Nowhere in the US are apartment rents declining as fast as they have in Austin. Average rents are down 22% from their August 2023 peak. This is according to Bloomberg. What seems to have happened is this: Lots of people started moving to Austin during the pandemic, rents jumped up dramatically, and so the city enacted policies to encourage more housing supply. Developers responded as they do and, between 2023-2024, well over 50,000 apartment suites were completed in the city. Now landlords have very little leverage in the market, and so rents are naturally dropping. It all makes perfect sense, but I will say that I'm surprised by the chronology. Apartment rents jumped 25% in 2021, there was a pro-development policy response, and then increased supply started flooding the market in 2023. How? Then again, Yahoo Finance is reporting that "builders [in Austin] typically take two years to go from buying land to welcoming tenants." That's development magic and I'd like some of it.

Cover photo by Carlos Alfonso on Unsplash

The City of Toronto is currently studying ways to increase housing options/supply and planning permissions in areas of the city that are designated as Neighbourhoods in the Official Plan.

These are areas that are sometimes referred to as the "Yellowbelt", because they are seeing very little intensification and, in a number of cases, actually losing population. (They're also colored yellow in Toronto's land use map.)

Ultimately, the goal is to encourage more "missing middle" type housing forms; housing that is denser than single-family homes but smaller in scale than say mid-rise housing like Junction House.

Here are a couple of interesting charts from the City. Based on Toronto's Official Plan, "Neighbourhoods" make up 35.4% of the city's land area.

In Toronto's Zoning By-law, the "Residential" category makes up 47.1% of the city's land area.

Digging deeper, 31.3% of Toronto's total area is zoned for only detached houses -- which would mean no missing middle type housing. But 15.8% of the city's total area is already zoned to permit other types of low-rise residential buildings, such as duplexes and triplexes.

So why isn't more of that happening?

As we've talked about before on the blog, the problem is that it is exceedingly difficult to make the math work on projects of this scale, which is why most developers don't want to do them. The web of bureaucracy that you need to navigate in order to build anything in the city is also imposing for non-developers (and developers really).

But to be a developer, I think you need to be an optimist. So I am going to remain hopeful that this study -- and the pilot they want to do in Ward 19 -- will result in a streamlined solution for housing of this scale.

Images: City of Toronto

121 East 22nd -- which is OMA's first ground-up project in Manhattan -- recently finished up construction at the corner of E 23rd St and Lexington Ave (the site continues through to E 22nd St, where there is basically a 2nd building). I wrote about the project over two years ago, here.

Below is a photo by Laurian Ghinitoiu, via Dezeen, of it completed:

The defining feature is its "prismatic corner", which, I understand from this interview with David Von Spreckelsen (President of Toll Brothers City Living), was largely an outcome of the site's restrictive zoning. There was a requirement to have constant street walls. That minimized what could be done architecturally on the project's main elevations.

The solution is two contextual street walls -- the punched windows are designed to match the rhythm of their adjoining buildings -- coming together and creating dramatic visual interest only at the point where they intersect. Below is a rolled out elevation from OMA. Note the gradient created by the windows as they converge toward the corner (center in the drawing below).

The other interesting thing about this project is that it reminded me just how different the built form of Manhattan can be compared to Toronto. In the case of 121 East 22nd, the streetwalls rise 150 feet without any stepbacks. There is then a 10 foot stepback before the building rises another 60 feet -- similarly without any additional breaks.

I love the grandeur.