Emily Badger’s recent piece on “how ‘developer’ became such a dirty word” has been getting passed around within the industry over the last few days. I had a chuckle when I read this bit: The notion that development is inherently bad, or that developers are… Read More
Every year since 1984, the National Association of Home Builders (in the United States) has commissioned a home with the goal of showcasing new trends and technologies in the industry. At the same time, it also serves as a kind of dream home. This is… Read More
This morning BILD and Altus Group released their January 2019 new home sales figures for the Greater Toronto Area. Here are the highlights: 1,362 new homes sold in January 2019 across the GTA. This is up 14% compared to last January. Of these, 942 (~69%)… Read More
Joe Cortright recently wrote about a study by Kate Pennington (UC Berkeley), which looked at the impact of housing production on legal eviction in San Francisco. The goal was to figure out if new housing supply actually causes displacement. To do this, Pennington went block-by-block… Read More
This week I saw it reported that in this decade alone, the Seattle area is set to deliver more new rental apartments than it did in the prior 50 years combined. And as a result, the sentiment is that new housing supply is finally starting… Read More
According to Bloomberg (using data from CMHC), 2017 was a surprising record year for housing starts in Canada: 219,675 units. This is the most since 2007 and is up from 197,916 units in 2016. The explanation: job growth (nearly 400,000 new jobs) and population growth… Read More
Over the past 5 years or so, real estate headlines in the Greater Toronto Area have often focused on the rapid appreciation of low-rise housing. High-rise housing simply wasn’t appreciating at the same rate – at least in aggregate terms. But 2017 has brought a… Read More
Miriam Zuk and Karen Chapple of the University of California, Berkeley, recently published a research brief called Housing Production, Filtering and Displacement: Untangling the Relationships. It’s a nuanced look at the impact of both market-rate and subsidized housing production on affordability and displacement within the… Read More
Alan Ehrenhalt recently published a balanced piece in Governing that largely reflects my own views on inclusionary zoning. It’s called: Why Affordable Housing Is So Hard To Build. His argument is that there are lots of cities trying to build more affordable housing, but that most… Read More
One aspect of the Toronto housing market that I’ve been paying close attention to is the adoption of multi-family dwellings by both long-term end-users and families. I’ve written about this before (here and here, over a year ago) and have argued that here in Toronto we… Read More
BRANDON DONNELLY 