Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.
Mid-rise buildings tend to attract more end-users because of their boutique scale. That is, they attract people who plan to move into the building once it is built, as opposed to buyers who plan to rent out their unit. We are certainly seeing this with purchasers at Junction House.
Because of their generally smaller scale and because they are often built in mature neighborhoods with few opportunities for new construction, supply of new mid-rise housing also tends to be limited. That bodes well for future price appreciation.
Here’s a quote from Shaun Hildebrand (President of Urbanation), taken from the above Globe article. (Sorry, it’s behind a paywall.)
“Price growth between the two building types [mid-rise and high-rise] began to converge in 2018, and in Q1-2019, buildings under 12 storeys saw average resale prices per square foot grow 10 per cent year-over-year, compared to 6.5 per cent for buildings of 12 or more storeys,” Mr. Hildebrand said. “We may be now entering back into a period of outperformance of mid-rise buildings as the market is shifting.”
Real estate development has historically been, and unfortunately still is, a male dominated business. (The story of Florence Casler is, however, a great outlier.) If you want some empirical evidence for this, pay attention to the length of the line for the men’s bathroom the next time you’re at a real estate conference or event.
This needs to change. Which is why my good friend Taya Cook (of Urban Capital) has just announced, in partnership with Sherry Larjani (of Spotlight Development), the first all-female development project in Canada. It’s called Reina and it’s planned for a vacant site at 689 The Queensway, Toronto. Here is an excerpt from a recent RENX article:
“We’re embarking on this project to create more visibility for women in real estate development, and to inspire younger women to see career possibilities,” said Cook, the director of development at Urban Capital, in a release announcing the project. “It’s a huge industry and a massive economic driver for the region. For some reason it has been seriously lagging behind in gender equity.”
Two things are probably important to mention about the team and project.
Firstly, the women developing Reina are all leaders and key decision makers. This is important for the project’s broader mission, but also because it will likely remove male biases from the design process. Everything from architecture to construction will be led by women and will incorporate a “female perspective.” Secondly — and this just makes the narrative even better — the site used to house a strip club.
Congratulations Taya, Sherry, and the rest of the project team on a terrific development and initiative: “Condominiums designed by women. Developed by women. Built for everyone.” Follow Reina on Instagram, here.
Being a sports fan is like having a bipolar disorder. The highs are high. And the lows are low. But right now — with the Toronto Raptors having clinched their first ever NBA Finals appearance — we are all on a high. Though the job is far from over, this city has waited 24 seasons for this moment. Turns out, all we were missing was one of the greatest basketball players of all time.
It’s pretty amazing to see how far we have come both as a franchise, and as a global city. When Scotiabank Arena was completed in 1999, it, and the surrounding area, looked like this. On Saturday night after the win, it looked like this, a veritable “sports alley.” I have long thought that Bremner Boulevard should be placemade into a sports alley connecting Scotiabank Arena (on the east) and the Rogers Centre (on the west).
From now until this Thursday, all is right in the world. Enjoy it Toronto, and Canada. Masai Ujiri made a bet that I think most, if not all, of us would agree has paid off. Had it not, Raptors fans across the country would be criticizing him for trading away our franchise player. But that’s par for the course in this bipolar world of sports fandom.
The most recent episode of The Urbanist is about the role of private developers in shaping public spaces and public life within our cities. How do you balance private and public interests?
Much of the discussion focuses on the redevelopment of King’s Cross in London, which is generally considered to be a successful example of large-scale, developer-led, urban regeneration. Andrew Tuck is less complimentary of Hudson Yards in New York.
One point that I found interesting was the remark that modern zoning tends to force buildings apart. It creates more in-between space. The result is that we are losing some of the more intimate public spaces found in older neighborhoods.
To listen to the full 30 minute episode, click here.
People move to cities for a whole host of reasons, whether it be for more money, more affordable housing, and/or better weather. The fastest growing cities in the US, for example, tend to be in the south where it’s warmer and where housing supply is more elastic. However, we also know that “consumer leisure amenities” increasingly factor into this decision.
A new research paper by Gerald A. Carlino (Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia) and Albert Saiz (MIT) has tried to quantify this relationship by looking at the perceived beauty of a place. To do this, they analyzed the number of tourist visits and the number of “crowdsourced picturesque locations” in a metro area. Read: Instagrammable moments.
What they found was that beauty, not surprisingly, matters (much like it does in other facets of life). Between 1990-2010, metro areas that were perceived as being “twice as picturesque” experienced greater population growth — about 10 percentage points higher. These metro areas also attracted a higher percentage of educated individuals and experienced greater housing appreciation.
If you’d like to download a copy of Beautiful city: Leisure amenities and urban growth, click here.
On February 1, 2017, an inclusionary zoning ordinance came into effect in Portland, mandating that all new residential projects with 20 or more units dedicate a portion of the building to affordable housing.
For the first year, the requirement was 8% of all units for households earning 60% of the Area Median Income or 16% of all units for households earning 80% of the AMI. I’m not sure if it was or is possible to do a blend of the two income levels.
After the first year, the requirement was supposed to step up to 10% and 20% of all units, respectively. But that step up was never enacted, which had many industry analysts arguing that it was a clear signal the ordinance was not performing as intended.
According to Joe Cortright of City Observatory (which is based in Portland), the new ordinance largely resulted in 3 things happening:
(1) Developers rushed to get new applications in during the transition period so that they would not be subjected to the new IZ rules; (2) applications increased for projects with less than 20 units (avoid the rules by building smaller); and (3), following the initial transition surge, building permit applications, as a whole, dropped off.
This last point is what usually comes up in debates around inclusionary zoning. Does the requirement to build affordable housing actually reduce overall housing supply?
I’ve written about this before, but the math is pretty simple. Inclusionary zoning policies are a drag on revenue and a direct cost to the project. What that means is that something else will need to give in order for the numbers to balance.
That could come in the form of lower costs (such as an impact fee abatement) or in higher rents on the balance of the units. But this latter approach is easier said than done. Sometimes you need to wait for the market to “catch up”, which could be what some developers in Portland are doing.
They’re waiting for housing to get more expensive — overall — so they can then offset the pro forma drag from the affordable units.
The project uses two prototypical, but random, semi-detached lots from the Christie & Bloor area of the city. Each one is 18′ wide x 100′ deep. So your typical long and narrow lots. From the street (see above image), it looks highly contextual. But in plan, you begin to see the 3 main volumes of the project emerge. Here’s a ground floor plan from the architect:
Each volume is around 2,500 square feet. I presume that includes the basement. If you exclude the basement area and the vertical voids throughout the project, which you’re allowed to do in your calculation of gross floor area in residential zones, I suspect we’d arrive at an FSI (density) number that isn’t that much more than what already exist in these sorts of areas.
At the front of the house (right side of the above plan) is a set of stairs (and a patio) leading down to the front basement unit and a set of stairs leading up to the main front unit. An inset patio also forms part of this main entrance (image below), which is a great way of adding outdoor space while at the same time maintaining privacy across the units. These strategy is one of my favorite aspects of the project.
The rear units are similarly accessed at the back of the building. And the two middle units are accessed along the side of the house. All in all, this housing typology has the ability to accommodate up to 6 units: 3 main suites and 3 secondary type suites. By the architect’s own estimate, this could result in 147,000 new housing units across the city if every lot occupied by a semi-detached house were to be redeveloped in this way.
But I wonder if any consideration was given to the secondary (basement) suites that may already exist in these zones. Because in some cases, and as beautiful as these homes may be, we may only be talking about 2 additional suites. Triplexes are also already allowed in some areas of the city. So does this ultimately achieve its intended goal, which is the creation of more “missing middle” housing in order to ease overall housing pressures? Or do we need to be thinking bigger?
As a follow-up to this post (subscribe to stay connected), I am going to look at what a development pro forma might look like for a project of this scale. The numbers have a way of answering a lot of questions. That said, kudos to Alex for taking on this initiative and kudos to the design team for a pretty spectacular architectural solution.
The American Institute of Architects just presented its 2019 Housing Awards. 12 housing projects were recognized across four categories.
Some of the projects I have written about before — such as the Tiny Tower in North Philadelphia. But most of the projects haven’t been covered on this blog. One of my favorites, among the winners, is the Oak Park Housing project in Sacramento by Johnsen Schamling Architects.
I like that the massing is simple and that it’s a dense — 6 unit — urban infill project in an area of Sacramento that has been struggling with disinvestment for many decades. According to the architect, it is one of the first residential projects in the neighborhood since the Oak Park Riots of 1969.
Three of the homes front onto the main street. And the other three front onto and are accessed from a rear alley. Each home is just over 1,500 square feet. The project also had “an ambitiously limited construction budget“, so let’s call it an example of good design not having to necessarily cost a lot of money.
Junction House won “Best Innovative Suite Design” at the 39th BILD Awards (2019) last night. A big congrats to the team. Below is the floor plan that won. It is a 2 bedroom suite from our two-storey House Collection (JH_2B_H1).
This design is fundamental to Junction House. It is why the project is called what it is. The goal was to create a suite that felt less like a condo, and more like a low-rise single-family home. Credit to Superkul Architects, and the rest of the team, for figuring it all out. There was a long list of requirements.
We wanted dedicated kitchen (+ island), dining, and living areas. (The living area is also wider than what you’d typically find.) We wanted a terrace with (standard) water and BBQ connections. We wanted the bedrooms upstairs for privacy/separation. We wanted both of them to have direct window exposure. And we wanted a master ensuite bathroom with a double vanity.
The House Collection includes some of my favorite suites in the building, which is why — full disclosure — I’m going to be moving into one of them. If you’d like more information about Junction House, reach out to Paul Johnston and his team at info@junctionhouse.ca or at 416-900-6076.
Since 2012, a team at New York University has been working on something called the Atlas of Urban Expansion. What they are doing is collecting and analyzing data related to the quantity and quality of urban growth around the world. Everything from population densities to how well the streets were laid out during each geographic expansion.
The Atlas defines a city as having at least 100,000 people, which is a commonly used benchmark. According to this definition, there were 4,245 cities on the planet as of 2010. Included in their study is a representative sample of 200 of them, all of which can be found here.
They are also, rightly, looking at each city in terms of its extrema tectorum — the limits of its built-up area. This is as opposed to using administrative boundaries, which wouldn’t be as relevant in a study like this.
I really like the animations that they created depicting urban growth from 1800 to 2014, because they show: (1) where each city started (the dark nucleus); (2) how different urban shapes emerge as a result of geography, transport, and other factors; and (3) how land consumptive many of our cities have become in recent years.
