My friend Matthew Slutsky runs a company called BuzzBuzzHome that allows you to search for new construction homes. This week they launched a feature that allows you to put down a deposit on a new home – online – with your credit card. It’s live right now for the Barra on Queen in Kitchener, Ontario.
I know that Matthew and his team have been working on this for years (I saw earlier demos), and so I wanted to publicly congratulate them on the blog. I’m not sure who their competitors are right now, but this feels to me like one of the first online real estate marketplaces where you can actually just hit “buy now.” Huge accomplishment.
I am sure many of you will have objections that we will hear about in the comment section below. But I have little doubt that this is the future. People used to say that the masses aren’t going to buy clothes online because of the need to try things on. I own suits that I have purchased online. People will buy real estate online.
The more important question: When will it go mainstream?
On Monday, RioCan REIT announced its new residential brand: RioCan Living. This is the group that will now be responsible for redeveloping the 43 properties within their portfolio that they have identified as having intensification potential. Here’s how they are describing the new brand: “RioCan Living delivers best in class purpose-built rental units and condos along Canada’s most prominent public transit lines.”
It has been interesting watching RioCan over the last 6 months. In the fall they announced that they would be selling off somewhere around $1.5 billion of their portfolio to rebalance toward Canada’s six largest markets, and in particular the Toronto market. And with this recent unveiling it is clear that they are doubling down on transit-oriented mixed-use communities as a way to future-proof their retail portfolio against disruption.
Major markets. High-density. Transit-oriented. This shouldn’t surprise any of you. Here is a link to their latest investor presentation in case you’re curious.
Chris Bateman does some terrific sleuthing in the Globe and Mail this week to determine that the girl pictured in the below photo, dated May 15, 1913, is Dora (Dorothy) Cooperman – daughter of Morris Cooperman, a clothing presser.
Dora is standing in front of 3 wood-framed “rear houses” located behind 21 Elizabeth Street in an area known then as St. John’s Ward, or simply, The Ward. Behind her is City Hall, which we refer to today as Old City Hall.
If you’re familiar with Toronto, it shouldn’t take you long to figure out that she is standing in what is today the middle of Nathan Phillips Square in front of (new) City Hall.
The Ward no longer exists today, but as far as neighborhoods go its history is one of the most interesting. It was a high-density and mixed-use precinct that served as an important landing ground for successive waves of immigrants until it was deemed a slum and ultimately cleared. I wonder what it would look like today had it remained. Perhaps a bit like Kensington Market.
It housed the Irish fleeing the Great Famine in the 19th century and was the center of Toronto’s Jewish community until the 1920s. The Cooperman family came from Kiev and identified as Jewish.
There are so many interesting aspects to the above photograph. Everything from Dora’s pose to the juxtaposition between her surroundings and the grand (old) City Hall in the background. (Sidebar: I would like to try and recreate this same perspective. Would anyone like to model?)
I also wonder why the city required a report to wake them up to the squalor that was living out in the Ward when they could have, presumably, just looked out their west facing windows.
In 1911, Charles Hastings and Arthur Goss published what Batemen describes as a “landmark report that stunned civic officials, who had long ignored the poverty on their doorstep.” Hastings was the city’s medical officer of health, and Goss was the’s city first official photographer and author of Dora’s above portrait.
One of the interesting things that Bateman explains about this report – and this is really the point of today’s post – is that it supposedly called out one particular housing typology as being highly problematic: rear houses.
These were houses that existed off the main street and could only be accessed via a laneway, like the one Dora is standing in. Today we would call them laneway houses. And so this report is evidence of over a century of anxiety around this particular housing type.
It is obvious why overcrowding would have been deemed a serious problem at the start of the 20th century, but now one has to wonder how influential this report may have been in establishing the tone around these “rear houses.”
Whatever the case may be, Dora’s story is an example of the role that this typology has played in housing people of modest means throughout this city’s history. It is also interesting, but perhaps not a coincidence, that affordability continues to be a part of the pitch around laneway housing and laneway suites.
