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Toronto and SF are very different cities with different housing problems. My interpretation is that in SF, NIMBYism and city council members have blocked most

Toronto and SF are very different cities with different housing problems. My interpretation is that in SF, NIMBYism and city council members have blocked most efforts to build high-density housing. This means that it forces the prices on available housing up. SF is experiencing a huge influx of people wanting to live there, and there just aren't enough houses. Affordability is a big issue, and probably the biggest, but there are people that are able to afford the high prices. That line won't go on forever though. Toronto has not shunned construction, far from it. We've built thousands of condo units. The problem is that they were built for investors in mind. Oh sure, if you're single or a couple, you could manage to get by in a 450-600 sf. 1BD 1BA condo, but as soon as you start to have a family, it feels cramped. A 2BR unit helps, and they exist, but there are not that many. Furthermore, our mentality in Toronto is that to raise a family, you must live in a house. That means moving out to suburbia. A single-family home, townhouse, semi-detached, or detached, is always going to be in high demand, no matter where you are. In Toronto, it's what most of us were raised in. Getting us to move families into condos is a huge undertaking, and it's made impossible by the fact that developers don't want to build these units simply because no one buys them. It's a vicious cycle. So Toronto's issue isn't a lack of construction, it's a lack of foresight. Finally, all large cities have this issue because of commuting. In Toronto, your options to get to work in the city are: 1) Live downtown, close to work to walk, bus, or subway in 2) Live in suburbia and spend 0.75-1.5 hours each way driving and/or commuting by bus or train If you try to find more affordable housing by living further from the city, you start hating your life as you commute the 2+ hours in. It's like trying to live in Walnut Creek and work in SF. It can be done, but why? Housing is a multi-faceted problem that isn't simply solved by just building more houses. You need to adjust people's expectations, habits, and start building viable transportation options to help move people.

martinald 10y ago
Surely for a growing city what you need is 1bed apartments, for young workers moving to the city? At least in London 1 or 2bed apartments go very quickly off plan, but 3 and 4 bed apartments are really slow to move.
joshlemer 10y ago
I don't quite understand the often made claim that there is simultaneously a dearth of 2+ bedroom apartments in Toronto, as well as a huge demand for them, as well as them being unprofitable for developers. Shouldn't savvy investors be able to see the market opportunity and put money into larger units?
- pmiller2 10y ago
  2+ BR apartments rent for less per square foot than 1 BR and studios. If demand for 1 BRs isn't being fully met, then there's no reason to consider building larger apartments.
- VLM 10y ago
  Its a misalignment where you're talking about private citizens having an incredible demand for something that's only sold in a marketplace flooded with financial speculators. One group wants a place to live that's permanently affordable at their income, the other group bought what boils down to a financial option contract on the hopes a greater fool will pay twice as much for the commodity next year. Those groups can't coexist in the same neighborhood or marketplace. The city I live in only builds 1%er apartments for investors, and construction is absolutely booming for them, which is very nice for those investors. Those are some very nice empty condo towers. The market for the lower 99% percentile income is totally separate and different, and frankly empty. There is no crossover. Perhaps its like gold, in that its a commodity for investment but once price exceeds practical use levels for connector plating and tooth capping, its no longer relevant to the practical use fields at all, and its price can completely decouple and head to the moon. At some point the concept of owning a box full of air downtown will completely decouple from the concept of a place where humans live. At that point investment prices can and will go infinite with no effect on human housing, solely dependent on national fed rates and international currency exchange rates.
amyjess 10y ago
> If you try to find more affordable housing by living further from the city, you start hating your life as you commute the 2+ hours in. It's like trying to live in Walnut Creek and work in SF. It can be done, but why? The answer to this is to pressure companies to move their offices out to the suburbs. One of the reasons why Texas still has affordable housing with good commutes is because a lot of companies have abandoned the traditional central business districts and moved into boomburbs and edge cities. I live in the burbs, and of the four jobs I've had here, I've commuted farther out into the burbs for three of them (with a 15-20 minute commute by car). The one company I worked for that had offices downtown was the most poorly-run company I've ever worked for; them having offices in a place where no other tech company has offices was the least of my problems with them, but I did think "what tech company in Dallas makes people commute downtown?" when I was working there. Why are people in Toronto's suburbs not just working in the suburbs? Is it because the businesses there are still stuck in the old model of having all their offices downtown? If so, let's throw huge financial incentives at them to get them to move their offices to the suburbs. I've been mulling around an idea for a while of placing massive tax penalties on companies that hire people to work in a different county from where they live. Let's make employers pay ten times the income tax on every employee that lives outside the county where they work, and at the same time make it illegal for companies to make a current employee move or discriminate against a potential hire based on where they live. This will make them relocate to where their employees actually live. Or at least get them to switch as much of their workforce to remote as they can. I'm fine either way.
- joshlemer 10y ago
  >let's throw huge financial incentives at them to get them to move their offices to the suburbs Aren't companies already highly incentivized to not locate in the downtown core, simply by the astronomical cost of real-estate downtown? It seems to make sense that highly specialized industries would locate downtown, because that gives them access to workers from virtually the entire metropolitan area, since all transportation infrastructure points downtown. If a company were to locate in some arbitrary suburb/exurb, sure the people in that area would be knocking down their door to work there, but people cross-town from there probably wouldn't even consider it, since the commute would be even worse (assuming they can't move).

martinald 10y ago

Surely for a growing city what you need is 1bed apartments, for young workers moving to the city? At least in London 1 or 2bed apartments go very quickly off plan, but 3 and 4 bed apartments are really slow to move.

joshlemer 10y ago

I don't quite understand the often made claim that there is simultaneously a dearth of 2+ bedroom apartments in Toronto, as well as a huge demand for them, as well as them being unprofitable for developers. Shouldn't savvy investors be able to see the market opportunity and put money into larger units?

pmiller2 10y ago
2+ BR apartments rent for less per square foot than 1 BR and studios. If demand for 1 BRs isn't being fully met, then there's no reason to consider building larger apartments.
VLM 10y ago
Its a misalignment where you're talking about private citizens having an incredible demand for something that's only sold in a marketplace flooded with financial speculators. One group wants a place to live that's permanently affordable at their income, the other group bought what boils down to a financial option contract on the hopes a greater fool will pay twice as much for the commodity next year. Those groups can't coexist in the same neighborhood or marketplace. The city I live in only builds 1%er apartments for investors, and construction is absolutely booming for them, which is very nice for those investors. Those are some very nice empty condo towers. The market for the lower 99% percentile income is totally separate and different, and frankly empty. There is no crossover. Perhaps its like gold, in that its a commodity for investment but once price exceeds practical use levels for connector plating and tooth capping, its no longer relevant to the practical use fields at all, and its price can completely decouple and head to the moon. At some point the concept of owning a box full of air downtown will completely decouple from the concept of a place where humans live. At that point investment prices can and will go infinite with no effect on human housing, solely dependent on national fed rates and international currency exchange rates.

amyjess 10y ago

> If you try to find more affordable housing by living further from the city, you start hating your life as you commute the 2+ hours in. It's like trying to live in Walnut Creek and work in SF. It can be done, but why? The answer to this is to pressure companies to move their offices out to the suburbs. One of the reasons why Texas still has affordable housing with good commutes is because a lot of companies have abandoned the traditional central business districts and moved into boomburbs and edge cities. I live in the burbs, and of the four jobs I've had here, I've commuted farther out into the burbs for three of them (with a 15-20 minute commute by car). The one company I worked for that had offices downtown was the most poorly-run company I've ever worked for; them having offices in a place where no other tech company has offices was the least of my problems with them, but I did think "what tech company in Dallas makes people commute downtown?" when I was working there. Why are people in Toronto's suburbs not just working in the suburbs? Is it because the businesses there are still stuck in the old model of having all their offices downtown? If so, let's throw huge financial incentives at them to get them to move their offices to the suburbs. I've been mulling around an idea for a while of placing massive tax penalties on companies that hire people to work in a different county from where they live. Let's make employers pay ten times the income tax on every employee that lives outside the county where they work, and at the same time make it illegal for companies to make a current employee move or discriminate against a potential hire based on where they live. This will make them relocate to where their employees actually live. Or at least get them to switch as much of their workforce to remote as they can. I'm fine either way.

joshlemer 10y ago
>let's throw huge financial incentives at them to get them to move their offices to the suburbs Aren't companies already highly incentivized to not locate in the downtown core, simply by the astronomical cost of real-estate downtown? It seems to make sense that highly specialized industries would locate downtown, because that gives them access to workers from virtually the entire metropolitan area, since all transportation infrastructure points downtown. If a company were to locate in some arbitrary suburb/exurb, sure the people in that area would be knocking down their door to work there, but people cross-town from there probably wouldn't even consider it, since the commute would be even worse (assuming they can't move).