I went to bed last night watching President Biden’s address to the Canadian Parliament (full transcript, here.). And I woke up this morning to this Globe and Mail article about Canadian competitiveness. In it, Tony Keller talks about some of the things that are broken… Read More
What do you get when you have some of the most stringent affordable housing requirements in the United States? You might think that you get lots and lots of affordable housing, but that is not the case in San Francisco. Paradoxically, you still get some… Read More
Here’s the thing about housing: The delegates insisted on one hand that “housing is for living not speculation”, but on the other, emphasised the critical importance of real estate to China’s economic growth. In other words, things are complicated. We want housing to be affordable… Read More
Here is a housing study that looked at housing supply — in the US from 2000 to 2020 — relative to median housing values. And here is the key takeaway: What this chart is saying is that new housing is rarely added in cities with… Read More
Bullpen Consulting just released its latest land insights reports for the Greater Toronto Area. For the period of Q2-2022, Ben Myers and the team identified 46 high-density residential land transactions with an average price of $95 per buildable square foot. This is down from $112… Read More
A blog reader responded to yesterday’s post about rent controls (and inclusionary zoning) with an excellent point: If you’re against rent controls, then you must also be against artificially low property taxes for homeowners. And I would agree with this. One of the points I… Read More
I received an email from a reader over the weekend saying that my comments around rent control have been too critical, and that they are not doing proper justice to the challenges that renters face in today’s cities. I thought this was a fair comment… Read More
What do you think of this beautiful low-rise apartment building? It is called Spadina Gardens and it was built (allegedly illegally) on Toronto’s Spadina Avenue in 1906, shortly before the City enacted an outright ban on “disease-breeding tenements” (i.e. apartment buildings) in all residential neighborhoods.… Read More
I spent much of this morning reading about and listening to discussions about what’s happening in Ukraine and so, instead of a typical post this morning, I’m just going to share a mélange of links. Monocle 24 Foreign Desk episode talking about Russia’s invasion of… Read More
When I was living in Philadelphia as a graduate student, new development was seen as a bit of a gift. I remember developers telling me that it costs the same to build in Philly as it does in New York, except that the rents are… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 