Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 233

Portable toilets are needed on every construction site, and in lots of other places too. Generally speaking, though, they are not pleasant spaces. But that doesn't seem to be the case in Switzerland. I just discovered a Swiss company called Kompotoi . They make high-quality portable toilets out of spruce, and they have made a commitment to composting as much human waste as possible.

But the really unique feature that I had never seen before is that each toilet comes equipped with a bin of wood shavings ("litter"), which you are supposed to sprinkle over your poop once you're done. This serves two important functions. One, it dries out the waste which greatly reduces any smells. I can attest that the toilet I used smelt just fine. And two, doesn't it just look better to go into a toilet and see wood shavings as opposed to poop?

This might be an instance of "yeah, only in Switzerland." The retail price for their classic toilet model is CHF 5,966. That works out to about C$9,500 once you covert it to our painfully weak dollar.

Here is a chart from a recent Bloomberg article summarizing who owns single-family houses in the US.

As of Q1-2024, about 69% were owner-occupied, about 26.6% were owned by small landlords (1-9 homes), and the rest were owned by what many are now calling "corporate landlords."

The point of this graph was to show that, despite getting a lot of political attention, corporate landlords still own very little. Let's call it sub 4%, excluding iBuying companies like OpenDoor. So how much of a problem is this, really?

Smaller landlords control much more of the US market. And at the end of the day, a house owned by a small landlord versus a corporate landlord doesn't change the supply-demand balance of a market. It still represents an available home.

The first and more important problem to solve is overall housing supply . Because that does change the supply-demand balance of a market. And once again, there's no shortage of data to support the finding that increased supply tends to moderate rental growth.

For the record, I also dislike using the term home to refer to single-family houses . Home is not a housing type. It is simply a place where people live permanently. So whenever I see a title like "US homes," I get confused, because I don't actually know what they're referring to.

If you read the article, it would appear they're only talking about single-family houses. But implying that these are the only kind of home feels to me like an anachronism.

Camera: Fujifilm X-T3 (23mm lens )