I was lollygagging on Bloor last night while waiting for my take-out sushi to be prepared when I happened to notice the above building at 1639 Bloor Street West.

What stood out to me was that it’s six storeys, has no stepbacks, is brick all around, and is more or less the kind of infill housing that Toronto is now trying to encourage along its major streets. Except, this building is old. The internet tells me it was built in 1954 (and houses 46 apartments). Which made me immediately wonder: did we used to know how to build this housing typology and then simply forget? Or was this the work of a cowboy developer who somehow managed to slip it through the cracks?

Either way, I decided to walk the perimeter and take a closer look. The first thing I noticed was a row of garbage bins along the building’s east elevation, with about a dozen or so cameras keeping a close eye on them. If anyone in building management is wondering why a handsome man in a black t-shirt and stylish Birkenstocks was so curious about garbage bins — don’t worry. I was just trying to determine if you had a Type-G loading bay hidden around the back. I can now confirm: no such loading facility.

Looking at Toronto’s maps, the site is approximately 30 meters wide by 40 meters deep — so roughly the equivalent of five lots, given the prevailing lot fabric in the area. The building itself appears to have a footprint of about 660 square metres (~7,100 square feet). If I multiply this by six floors and then by an efficiency ratio of 0.80, I get a very rough gross rentable area of 31,000 square feet. Divide this by 46 apartments and you end up with an average suite size of ~741 square feet.

Imagine that: assemble five lots on Bloor, employ an all-brick façade on all elevations, and build to an average suite size that is probably close to 200 square feet larger than some of the city’s most recent downtown developments. The math would never math today.

Those of us in the yes-in-my-backyard camp like to point out that increased housing supply is good for the overall health of a market because it moderates price and rental growth. And to point out just one example, there's evidence of this happening right now in Austin.

But one of the common objections to this mental model is that the new housing getting built is simply not affordable. It's high-income housing. So how is that helpful to someone who maybe can't afford the rents? And to be fair, this is generally true (unless there are subsidies involved that are allowing the homes to be offered at below-market pricing).

The reason this is true is because development "happens on the margin." Meaning, virtually every new project just barely makes economic sense to build. Developers have to be very precise about their costs and often have to embed some degree of optimism into their revenue assumptions in order to arrive at feasibility. This means that new home prices and rents are almost always at the very top end of what's achievable in a market.

But this market reality doesn't just benefit the people who can afford high-income housing. For one thing, brand new expensive housing eventually becomes older and more affordable housing (this is referred to as filtering). But even in the immediate term, new supply serves the important function of relieving some of the pressures on a city's existing housing stock.

Think of this way: If you're a high-income household that could afford new housing — if only it were being built and available — well then you're just going to seek out the next best thing. And because you're a high-income household, you have the ability to outbid middle-income households for whatever housing happens to be available on the next rung of the ladder.

This is what the research shows. In a recent study by Pew, it was found that building more housing — both across a metro area and in specific neighborhoods — tempers rents across all classes of buildings. Importantly, though, it was found to decrease rents the most for older, more affordable housing:

I was lollygagging on Bloor last night while waiting for my take-out sushi to be prepared when I happened to notice the above building at 1639 Bloor Street West.

What stood out to me was that it’s six storeys, has no stepbacks, is brick all around, and is more or less the kind of infill housing that Toronto is now trying to encourage along its major streets. Except, this building is old. The internet tells me it was built in 1954 (and houses 46 apartments). Which made me immediately wonder: did we used to know how to build this housing typology and then simply forget? Or was this the work of a cowboy developer who somehow managed to slip it through the cracks?

Either way, I decided to walk the perimeter and take a closer look. The first thing I noticed was a row of garbage bins along the building’s east elevation, with about a dozen or so cameras keeping a close eye on them. If anyone in building management is wondering why a handsome man in a black t-shirt and stylish Birkenstocks was so curious about garbage bins — don’t worry. I was just trying to determine if you had a Type-G loading bay hidden around the back. I can now confirm: no such loading facility.

Looking at Toronto’s maps, the site is approximately 30 meters wide by 40 meters deep — so roughly the equivalent of five lots, given the prevailing lot fabric in the area. The building itself appears to have a footprint of about 660 square metres (~7,100 square feet). If I multiply this by six floors and then by an efficiency ratio of 0.80, I get a very rough gross rentable area of 31,000 square feet. Divide this by 46 apartments and you end up with an average suite size of ~741 square feet.

Imagine that: assemble five lots on Bloor, employ an all-brick façade on all elevations, and build to an average suite size that is probably close to 200 square feet larger than some of the city’s most recent downtown developments. The math would never math today.

Those of us in the yes-in-my-backyard camp like to point out that increased housing supply is good for the overall health of a market because it moderates price and rental growth. And to point out just one example, there's evidence of this happening right now in Austin.

But one of the common objections to this mental model is that the new housing getting built is simply not affordable. It's high-income housing. So how is that helpful to someone who maybe can't afford the rents? And to be fair, this is generally true (unless there are subsidies involved that are allowing the homes to be offered at below-market pricing).

The reason this is true is because development "happens on the margin." Meaning, virtually every new project just barely makes economic sense to build. Developers have to be very precise about their costs and often have to embed some degree of optimism into their revenue assumptions in order to arrive at feasibility. This means that new home prices and rents are almost always at the very top end of what's achievable in a market.

But this market reality doesn't just benefit the people who can afford high-income housing. For one thing, brand new expensive housing eventually becomes older and more affordable housing (this is referred to as filtering). But even in the immediate term, new supply serves the important function of relieving some of the pressures on a city's existing housing stock.

Think of this way: If you're a high-income household that could afford new housing — if only it were being built and available — well then you're just going to seek out the next best thing. And because you're a high-income household, you have the ability to outbid middle-income households for whatever housing happens to be available on the next rung of the ladder.

This is what the research shows. In a recent study by Pew, it was found that building more housing — both across a metro area and in specific neighborhoods — tempers rents across all classes of buildings. Importantly, though, it was found to decrease rents the most for older, more affordable housing: