This is a follow-up to yesterday's post about too many people allegedly speculating on underutilized urban land. Over the weekend, I saw Patrick Condon, a professor at UBC and author of the book "Broken City: Land Speculation, Inequality, and Urban Crisis," argue that "urban land is the impossible-to-ignore driver of the housing crisis." Is it really? Let me offer the developer's perspective and explain what has happened in Toronto.
It is certainly true that the price of development land appreciated rapidly toward the end of the last cycle and that, at the time, there was enough margin for developers to bifurcate the work of zoning land and actually building out projects. But since 2022, that has gone away, and we have seen a dramatic correction in pricing.
According to Bullpen and Batory's Q4-2025 High-Rise Land Insights Report, the average sold price for a high-density site in the GTA has gone from $119 per buildable square foot in 2019 to $78 per buildable square foot at the end of last year (a ~34% decline).
But this is a blended average. In my experience, the falloff in pricing has been even more dramatic and, in many cases, land now feels illiquid. With rents declining and new condominiums not selling, what's the value? Land prices are a function of what you can do with the land. If what you can do disappears, so too does the value. Land is not the problem right now.
But even if we were to ignore current market factors, it's debatable whether land prices were really the primary driver of unaffordable housing. About six years ago, Toronto developer Urban Capital published a pro forma comparison between a project they did in 2005 and a project they were doing in 2020.
What they found over this 15-year period was that construction costs increased by 91%, land costs increased by 160%, and government fees and taxes increased by some 413% (development charges alone increased by 3,244%!). The price of development land certainly increased, surpassing the rate of inflation, but we can't ignore that roughly a third of the price of a new home became government fees and taxes.
Today, there are countless development models that don't pencil even if you plug the land value in at $0. That tells me that we've got bigger problems.
Cover photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
I recently came across this tweet by Patrick Collison, the CEO of Stripe, where he argues that the YIMBY movement "employs an inadvertently dishonest sleight-of-hand" when it promises "Paris-scale density" only to ultimately deliver something quite different in cities.
In the post, he shares a fairly banal mid-rise development that looks nothing like Paris, and then says that if we're talking about Paris-style building, he'd be all for it, and likely voters would be too. His point seems to be that if only we made developments more beautiful, fewer people would oppose them.
I had to read the tweet a few times to make sure I was understanding it correctly because the "Paris-scale density" language was throwing me off. Paris is not a medium-density city. It's a high-density city and generally considered to be the highest-density city in Europe. Is this the Paris promise?
I don't actually think most people want Paris; they want a city that looks like Paris, and that's because they ignore most of its urban ingredients and only focus on the two most obvious things: (1) its outward architectural expressions and (2) its modest building heights.
Paris-scale density is single-stair buildings with minimal setbacks and stepbacks, dark light wells, tiny 130-square-foot studios in the penthouse, no parking minimums, and area population densities that can exceed 50,000 people per km2. Is this what most voters want, provided they look pretty?
For the purposes of this post, let's just run with the argument that urban environments people broadly feel are beautiful would elicit less NIMBY opposition. Just build Paris-like buildings. Unfortunately, I also don't think the answer is as simple as this.
As Sam Deutsch of Better Cities points out, this runs counter to NIMBY history. Let's not forget that the Paris everyone visits today was vehemently opposed during the time of its initial development and that the city's most iconic structure was called a hateful column of bolted sheet metal, among other things.
Beautiful buildings and great places are, of course, fundamental to cities. But even then, expect turbulence along the way.
Cover photo by Deniz Bireroglu on Unsplash
My internet friend Bobby Fijan is one of the founders of a mission-driven company called The American Housing Corporation. It was founded in 2024. They opened their first factory in Austin in 2025, and they're now actively working on their first collection of modular homes.
The mission is both simple and awesome: The American middle class can no longer afford a family-oriented starter home in the cities they love. This has people leaving cities, abstaining from having kids, and forgoing economic opportunity.
To correct this, they're going back to what they refer to as "the original American urban home" — the rowhome. And they're working to perfect it through vertical integration and a modular approach where prefabricated components are built in a factory and then shipped flat-packed to the site.
They're obviously not the first company to try to reduce the cost of new housing through prefabrication, but they believe that total vertical integration will make them different. And boy, would I like to see them succeed.
If we truly want to bring down the cost of new housing, we need to (1) stop taxing it like we want less of it and (2) think of it in every possible way as a repeatable product and not as a custom prototype.
Good luck, team!
Photos from The American Housing Corporation