CityLab recently published this article about “why Hong Kong is building apartments the size of parking spaces.” It’s about the city’s “microflats” which are typically in the range of 150 to 300 square feet. Supposedly there about 8,500 of these apartments across Hong Kong and… Read More
New Zealand has been in the news lately for sweeping housing legislation that effectively abolishes single-family zoning throughout most of Auckland, Hamilton, Tauranga, Wellington, and Christchurch. But before I get into how this will all work, here’s a bit of background from an article that… Read More
Toronto city council has decided to defer its decision on legalizing rooming houses across the city one more time. Some of you may remember that this item went to council in the summer and was deferred to this fall. So now a new report is… Read More
My good friends over at Urban Capital recently released a short film about the making of their River City project here in Toronto. (If you can’t see the embedded video above, click here.) For those of you who aren’t familiar, River City is a 4-phase… Read More
One of the co-founders of Juno — a new mass-timber and modular housing company — was recently interviewed by Dezeen. Prior to cofounding Juno, BJ Siegel was Apple’s design director and spent 19 years designing and working on their stores. And so this is the… Read More
According to this RedFin data from 2019 — which looked at normalized sale prices and Walk Scores above 50 — it is about 23.5% or $77,668 for 16 major US metro areas. Again, this is 2019 data and so things may have changed a bit,… Read More
Over the weekend I learned about a unique feature of South Korea’s housing market. It’s called jeonse. And the way this housing contract works is that, instead of tenants paying a monthly rent to their landlord, they pay a huge lump-sum amount up front. Usually… 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
When you look at some of the most iconic home designs from around the world — which Bloomberg CityLab has been doing — there are some trends that emerge. One of them has to do with desirability. Whether we’re talking about Stockholm or Montreal, a… Read More
Our cost consultant, Finnegan Marshall, gave our team a presentation today on what’s happening with construction costs in Toronto and across Canada. I’ve said this before, but hard costs are no joke right now. One of the areas that they focused on was the impact… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 