By some measures, housing affordability is, in aggregate, the worst it has been in Canada going back to the 1980s. Below is a chart from RBC showing homeownership costs as a percentage of median household income. The previous spike came around the early 90s, but… Read More
I am not a transportation engineer, but sometimes I like to, you know, pretend. And lately, I’ve been thinking about how to better design the Toronto intersection of Dundas, Dupont, Annette, and Old Weston (which I touched on briefly over here). It’s a weird 5-point… Read More
I sometimes wonder if I wasn’t born and raised in Toronto if I still would have gone to architecture school and become a real estate developer. I mean, if I grew up in Paris, maybe I would have become a fashion designer. Or if I… Read More
Here is a mapping, from the University of Toronto’s School of Cities, showing the number of “closed” building permits issued in Toronto between 2013 and 2023 for both rear-yard suites (laneway houses and garden suites) and secondary suites (like basement apartments). A “closed” building permit… Read More
Let’s resume looking at sidewalks and public spaces. If you look in the City of Toronto’s Official Plan for the stretch of Dundas Street West that runs between Dupont Street and Bloor Street West, you’ll find a map that looks like this: Red signifies “Mixed… Read More
Last week was “forum week” in Toronto. (That is, it was the Toronto Real Estate Forum.) And as is the case every year, Benjamin Tal, deputy chief economist of CIBC, opened up the event with his usual macro view of the world. For those of… Read More
I know I know this, but this is still an alarming chart: This is saying that, as of 2016, over 36% of Americans were considered to be obese. In Canada, the number was just under 30%. And in the UK, it was just under 28%,… Read More
As many of you know, I am learning French, again. One of the small things that I found really interesting in this week’s class — besides, of course, figuring out how the hell to use le subjonctif — was the expression “en province.” In France,… Read More
We know that, for a variety of reasons, more and more people are living alone. As of 2018, single-person households represented about 28% of all households in the US. This is up from 13.1% in 1960. Here in Canada, single-person households became the predominant household… Read More
One way you could oversimplify the Canadian economy is to say that it revolves around three things: natural resources, real estate, and high immigration. (You can tell me I’m wrong in the comments below.) More recently, we’ve also been touting the growing number of tech… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 