Here are two charts from a recent blog post by Ryerson University's Centre for Urban Research and Land Development. The charts compare residential building permits issued for ground-related housing vs. apartment suites.
Over the last two quarters (Q4 2020 and Q1 2021), the Greater Golden Horseshoe (GGH) issued a record (all-time record?) number of permits: 39,734 housing units. This represents a 56% year-over-year increase.
The biggest contributor to this increase is, not surprisingly, apartment units. These permits saw a 73.6% year-over-year increase. There's simply no other way to deliver this amount of new housing -- at least in the context of the GGH. You have to go up.
But given the price increases that we have seen across the region for ground-related housing, Ryerson's CUR concludes that there must be a strong home buyer preference that is simply not being met by the amount of low-rise supply we are delivering.
Notwithstanding this potential mismatch, I don't see things changing anytime soon.
This is a chart from a recent blog post by Ryerson University's Centre for Urban Research and Land Development. It shows net intraprovincial migration across the regions of the Greater Toronto Area. And what you are seeing here is people moving from expensive and built-up areas like the City of Toronto and the Region of Peel to lower cost areas further outside of the city.
This is interesting for a couple of reasons. One, it's very much a natural market outcome. Many people tend to "vote with their feet" and look for greater housing affordability. And two, this is a trend that existed prior to COVID-19. It is not the death of cities. In the words of Ryerson's CUR, it's about people looking for more affordable lower-density housing.
But to what extent is "lower density" the key deciding factor? In other words, how much of this is consumer preference and how much of this is people being forced out by a lack of infill housing supply?
Earlier this year, the University of Toronto Transportation Research Institute (UTTRI) published this report on the impacts of ride hailing services in the City of Toronto.
And then today, the Ryerson City Building Institute leveraged it to opine on how "on-demand tech" might improve transit going forward. That's how I discovered it.
What is clear from the report is that ride-hailing services -- which they refer to as Private Transportation Companies (PTC) -- are driven by two dominant use cases: 1) going out at night and 2) commuting to and from work.
Friday and Saturday nights are by far the busiest periods for PTC travel, with the peak usually happening around midnight on Sunday morning. About 13,100 trips per hour, mostly concentrated in the core.
Overall, it is estimated that Toronto does about 176,000 daily PTC trips (as of March 2019). That places it behind New York and Chicago in terms of the size of the market. But Toronto also didn't complete its first PTC until 2014. Here's a comparison chart:
Another diagram that I found interesting was the proportion of shared ride trips by neighborhood. It shows that much of the inner suburbs are hailing shared rides -- sometimes as high as 45% of all trips. This is interesting because it is people effectively gaming the system.
Because the population densities are lower in the suburbs than in the core, you're a lot less likely to get paired with other riders when you select that option. So what tends to happen is that you end up getting a private ride for the price of shared ride. I know I've played the odds before.
If you'd like to download a full copy of the report, click here.