Deeply affordable housing is mostly infeasible to build. This is why you don’t see the market naturally building this kind of housing on its own. It, for the most part, doesn’t make any economic sense to do so. So this is also why the US… Read More
San Diego-based Jonathan Segal is a unique kind of builder in that his firm doesn’t have any clients. They act as both the architect and developer for all of their projects. This gives them a lot of control over the building process, but also more… Read More
The great housing debate continues: Are we building enough housing, or are we not? Right now the media is talking about a new report from the Union of B.C. Municipalities, which is claiming that cities in British Columbia are actually building enough housing to keep… Read More
Somebody on Twitter responded to my recent post about inclusionary zoning and asked: Aren’t all the upzonings that the City is already doing a kind of density bonus? In other words, and this is me elaborating here, why is there an economic “shortfall?” Why does… Read More
So, this seems dumb. San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors recently voted 8-3 in favor of rejecting a new 495-unit residential project at 469 Stevenson Street in SoMa. The property is currently a parking lot used by Nordstrom. Of the project’s 495 units, 73 were to… Read More
Toronto’s new inclusionary zoning policy went to Planning and Housing Committee this week. Agenda item, here. The recommendations were approved, which means that the item will move onto City Council next month for final approval. Here’s a summary of some what is being proposed (though… Read More
It upsets me when I read things like this (click here if you can’t see the embedded tweet above). I think it creates a false sense of a free lunch and ignores all of the nuances and complexities associated with inclusionary zoning. IZ is an… Read More
Bloomberg CityLab has a new video out talking about how Vienna has seemingly solved the housing unaffordability problem that is impacting most global cities around the world. Each year Vienna builds about 14,000 new housing units and about half of this is supply is “affordable.”… Read More
News has just dropped that architect Bjarke Ingels, Roni Bahar, and Nick Chim are launching a new “design living” company called Nabr. Their website says that it is “coming soon to Silicon Valley” and so presumably there will be tech involved and we should actually… Read More
The price of an existing home in the Netherlands increased 14.6% in the first 6 months of this year alone, according to this recent FT article. This is in comparison to 6.1% for existing homes across the EU on a year-over-year basis. Some economists estimate… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 