many reasons, including reducing housing pressures at the regional scale and housing large segments of the population. However, our analysis strongly suggests that subsidized housing production is even more important when it comes to reducing displacement of low-income households.”
If you’re interested in this topic, I recommend reading the full brief. It’s only 12 pages. I particularly liked the information around filtering and how new housing steps down over time to ultimately serve lower-income households.
Alan Ehrenhalt recently published a balanced piece in Governing that largely reflects my own views on inclusionary zoning. It’s called: Why Affordable Housing Is So Hard To Build.
His argument is that there are lots of cities trying to build more affordable housing, but that most strategies have not yet proven to be all that successful.
I’ve written a few posts on inclusionary zoning. The most recent is this one. And though I believe that a mix of incomes is a critical component of good city building, I am having a hard time believing that inclusionary zoning is the silver bullet that will get us there. Admittedly, it sounds like a great idea. But how does that translate into reality?
Here’s a snippet from Alan’s article (shout out to Daniel Hertz of City Observatory who seems to get cited in almost every article I read these days):
Just about every city that has tried an inclusionary zoning law in recent years has had a similar experience. In some cases, the results have been much worse. According to BAE, Chicago’s inclusion law produced $19 million in 11 years, but only 760 affordable units. Thirteen years of inclusionary zoning in Seattle brought the city $31.6 million in fees and a grand total of 56 units. As the urbanist Daniel Hertz wrote recently, inclusionary zoning has been “more powerful as a symbol than as a way of helping people.”
Of course, the devil is in the details. Many inclusionary zoning policies allow cash in lieu of actual housing:
San Francisco actually has had an inclusionary zoning law since 2002, and it has been a flop. It mandates a 12 percent affordable set-aside, but allows developers to escape the mandate by paying a fee to the city. As in Arlington, this is what they have done. A study by the research firm BAE Urban Economics found in 2014 that after 12 years the San Francisco law had brought in $58.8 million in developers’ fees and had generated 1,560 units. That’s better than nothing, but it’s a drop in the bucket for a city facing an affordability problem in virtually every neighborhood.
All this said, I’m still not so sure that it’s as simple as eradicating the cash in lieu option and forcing mandatary inclusionary zoning. As Alan rightly points out in his article, if we set the bar too high, then all of a sudden it starts making some market rate housing infeasible to build.
And if this ends up lowering the overall supply of new housing, then we could be hurting affordability while at the same time trying to mandate more of it. Does that make sense? Clearly this is not as simple as it may seem.
I get the appeal for cash poor cities. It sounds like free affordable housing. But I’m always suspect of “free” lunches. In any event, I think we can all agree that this is an important discussion to be having.
Over the past 5 years or so, real estate headlines in the Greater Toronto Area have often focused on the rapid appreciation of low-rise housing. High-rise housing simply wasn’t appreciating at the same rate – at least in aggregate terms.
But 2017 has brought a different story.
If you look at BILD’s “New Homes Monthly Market Report” (data provided by Altus Group as of July 2017), you can see that high-rise pricing is now on a similar trajectory to low-rise pricing.
Here is that graph:
This sharp uptick in pricing is also apparent when you look at the average price per square foot of new high-rise inventory. As of July, it was $764 psf across the GTA. See below.
At the same time, average unit sizes have also jumped up to 871 square feet. So not only are new high-rise homes becoming more expensive on a normalized basis, they are also getting bigger, which further increases prices.
I recognize that we’re only seeing data up to the end of July, but, from the looks of it, 2017 is shaping up to be an extraordinary year for the condo.
Of course, part of the reason this is happening is because remaining inventory for both low-rise and high-rise product is hitting 10-year lows. We’re back to the topic of supply.
If you’re curious how some of these numbers have changed from the month prior (June 2017), check out this post.
Miriam Zuk and Karen Chapple of the University of California, Berkeley, recently published a research brief called Housing Production, Filtering and Displacement: Untangling the Relationships.
It’s a nuanced look at the impact of both market-rate and subsidized housing production on affordability and displacement within the San Francisco Bay Area.
The report is essentially a response to the debate around whether increasing market-rate housing production alone can address affordability and displacement concerns, or whether the only way to do it is through subsidized housing. What they found was that both matter, but…
“What we find largely supports the argument that building more housing, both market-rate and subsidized, will reduce displacement. However, we find that subsidized housing will have a much greater impact on reducing displacement than market-rate housing. We agree that market-rate development is important for many reasons, including reducing housing pressures at the regional scale and housing large segments of the population. However, our analysis strongly suggests that subsidized housing production is even more important when it comes to reducing displacement of low-income households.”
If you’re interested in this topic, I recommend reading the full brief. It’s only 12 pages. I particularly liked the information around filtering and how new housing steps down over time to ultimately serve lower-income households.
Alan Ehrenhalt recently published a balanced piece in Governing that largely reflects my own views on inclusionary zoning. It’s called: Why Affordable Housing Is So Hard To Build.
His argument is that there are lots of cities trying to build more affordable housing, but that most strategies have not yet proven to be all that successful.
I’ve written a few posts on inclusionary zoning. The most recent is this one. And though I believe that a mix of incomes is a critical component of good city building, I am having a hard time believing that inclusionary zoning is the silver bullet that will get us there. Admittedly, it sounds like a great idea. But how does that translate into reality?
Here’s a snippet from Alan’s article (shout out to Daniel Hertz of City Observatory who seems to get cited in almost every article I read these days):
Just about every city that has tried an inclusionary zoning law in recent years has had a similar experience. In some cases, the results have been much worse. According to BAE, Chicago’s inclusion law produced $19 million in 11 years, but only 760 affordable units. Thirteen years of inclusionary zoning in Seattle brought the city $31.6 million in fees and a grand total of 56 units. As the urbanist Daniel Hertz wrote recently, inclusionary zoning has been “more powerful as a symbol than as a way of helping people.”
Of course, the devil is in the details. Many inclusionary zoning policies allow cash in lieu of actual housing:
San Francisco actually has had an inclusionary zoning law since 2002, and it has been a flop. It mandates a 12 percent affordable set-aside, but allows developers to escape the mandate by paying a fee to the city. As in Arlington, this is what they have done. A study by the research firm BAE Urban Economics found in 2014 that after 12 years the San Francisco law had brought in $58.8 million in developers’ fees and had generated 1,560 units. That’s better than nothing, but it’s a drop in the bucket for a city facing an affordability problem in virtually every neighborhood.
All this said, I’m still not so sure that it’s as simple as eradicating the cash in lieu option and forcing mandatary inclusionary zoning. As Alan rightly points out in his article, if we set the bar too high, then all of a sudden it starts making some market rate housing infeasible to build.
And if this ends up lowering the overall supply of new housing, then we could be hurting affordability while at the same time trying to mandate more of it. Does that make sense? Clearly this is not as simple as it may seem.
I get the appeal for cash poor cities. It sounds like free affordable housing. But I’m always suspect of “free” lunches. In any event, I think we can all agree that this is an important discussion to be having.
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