Yesterday morning, we did a day trip to Monaco. The main thing I wanted to see was Le Renzo (which is a project I have written about before). Designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop, it is among the most expensive residential buildings in the world. Condominiums have reportedly sold for as high as €120,000 per square meter (or about €11,148 per square foot).
Before the trip, I emailed the district's PR contact to see if we could get a tour inside. Unfortunately, it's August in Europe, and they told me that nobody from the development team would be around to take us through. So we ended up just walking the perimeter. Here is a photo of the project's north elevation, facing inland.
Yesterday morning, we did a day trip to Monaco. The main thing I wanted to see was Le Renzo (which is a project I have written about before). Designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop, it is among the most expensive residential buildings in the world. Condominiums have reportedly sold for as high as €120,000 per square meter (or about €11,148 per square foot).
Before the trip, I emailed the district's PR contact to see if we could get a tour inside. Unfortunately, it's August in Europe, and they told me that nobody from the development team would be around to take us through. So we ended up just walking the perimeter. Here is a photo of the project's north elevation, facing inland.
Residential - Brandon Donnelly - Page 2
Here's the south side facing the sea:
And here's a photo of its western edge, including the building's outdoor pool amenity:
The -1 level is boat slips and retail, some of which are still in the process of opening. The fact that they placed the retail where they did stood out to me, because it feels akin to second-floor retail — meaning, it only works in certain places and under certain conditions. Maybe this is one of them.
The ground plane — or at least the level that connects inland — is visually open on all sides, except for the elevator cores and exit stairs coming down from the buildings. This gives you a clear view of the Mediterranean as you approach the district and makes the entire area feel publicly accessible. It's also meant to evoke the image of ships sitting in a dry dock.
We didn't stay in Monaco very long, but this project was the highlight for me. I would have really loved the opportunity to tour inside and get closer to its details.
Leaving Monaco requires some maneuvering if you didn't drive or take the train (which we didn't). Uber is banned within the principality. You can get dropped off in an Uber, but you can't request a car once you're there. This is what you'll see if you open up the app and try:
We were also told that they're very strict about this. If, for example, you get dropped off in an Uber and then try to go off-app for your return, the Uber driver runs the risk of a heavy fine and having their car confiscated for a week. So many drivers don't want to do this unless you're willing to compensate them for the risk.
What you instead need to do is walk to the Monaco-France border, which usually isn't far given the country has a total land area of around 2 square kilometers. As soon as the GPS on your phone signals that you're in France rather than Monaco, cars reappear in the app. And from my experience, the geofencing is accurate within a few meters. It was pretty neat.
In the future, I think a better option might be to road bike over. I saw a number of people doing that yesterday and, boy, it looked like fun.
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.
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.
Here's the south side facing the sea:
And here's a photo of its western edge, including the building's outdoor pool amenity:
The -1 level is boat slips and retail, some of which are still in the process of opening. The fact that they placed the retail where they did stood out to me, because it feels akin to second-floor retail — meaning, it only works in certain places and under certain conditions. Maybe this is one of them.
The ground plane — or at least the level that connects inland — is visually open on all sides, except for the elevator cores and exit stairs coming down from the buildings. This gives you a clear view of the Mediterranean as you approach the district and makes the entire area feel publicly accessible. It's also meant to evoke the image of ships sitting in a dry dock.
We didn't stay in Monaco very long, but this project was the highlight for me. I would have really loved the opportunity to tour inside and get closer to its details.
Leaving Monaco requires some maneuvering if you didn't drive or take the train (which we didn't). Uber is banned within the principality. You can get dropped off in an Uber, but you can't request a car once you're there. This is what you'll see if you open up the app and try:
We were also told that they're very strict about this. If, for example, you get dropped off in an Uber and then try to go off-app for your return, the Uber driver runs the risk of a heavy fine and having their car confiscated for a week. So many drivers don't want to do this unless you're willing to compensate them for the risk.
What you instead need to do is walk to the Monaco-France border, which usually isn't far given the country has a total land area of around 2 square kilometers. As soon as the GPS on your phone signals that you're in France rather than Monaco, cars reappear in the app. And from my experience, the geofencing is accurate within a few meters. It was pretty neat.
In the future, I think a better option might be to road bike over. I saw a number of people doing that yesterday and, boy, it looked like fun.
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.
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.
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.
