My internet friend (and fellow Penn alum), Bobby Fijan, is a strong proponent of more family-friendly housing in urban centers. And by strong proponent, I mean that he is both building more family-friendly housing as a developer and publishing thoughtful research on the topic. His most recent project is this study, which surveyed more than 10,000 people, and looked at what it will take to build more urban homes for young families.

What he and his co-author Lyman Stone found is the following:

• People who don't have enough space at home are less likely to have children.

• Apartments are a growing share of new housing in the US, but they are becoming increasingly less family friendly.

• Americans are willing to pay more in rent per square foot for the same amount of space if there are more bedrooms.

• Developers are not properly accounting for the higher vacancy and turnover associated with smaller apartments (especially in the current market environment).

• Cities could increase the number of family-friendly apartments if they did things like exempt them from FAR calculations, accelerate approvals/permitting, and so on.

This is a topic that I feel similarly about. I am an urbanist and I believe that cities are at their best when they provide for every generation and demographic segment. It's also not a new topic for cities like Toronto.

But I do think cities like Toronto and Vancouver are a bit unique. If you look at some of the floor plan examples in the report, you'll find one-bedroom apartments at 750 square feet and two-bedroom apartments at 1,100 square feet. Part of the thinking is that these floor plans could accommodate additional bedrooms in order to make them more family friendly (and it would be accretive to developers based on the above finding).

But by Toronto standards, these would be very generous apartments. At 750 sf, it is likely the apartment would already have 2 bedrooms and possibly even a den/office. The reason for this is that affordability has been strained for a long time in this city, and the market responded with shrinkflation. Every square foot has already been optimized.

So if we truly want to encourage more family-friendly apartments, I believe that we are going to need to change the cost structure underpinning the development of these homes. In other words, we need to make them cheaper to build so that more families can afford a bit more space. The way you start to do this is by doing some of the things listed in the last point above and by reducing added taxes and levies.