One argument that you might be able to make is that home prices follow urban density. New York City, for example, is dense. And homes in New York City tend to be more expensive than those in, oh I don’t know, rural Canada. So with… Read More
It seems like just yesterday that I wrote about Canada’s population surpassing 40 million people. Because today, some 9 months later, we’re already over 41 million. Since 2000, we are the fastest growing country in the G-7: This is, in many ways, a positive thing.… Read More
Rental housing in France is both heavily regulated and supported through dedicated public funds. Here’s a high-level overview of what that means (via this 2021 Brookings case study by Arthur Acolin): If you’re interested in rental housing, Brookings also has articles covering the US, Germany,… Read More
It is disappointing to me that we often vilify all condominiums as being “luxury condos.” I think the rhetoric is disingenuous and I think it distracts us from finding more productive solutions. As Mike Moffatt points out in this thread, if you look at virtually all… Read More
If you are the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority and you own excess land next to a transit line that you’ve just recently built, one possible option could be to give this land to a non-profit housing developer so that they can build some… Read More
Non-profit Vivre en Ville launched a new rental registry in Ontario last week. It is an extension of the one that they launched in Quebec last spring. The way it works is that it allows anybody to enter how much they’re paying in rent. In… Read More
Montreal has a bylaw that came into effect on April 1, 2021 and that requires developers to contribute to the city’s supply of social, affordable, and family housing. (All three of these have their own definition.) Developers can meet this requirement in a number of… Read More
Last month we spoke about how our current economic environment is going to negatively impact housing supply in the short-term. Now here’s some further evidence for this argument (via Bloomberg): “As rates started ticking up, the faucet started to turn off,” says Jonathan Gertman, senior… Read More
This is an intriguing idea: Many cities around the world practice some form of participatory budgeting, but even among those that do, Cascais [Portugal] is an outlier. It spends prodigiously through the system: in Paris, five per cent of the city’s annual investment budget has… Read More
ICON, the 3D-printing home company that I wrote about a few months ago, has just launched a new global architecture competition called Initiative 99. As the name starts to suggest, the goal is to generate new ideas for “accessible, beautiful, and dignified 3D-printed homes that… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 