Tag: housing

• Toronto Community Council voted unanimously in favor of laneway suites

  It happened.

  Today, Toronto and East York Community Council voted unanimously in favor of adopting a planning framework that would allow laneway suites on lands within the Toronto and East York District that are designated as “Neighbourhoods.” 

  If you’d like to see the actual vote (and the clapping that ensued), check out this YouTube video at the 41 minute mark. There are also some great speeches prior to the vote by Councillor Bailão, Councillor Perks, and others.

  Now, it still needs to go through City Council, but today remains an important milestone and a positive step forward. So kudos to everyone who has been working tirelessly to push this initiative forward.

  I would also like to take this opportunity to address some of the comments that I recently received about this blog, one of which is that I continue to offer a one-sided perspective on this issue of laneway housing in Toronto.

  Think of this blog – and I’m stealing this analogy from another blogger – as a bar. I am the bartender and I show up here pretty much every day. I’ve been doing that consistently for almost 5 years now.

  At this bar I sip on negronis – okay, it’s probably beer – and I talk about topics and issues that excite me and that are usually related to city building. If it doesn’t excite me, I don’t talk/write about it. And I get lots of emails every day asking me to write about things that do not excite me.

  If you would like to take a seat at the bar, have a drink, and join the conversation, you are more than welcome to do that in the comment section at the bottom of every post. In fact, it’s encouraged. I make a mean vodka soda.

  So maybe I’ll see you at the bar. The bartender is a fairly open-minded guy who enjoys good conversation.

  2018.06.07

• Birth rates in the United States last year

  The National Center of Health Statistics just released this update on births and birth rates for the United States in 2017. The provisional number of births last year was 3,853,472, which represents a 2% reduction from 2016 and the lowest number in 30 years. The general fertility rate was 60.2 births per 1,000 women aged 15-44, which represents a 3% reduction from 2016. Also a record low.

  Here is a chart from the report showing birth rates for selected age ranges from 1990 to 2016 (the 2017 numbers are provisional):

  

  Many of the age ranges have remained stable. Notable are the decline in the teenage (15-19) birth rate and the increase in births to women aged 40-44. The teenage birth rate declined 7% from 2016 and has averaged a decline of nearly 8% a year since 2007. And the birth rate for women aged 40-44 has generally been rising since 1982.

  I am sure that you can all think of many explanations for the above phenomena without even diving into the report. I find all of this relevant because demographics obviously impact the real estate business and how we build cities.

  2018.05.20

• Percentage of residential properties dedicated to single-family housing in US cities

  The Seattle Times has an article up about “widespread single-family zoning” that will feel familiar to many here in Toronto who, I know, are having similar conversations about the amount of land dedicated to low-density housing.

  The article, by Mike Rosenberg, estimates that 49% of all developable land in Seattle is dedicated to single-family housing; that 8% is dedicated to multi-family housing; and that another 8% is dedicated to commercial and mixed-use buildings. The rest of the land is institutional, open space, vacant, and so on.

  Of all the residential lots in the city, the estimate is that 69% of them are occupied by single-family houses. This is compared to 1% in Manhattan. 

  

  I tried to reverse engineer the 69% based on the land use areas in the article, but the math didn’t quite add up. In any event, the argument here is, of course, that single-family homes are too expensive in Seattle and that the city needs more land available for multi-family housing.

  Housing supply is no doubt important, but looking at the above chart, having a low, or lower, percentage of residential land dedicated to single-family housing doesn’t seem to necessarily guarantee affordable housing.

  2018.05.13

• Less, rather than more, housing

  Earlier this year I wrote about the California housing bill (827) intended to dramatically increase housing supply around transit stations all across the state. Well that bill was rejected last month and the Los Angeles Times wrote this post post-mortem explaining why and how it went wrong. Their argument is that it came down to opposition from low-income residents who feared that an increase in housing supply would lead to greater displacement.

  On a related note, the Official Plan Amendment and Zoning By-law Amendment that would permit laneway suites in Toronto went to Community Council this week. They voted to defer the decision for a month. Only 3 of 13 councillors voted to pass the proposal, despite there being 185 letters of support and only 4 letters of opposition. For more information on what the hell happened, check out this Lanescape post.

  2018.05.04

• Toronto is finally ready to permit laneway suites

  Some of you might remember that last summer the city refused my laneway house/suite here in Toronto.

  Well that was last summer and this is this summer.

  On May 2, 2018 – which just so happens to be my birthday – Toronto and East York Community Council will consider a staff report for a City-initiated Official Plan Amendment and Zoning By-law Amendment that would permit laneway suites in the Toronto & East York District.

  Here are a couple of excerpts from the summary section (full report, here):

  This report recommends establishing a planning framework to permit laneway suites on lands within the Toronto and East York District that are designated as Neighbourhoods by amending both the Official Plan and City-wide Zoning By-law.

  A second unit can take many forms but is generally considered to be subordinate to the primary dwelling unit on a lot. Second units are an important part of the City’s rental housing stock. Laneway suites are one form of second unit.
  

  This report contains a detailed planning rationale for the introduction and regulation of laneway suites within the Toronto and East York area and discusses the policy implications and intent of proposed performance standards and criteria. 

  These performance standards and criteria intend that laneway suites will provide a new form of ground-related, rental and extended family housing that will fit appropriately within the scale of established Neighbourhoods, and limit their impact on the existing physical character, while contributing to the growth of the City’s rental housing stock.

  What a thoughtful birthday gift. Thank you.

  2018.04.23

• First 3D printed home in America

  The video below is a good follow-up to my recent post about the 100 million city and the rapid population growth that we are seeing in some parts of the developing world.

  If you can’t see the embedded video below, click here.

  [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvM7jFZGAec?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

  It’s a video about what is allegedly the “first permitted, 3D-printed home in America” – an 800 square foot home that was built/printed in Austin during SXSW in about 24 hours.

  The project is a partnership between New Story (a non-profit) and ICON (a construction technologies company), and the goal is to pioneer a fast and cheap housing model for the developing world.

  The cost for the above home is said to be about $4,000.

  2018.03.29

• Vancouver’s Empty Homes Tax

  In an effort to curb the much talked-about and much debated empty home situation in Vancouver (supposedly the number is ~20k vacant homes), the city, as many of you know, implemented an Empty Homes Tax.

  To enforce this, the City of Vancouver now requires that every year, every owner of residential property must file a status declaration. If you don’t file this by the deadline, the property is automatically deemed vacant and the tax (1% of assessed taxable value) and a penalty ($250) are applied.

  Last month, 11 days before the 2017 deadline, the city published the below heat map showing the concentration of Vancouver property owners who hadn’t yet made their declaration. There were just under 4,000 undeclared properties.

  

  But as Jens von Bergmann points out on his blog, Mountain Doodles (great data-driven blog), this was really just a map of where people live. Because if you also create a map of residential properties subject to the tax, which he did, it looks pretty similar to above.

  2018.03.25

• New high-rise home prices up 39.5% year-over-year

  February data (2018) for the new home market in the Greater Toronto Area was released this past week by BILD and Altus. I seem to have gotten into the habit of writing about this every month.

  The benchmark price for new low-rise single-family housing was down slightly from January to $1,219,874, but still up 12.8% from a year prior.

  The benchmark price for new high-rise housing was up a whopping 39.5% year-over-year to $729,735. But part of this is being driven by an equally dramatic increase in average unit sizes.

  Here is the relevant graph:

  

  The story continues to be about tight supply, historically low developer inventories, and a lack of affordable low-rise product. 

  As I have argued many times before on this blog, I believe these factors — and in particular the last one — are, at least partly, driving this recent pop in high-rise pricing. People are priced out and now searching for substitutes.

  So my prediction continues to be that we will see a convergence (i.e. diminishing spread) between new low-rise and high-rise pricing.

  That will also bring about design and product changes on the high-rise side.

  2018.03.24

• Neighborhood depopulation

  

  Recently we’ve been talking about California’s Proposition 13 and how it may be creating a disincentive for longtime homeowners to move. They’re enjoying below market property taxes, and so they stay put, even if they may have too much house.

  But this concept of “overhousing” isn’t unique to California. The Globe and Mail just ran a piece talking about how Toronto’s designated “Neighborhoods” are losing people as the nests empty out, seniors remain put, and the broader city booms.

  The rate of depopulation that created the spare bedrooms in Toronto’s low-rise neighbourhoods is stark: “Since 2001, about 52 per cent of the land mass of Toronto has reduced in density of population by about 201,000 people,” Mr. Smetanin says. “Other parts of Toronto have grown by 492,000.”

  The irony of this phenomenon is that the city’s Official Plan considers these Neighborhoods to be “physically stable”, as well as “one of the keys to Toronto’s success.” However, things are clearly changing behind that physical stability.

  Photo by Verne Ho on Unsplash

  2018.03.18

• UNStudio announces new tech architecture company (and thoughts on the smart home)

  

  Dutch architecture firm UNStudio has just launched a new company called UNSense, whose purpose is to explore and develop “new sensor-based technologies that are specifically designed to positively impact people’s physical, mental and social health.” They are calling the new business an “arch tech company” and it is their belief that, at some point, all architecture firms will become arch tech companies. You can learn more about UNSense, here.

  This announcement got me thinking about the state of smart home technologies, which, of course, is this massive buzzword that everyone is throwing around these days. Many of us have smart thermostats, voice assistants (that may be listening to our every word), wifi lights, and so on. And you can do some pretty neat things with software like IFTT, such as program your lights to come on at sunset or when you walk in the door.

  But as cool as they may be, these smart home devices have always felt like patchwork add-ons to me. I understand that this is partially driven by what customers can easily adopt and I don’t mean to discredit the value that they bring, but today’s post is about reminding us to also think more fundamentally, as opposed to just incrementally.

  Smart thermostats, for instance, give us the functionality to adjust our heating/cooling from our phone. But at the end of the day, they still control the same underlying system, which, by the way, is a fairly simple one. When it gets cold (because of our R-3 windows), the heat turns on. When it gets warm enough, the heat turns off. Zoned systems certainly add another layer of sophistication, but are we optimizing for the right variables?

  UNSense works at three scales: Cities, Buildings, and Interiors. And if you look at what they are trying to do at the building scale, it is around the interface between inside and out. Designing transformable facade systems and buildings that can respond to their environment and our changing needs. These are not new ideas, but in today’s tech-driven world, the timing may just be right.

  If you think about the climate we have here in Toronto, it is actually an incredibly difficult design problem. We have cold winters and hot humid summers, which means we have to solve for two different extremes. Mechanical systems have made that a lot easier to do, but if we’re going to meet the energy and greenhouse gas emission targets that we’re all talking about, we’re going to need a hell of a lot more than just smart thermostats.

  Image: UNSense

  2018.03.17