About Here makes excellent videos about cities. Here's their latest about missing middle housing:

In my view, there are two key takeaways.

The first is that cities need to spend way more time understanding the economics of missing middle housing. As Uytae Lee says in the video, our land use policies need to respond to real math and overall financial viability.

The second is that there's real potential here. Uytae gives the example of Auckland which, according to the video, managed to deliver 20,000 new missing middle homes in a 5-year time period.

This is meaningful! And, it is suggested that this has reduced rents in the city by somewhere between 13-35% compared to where they might have gone had this new housing not been built.

As I've said many times before on the blog, the devil is in the details. The headline may sound really great that some city is now allowing 4 or 6 homes on every single-family lot, but that doesn't necessarily mean that any new homes will actually be built.

It's important we change that.

P.S. Thanks to Michael Geller for sharing this video with me.

The City of Vancouver recently published this video talking about missing middle housing. For those of you who are following this trend (and reading this blog), there won't be a lot that is new in the video (although Uytae Lee is great). But I'm sharing it here, anyway, for three reasons. One, it's an example of Toronto being ahead of Vancouver, which wasn't the case with laneway housing. Vancouver started allowing these first. Two, it is further evidence that this shift toward intensifying low-rise residential neighbourhoods is really happening -- and gaining momentum -- all across North America. And three, the City of Vancouver is about to bring forward new multiplex housing policies. So now is a good time to get involved and say things.