Tag: urban families

• Families in multi-family buildings

  There is an ongoing debate in Toronto, and many other North American cities, about how to encourage more families to live in multi-family buildings. And here that has generally translated into (1) mandating a certain number of larger family-sized suites and (2) creating design guidelines to better equip both suites and buildings for families.

  But what we often ignore is the very real economic reality of buying a large family-sized suite. If you look at the latest Q3-2022 data from Urbanation, the average price of a new condominium in the entire Greater Toronto Area right now is about $1,427 psf.

  So if assume that a good family-sized suite is, oh I don’t know, 1,200 sf, the average price would be about $1.7mm, before you add in any parking (if necessary).

  If this is too big and you can get away with something more similar to a post-war bungalow — let’s say 900 sf — you’re still at nearly $1.3mm, again before any parking. At these sorts of prices, you have a few options, particularly if you’re willing to sprawl outward. And I think it’s important to recognize this.

  The other hurdle remains our industry’s requirement to pre-sell suites in order to obtain financing and start construction. What this effectively means is that you need buyers who can say to themselves, “I’m probably going to need a family-sized suite for the 1.4 kids I may have in 4-5 years.” This isn’t for everyone.

  So if we are truly serious about encouraging more families in multi-family buildings (which is an obviously good idea), I think it can’t just be viewed as a design problem and/or the result of greedy developers who just want to profit maximize by building smaller suites. We need to be looking at both the cost structure behind these homes and new ways to finance them.

  2022.11.18

• High-rise urban families in Toronto’s CityPlace

  The narrative in this fairly recent FastCompany article about Toronto’s CityPlace neighborhood is that the area was initially planned and built for young professionals who wanted to be close to work and party. But that it has since evolved to become a more mixed residential community. Over time, the young professionals started having children and now the area is filled with a surprising number of urban families. “Hundreds” according to FastCompany. In response to this shifting demographic, the Canoe Landing Campus was recently completed, containing a community center, two public schools, a public park, and childcare facilities. And apparently it was long overdue.

  This is interesting for a few reasons. CityPlace has long been criticized for its planning. Local Toronto lore has been that the area was destined to become a slum. But is that actually playing out? Anecdotally, it would seem that families are sticking around (and being attracted to the area) and that it’s settling in nicely as an urban residential community. In fact, I wonder if CityPlace might be emerging as one of the areas in the city with the highest concentration of high-rise urban families. I quickly tried to find some data on this but couldn’t.

  Something else worth pointing out: One of the objections that you’ll often here when it comes to new development is that there isn’t the infrastructure in place to support it. Where are the schools? Where are the community centers? And where are the hipster coffee shops? Because without these invaluable things, development should be stopped immediately. Now I’m not suggesting that these things aren’t important. But the CityPlace example is yet another reminder that cities and neighborhoods evolve — often in fortuitous ways. The best city building is nimble and entrepreneurial.

  2022.03.16

• The childless city debate

  There’s an interesting debate happening online right now. A recent article by Derek Thompson (of the Atlantic) made the claim that today’s urban renaissance is great for young college graduates, but not so good for kids.

  Here’s a quick synopsis:

  Cities have effectively traded away their children, swapping capital for kids. College graduates descend into cities, inhale fast-casual meals, emit the fumes of overwork, get washed, and bounce to smaller cities or the suburbs by the time their kids are old enough to spell.

  Raising a family in the city [New York City] is just too hard. And the same could be said of pretty much every other dense and expensive urban area in the country.

  Michael Lewyn (of the Touro Law Center) responded to this argument with a post titled “the myth of the childless city.” While it is true that the US fertility rate is at an all-time low, the numbers — at least some of them — suggest that cities aren’t all that childless:

  Furthermore, not all urban cores are doing poorly in retaining children. Washington, D.C. had just under 32,000 children under 5 in 2010, and has over 45,000 today. In Philadelphia, the number of children under 5 increased from just over 101,000 in 2010 to 104,152 in 2018. Even in San Francisco (which, according to The Atlantic article, “has the lowest share of children of any of the largest 100 cities in the U.S.”), the number of under-5 children increased from 35,203 in 2010 to 39,722 in 2018.

  What I would be curious to see is a more granular look at where children are being raised within specific cities, and how that may, or may not, be changing over time. City boundaries can be broad.

  2019.07.26

• 2 parents, 2 kids, and 1 cat in 1,000 square feet

  Yesterday a colleague at the office sent around this Globe and Mail article talking about a Vancouver family of 4 (plus one cat) who live in a 1,000 square foot loft near downtown that they purchased in 2003 for $269,900. There weren’t really any photos of the place, but the article makes it sound like they have 3 beds crammed into one room. (I wonder how the parents ever manage to have sex. There are better ways to lay out 1,000 sf.)

  In any event, the point of the article is that there’s a growing number of families who are clinging to the downtown lifestyle that they’ve grown accustomed to and are refusing to follow the path of a conventional suburban house – regardless of how tight their current quarters might be. It’s happening in Toronto (here’s an article from the Toronto Star and here’s a post I wrote) and it’s happening in New York:

  A recent New York Times article on a similar trend noted that the number of white professionals with one or more children living in one-bedroom condo units in that city had jumped by almost a third between 2000 to 2006. Prof. Andrew Beveridge, from Queens College of the City University of New York, said the pattern was showing up in other expensive American cities. In Toronto, the 2011 National Household Survey showed there are about 72,000 families living in 71,500 units in buildings with five or more storeys – undoubtedly many of them the new, tiny condos proliferating there.

  To some this might sound crazy. I mean, why would a dual income family–such as the one in Vancouver–subject themselves to a smaller space when they could easily afford a bigger place somewhere else? Isn’t that the dream – to have a big house?

  The answer is that these families are considering–in addition to the direct costs of a bigger place–both the indirect costs of living further away from the core (such as longer commute times) and the inevitable lifestyle changes that would happen should they move out from their downtown neighborhoods. The urban lifestyle is different.

  But what I find interesting about this phenomenon is that if this trend continues (and I think it will), we’re going to have a new generation of people in North America who grew up in apartments, condos, and lofts, and don’t have the same biases around single family houses and suburban living. To them, an apartment will be a perfectly normal place to raise a family.

  2014.07.19