Tag: mid rise

• An example of city building doublethink

  

  Earlier this month, Shane Dingman wrote a piece in the Globe and Mail talking about TAS’ proposed development for 2 Tecumseth Avenue here in Toronto – the former home of Quality Meat Packers, a slaughterhouse. In the article there’s a quote from Mazyar Mortazavi, which I posted to my Instagram (as a story), but that I have been meaning to also post to the blog. So here it is: 

  “It’s not a conversation about towers good, towers bad: Mid-rise is the most expensive construction typology and it delivers effectively luxury housing, so it doesn’t respond to the needs of affordability,” he said. “We didn’t buy Tecumseth to build a bunch of condos and move on. We bought it because we wanted to pursue a vision around city building. You need density … the question is how do we actually deliver density that’s relevant today and relevant 50 years from now?”

  He’s of course right about mid-rise construction costs. There are diseconomies of scale and other construction inefficiencies that we have talked about many times before on this blog. The result is one of the Catch-22s of city building. Mid-rise and small scale infill is often seen as desirable, but we also say that we need more affordable housing.

  It’s doublethink.

  Image: 2 Tecumseth by KPMB Architects for TAS

  2018.06.10

• Could high low-rise infill buildings work?

  Dylan Reid recently wrote an interesting article about, what he calls, high low-rise infill buildings along Toronto’s main streets. 

  He describes the typology in this way: “These are generally 4-storey mixed-use buildings built quickly on one or two lots, replacing smaller previous buildings. They are often inserted beside existing, attached buildings.“

  Now, Reid acknowledges that this a challenging scale to develop at. He links to one of my articles in Urban Capital’s Site Magazine where I talk about exactly that: the diseconomies of scale associated with building small. (Though, I was talking about mid-rise, not high low-rise.)

  Reid addresses these challenges with a number of potential cost savings, including no parking minimums and no rezoning process. He also suggests that these projects may be better suited to existing landowners (who may own the land free and clear of a mortgage).

  Getting rid of parking minimums and streamlining approvals would certainly help, though I remain doubtful about overall feasibility. But what I wanted to comment on today was the last point about these projects being better suited to existing landowners.

  One problem with this line of thinking is that if we’re talking about land on a street where greater densities such as mid-rise are also permissible, the land is going to get valued based on mid-rise and not high low-rise.

  So when a prudent landowner thinks about developing their land, they may also consider the opportunity cost of simply selling their land based on its highest and best use.

  That thought process might go something like this. I own a piece of land. If I were to sell this land today and take on no development risk, I could make $X. If I were to instead develop this land, I could make $Y.

  If $Y is less than $X, then I’m obviously not going to develop. But if the spread between $Y and $X isn’t enough to compensate me for the risk of developing (and there’s lots of risk in developing), then I’m also not going to do it. (Developers run a similar test by marking the land cost in their pro forma to market.)

  And if $X is based on greater densities than $Y ($X is based on mid-rise densities and $Y is based on high low-rise densities) and if $Y is also being challenged by further diseconomies of scale, then I’m sure you can start to see how the math may not pencil.

  I say all of this not to shit on Reid’s article. It’s a good article. You should go read it. And we should all continue to think about ways to increase the supply of housing in this city and in others.

  2018.05.08

• Toward more family condos

  The Ryerson City Building Institute and Urbanation recently published a terrific report called: Bedrooms in the Sky. Is Toronto Building the Right Condo Supply? 

  Here is a quick synopsis: The 35-44 year old age bracket in this city will see significant growth over the next decade; single family homes are really expensive; and we’re not building enough family-friendly condo units.

  When Urbanation looked at the data for all condo units currently under construction they found that the unit mixes still skewed toward 1-bedroom units, but that the number of 3-bedroom units is starting to trend upward. That feels right.

  The report also talks about the affordability gap between condos and houses. The average condo in the Greater Toronto Area costs about $511,000, while the average detached house costs $1,134,000.

  However, this isn’t exactly an accurate comparison because the average condo is smaller in size than the average house. I think a better metric is to look at price per square foot.

  Also, houses give you the flexibility of a secondary suite. Right now that usually means a basement apartment, but pretty soon it’ll likely include a laneway suite. That creates an additional income stream and helps with overall affordability.

  In any event, up until maybe recently, houses generally looked cheaper on a per square foot basis. And my view – which I have written about extensively on this blog – was that as soon as houses become “more expensive”, we’ll see an uptick in larger family-oriented condos.

  A few weeks ago I went to an open house in a desirable area of Toronto. It was for a 1,300 sf semi-detached house with good bones, but in need of a full gut. Basement was low, only suitable for humans around 5′ tall. It sold for $1 million.

  Let’s say that house needs $300,000 to bring it up to the level of a new condo. If that doesn’t include some sort of extension, now you’re in for $1.3 million or about $1,000 per square foot. You can still find a condo for less than that.

  Which is one of the reasons why I think we’re now starting to see an uptick in larger/family units. (We are trying to do it at Junction House.) 

  But like all things in real estate, these things move slowly. The condos under construction today were designed years ago. Changes take time to work themselves through the system.

  2017.11.08

• Only 9% of new homes sold last month were low-rise single-family

  

  BILD (the Building Industry and Land Development Association) just released its June 2017 data for the Greater Toronto Area’s new housing market. You can read the full release here. But I would like to point out a couple of things:

  About 91 percent of the 6,046 new homes sold last month were multi-family condo apartments in high-rise and mid-rise buildings and stacked townhomes, while only nine percent were low-rise single-family homes.

  The average price of available new condo apartments continued to rise with an increase of more than $22,000 from May. June’s $627,000 average price marked a 34 percent increase from a year ago. The average available unit was 845 square feet with an average price per square foot of $742. A year ago, the average price per square foot was $587.

  From this, it’s once again clear that Toronto is in the midst of an incredible transformation from a low-rise city to a more vertical city. New supply on the low-rise side of the market is heavily constrained.

  I get the sense sometimes that many people in this city, and others, believe that access to a low-rise detached house should be a right. Go to school. Get a good job. And then buy that house with a backyard. 

  The data speaks to a very different reality.

  Photo by Victoria Heath on Unsplash

  2017.07.25

• We’re working with superkül

  

  Today I am excited to announce that we are working with superkül architects on a new mid-rise condo project here in Toronto. Details about the site and project to follow.

  I am excited about this for a few reasons.

  It should go without saying that I love their work. Check out Compass House, SHIFT Cottage, Harbord Towns, and Oben Flats Queen East.

  You may also notice that they work at a variety of different scales and have a lot of single-family / custom home work. This was important to us because one of our goals for this project is to create really great homes within a boutique building. Emphasis on home.

  The other exciting piece is that one of the founding principals of superkül – Meg Graham – was one of my professors in architecture school. So there’s a sense of coming full circle.

  This matters to me because when I became a developer I told myself that I was going to be the kind of developer that gave a shit about design and actively worked to improve the built environment.

  I guess what I’m saying is that there’s a feeling of continuity. I haven’t forgotten where I came from, which was the world of architecture.

  Image: Blok Design

  2017.05.09

• Powerhouse: A case study in neighborhood infill

  

  Dezeen recently featured the above project in Philadelphia by Interface Studio Architects. It’s called Powerhouse and the goal was to provide a variety of different housing typologies and tenures within a dense infill project that, at the same time, remains in keeping with its context.

  The full block complex contains 31 residential units, which are a mixture of apartments, duplexes (stacked towns), live/work units, and single-family townhouses. There’s also a corner retail space. 10 of the units are rental and the balance are for sale. The development also incorporates 3 existing rowhouses on the block. (Were these the holdouts?)

  Here is a diagram from ISA to give you a sense of how these different housing types come together:

  

  The project feels germane to Philly’s urban fabric and it is certainly interesting in its own right. But for those of us from Toronto, it’s perhaps even more interesting because it’s a scale of infill development that we don’t see very often in this city: low-rise intensification. (Also commonly referred to as “The Missing Middle”.)

  Recently I’ve been speaking with a number of people about whether or not Toronto should be thinking differently about its low-rise neighborhoods. Because as it stands today, even this sort of gentle density can cause quite a stir. 

  Two thoughts immediately come to mind – one of which will not surprise anyone who reads this blog. Firstly, I see laneway housing as an elegant way to intensify low-rise neighborhoods without changing their character. That’s why I’m proposing this house.

  Secondly, I have long felt that we should rethink how we treat arterial roads that are not designated as “Avenues.” That is, we should encourage greater densities. An “Avenue” designation signals mid-rise. But absent this, our policies are frankly retrograde, given the way some of these arterial streets have evolved over the years.

  What are your thoughts about this scale of infill?

  Images: ISA

  2017.05.09

• The long and narrow of property affordability

  

  Lots sizes and dimensions vary from city to city, as well as from neighborhood to neighborhood. They come in many different shapes and sizes from long and narrow (common in Toronto) to rectangular or even wide and shallow. Charlie Gardner wrote a terrific post on this last year where he used Bing Maps to illustrate some of these differences. Tokyo, for instance, is shown as having more rectangular lots (32′ x 38′), whereas Buffalo is shown as having more long and narrow lots (30′ x 175′). Charlie then asks: why the prevalence of inefficient long and narrow lots? These dimensions obviously produce long and skinny houses.

  As he rightly points out in his post, there are economic reasons for this. Assuming you’re starting with deep blocks and lots, then there’s going to be a natural tendency toward subdividing and going long and skinny. That’s because the key dimension is frontage onto the street. The more frontages you create, the more front doors can be built, the more lots with access to the Mississippi can be created, etc. And that’s how you end up with 10-12′ wide row homes, which also helps to address overall housing affordability. This is not a new phenomenon.

  To further demonstrate this point, let’s look at how this phenomenon has translated into the condo market – specifically the mid-rise condo market here in Toronto. In this case street frontage morphs into window frontage (access to light). That’s now the guiding dimension. In a 1 bedroom apartment, that dimension might be something around 6-7m. That allows you to have both a bedroom and a living room with a window. So it makes for a great 1 bedroom or 1 bedroom + den apartment. (I’m ignoring corner suites for this thought exercise.)

  However, a tension often arises when you begin to look at larger suites, such as 2 bedrooms and 3 bedrooms. The obvious response would be to simply give over more window frontage. So instead of 6-7m, the suite may get 10m. This would allow you to create a split 2 bedroom apartment (both rooms get windows) with a living room in the middle. This would be considered a highly desirable floor plan.

  But up until now we’ve been ignoring the depth of the apartment. And as is the case with lot dimensions, this can have an impact on the amount of street/window frontage that gets designed. We’ve talked a lot about mid-rise buildings before on this blog and one of the challenges here in Toronto is that the 45 degree angular plane guideline produces deep floors on the bottom of the building and narrow floors on the top. Given this, it would not be unheard of to end up with 12m apartment depths on some of the lower floors.

  The counter argument would be that nobody is forcing these larger floor plates. Simply carve the building back. But the economic reality is that the margins are so thin on mid-rise buildings, that it would be inconceivable to give up this floor area. You have to max out the envelope.

  Why does this matter? Well let’s assume that the average downtown Toronto condo will cost you $857 per square foot. Using back of the envelope math, that means that the above 6m x 12m apartment (1 bedroom) could cost around $663,000 (774 square feet x $857 psf). And that the above 10m x 12m apartment (2 bedroom) could cost around $1,106,000 (1,291 square feet x $857). 

  These are obviously big numbers. Question becomes: Who will be able to afford these?

  So naturally the design exercise becomes about reducing the size of the apartments and often this means reducing the amount of window frontage. Of course when you do this, it means that one or more of the bedrooms will need to be pulled back from the front windows, which is how you end up with inset / recessed bedrooms (indirect light) and long and narrow apartments. These are often pejoratively referred to as “bowling alley suites”, but they are driven by a push for greater affordability.

  Again, this is not a new phenomenon. It is simply a trade-off that gets made. It’s the long and narrow of property affordability.

  2017.01.08

• Enhancement Zones: The mid-rise performance standard that didn’t make the cut

  I’ve written a lot about mid-rise development on this blog and elsewhere. 

  I recently wrote this post responding to a tweet by the Chief Planner of Toronto. And towards the end of last year, I wrote a longer piece for developer Urban Capital’s annual magazine. If you missed it, you should definitely download a copy. Not so much for my article, but because, overall, the UC magazines are excellent. (Credit to David Wex.)

  Today, I’d like to focus on one specific “performance standard” from Toronto’s mid-rise guidelines that I’ve been thinking about lately. But more specifically, I’d like to focus on a performance standard that was initially contemplated but never actually got adopted. 

  (I apologize in advance if this post gets a bit too geeky for some of you. It refers to a specific land use policy in Toronto, but it has much broader relevance.)

  If you take a look at the final Avenue & Mid-Rise Buildings Study and turn to page 56, you’ll see that Performance Standard #5B (Rear Transition to Neighbourhoods: Shallow Properties) was stricken from the report. It was never adopted as a standard.

  So what is this all about?

  This performance standard had to do with something called “Enhancement Zones”, which was proposed as a way to deal with shallow parcels of land on Toronto’s main avenues. You see, because of the other performance standards – namely the angular plane (see images below) – the depth of an avenue site is hugely important for determining what can ultimately be built on it.

  From the city’s perspective, this is a double edged sword. In the case of exceptionally deep lots, you can actually meet all of the performance standards while at the same time exceeding the recommended densities. But in the case of shallow lots, the performance standards sometimes/often make it so that you can’t even achieve the recommended densities. In fact, a lot of sites simply become un-developable.

  To give you a visual for what I’m talking about, here’s a section drawing from a zoning by-law that was adopted by City Council for St. Clair Avenue West in midtown:

  

  Here you can quickly see that if you were dealing with a shallow lot of, say, 25m in depth, you wouldn’t have much left over after taking into account the rear property line setback (7.5m above), the front property line setback, and the 45 degree angular plane. Now you’re beginning to see why I said that it is easier said than done to play creatively within the guidelines envelope (thick black line above). When you look at the feasibility of these projects, you quickly end up getting pushed right up against the glass.

  But this is where Enhancement Zones comes in. 

  The idea here is that an adjacent low-rise residential property (or pair of properties in the case of attached houses) could be included in mid-rise development proposals to create a deeper site that then meets the requisite separation distances between the mid-rise scale and the low-rise scale. To be clear, nothing would be built in the Enhancement Zones. They would just help to relieve some of the setback pressures from the original shallow lot and maybe even create a rear laneway system where one did not exist before.

  Below is a drawing from the Mid-Rise Buildings Study showing that new condition. The same 7.5m setback applies at the rear, but now it sits within an Enhancement Zone – formerly an adjacent and separate property. All the text is crossed out because, again, this standard was not adopted.

  

  From a mid-rise development and feasibility standpoint, this makes a lot of sense. Sites that may have been un-developable before, now become developable. This makes it easier for us to achieve the European-scaled mid-rise vision that Toronto has for its avenues.

  But for reasons that I am sure you can guess, there are concerns with this performance standard. Probably the most obvious is that, to a certain extent, it destabilizes “neighbourhoods.” And they are intended to be completely stable entities that see little to no intensification. As soon as you allow this to happen, properties sitting in Enhancement Zones would become the prey of developers.

  However, there are counter arguments you could make. The owners of these properties would likely receive offers above market value. So maybe they end up better off. At the same time, you could also argue that the more development we unlock outside of “neighbourhoods”, the more stable they can actually remain.

  In any event, I’ve been thinking about this lately and I thought it would be interesting to debate the pros and cons of these magical-sounding Enhancement Zones. For those of you inclined to engage in geeky planning discussions, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

  2016.03.24

• Easier said than done

  Earlier this week I saw the Chief Planner of Toronto, Jennifer Keesmaat, tweet this out:

  New buildings shouldn’t maximize the envelope prescribed by guidelines, but employ creative designs within it. pic.twitter.com/l7axVB4Hke

  — jennifer keesmaat (@jen_keesmaat) March 3, 2016

  //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  I responded with the below quote retweet because I figured I should probably devote a blog post to this topic and not just a tweet.

  🤔 https://t.co/WqdaCCWkNi

  — Brandon G. Donnelly (@donnelly_b) March 3, 2016

  //platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

  Now, I don’t know for sure, but I am guessing that her tweet was in response to the criticism from architects and developers that Toronto’s design guidelines are creating homogenous architectural outcomes. Some people – and I’ve written about this before on ATC – believe they’re too prescriptive.

  So today I’d like to talk about why playing creatively within the guidelines/zoning envelope, particularly at the mid-rise scale, is a lot easier said than done.

  Generally speaking, the value of land is dependent on what you can do with it or, in this case, what you can build on it.

  If all you could do was plant things on it, then the value of the land would be correlated with crop yields. If on the other hand you could build a building, it would be correlated, at least in theory, with the amount of space you could build and the rents you could charge for that space.

  Of course, this isn’t a perfect science. That’s why I said “in theory.”

  Landowners obviously want to maximize the value of their asset when it comes time to sell. So they, along with their brokers, will naturally try and stretch what is possible with the land. Why else do you think the best neighborhoods seem to magically grow new boundaries?

  When you combine this with the fact that mid-rise buildings are inherently less efficient to build and with the fact that their smaller size creates diseconomies of scale, it can be exceptionally difficult to find development sites where the numbers make any sort of financial sense. That is, even if you “maximize the envelope” and push rents or sale prices.

  So, with all due respect, not maximizing the envelope is almost unthinkable, unless you somehow managed to get a bargain on the land.

  Many of you will likely respond in the comments saying that all of this is simply a result of real estate developers being greedy capitalist pigs. But what we are talking about is no different than in any other competitive business environment. 

  Developers rent and sell products – albeit products that take an incredibly long time to make and bring to market. To make those products, there are a many costs, ranging from the cost of land to the cost of drawings. But hopefully within all of those numbers sits a profit margin that makes sense given the amount of work and risk that the developer has taken on. 

  Put differently, telling developers not to maximize the envelope is like telling a pizza maker to throw out 10-15% of her dough before she makes every pizza – even though she already (over)paid in full for the dough.

  If you’ve ever created a development pro forma, you’ll know that it’s not easy getting the numbers to work when you’re operating in a competitive market. This is not a knock against creative design. Trust me, I am a design snob. This is just business.

  2016.03.05

• Urban infill case study: 1234 Howard Street in San Francisco

  Urban infill developments can be tough. The sites are often small and/or narrow and that creates a lot of design challenges. Access to light is a common problem.

  But constraints can also be beautiful, because they have a way of forcing creativity. 

  When I was in architecture school, I used to find it easier to work when I was given constraints and challenges. It gave me something to latch onto, as opposed to just starting with a blank canvas. A big part of design, at least for me, is about solving problems. So give me a problem to solve!

  One of the ways that architects and designers often deal with the access to light problem is by carving out lightwells or courtyards to bring light down into the building. This can be used when you have a deep site or when you’re building right up against the property line and you can’t have any windows.

  One project that I’ve always liked for this reason – as well as the fact that it’s beautifully designed – is 1234 Howard Street in San Francisco. It looks like this from above:

  

  The site is 50′ x 165′ and it spans an entire block. 

  In order to get lots of light into all of the units, the architects (Stanley Saitowitz | Natoma Architects) split the site up into 3 “bars”, each of which would be somewhere around 16′ x 165′. The middle “bar” was then dedicated to a courtyard that cuts through the entire building.

  

  The two flanking bars were then further subdivided into 2 units per bar, which translates into 4 units per floor x 4 floors. The ground floor is just common areas and parking.

  The advantage of this design strategy is that the apartments now have windows running the length of the courtyard, where as typically on narrow deep lots you would end up with “bowling alley” units and windows just on one end.

  The disadvantage of this design strategy is that you’re now just over 16′ away from seeing what your neighbor is eating for dinner, among other things. 

  But with the right window coverings, I’m sure we’d all survive in these apartments with their Bulthaup kitchens and Miele appliances.

  

  I love seeing creative solutions to tight urban sites. And one of the things that I worry about, with things like the Mid-Rise Performance Standards here in Toronto, is that we’re reducing or even eliminating the possibility for these kinds of creative solutions.

  I recognize that 1234 Howard is not the same as an avenue mid-rise site in Toronto with low-rise residential behind it. But the thought still crossed my mind as I was writing this piece.

  All photos via Stanley Saitowitz | Natoma Architects Inc.

  2016.01.08