Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 328

In the second half of the 19th century, the way Londoners had historically lived, started to change :

In the 1870s, a striking change was occurring in the residential habits of London’s elite. After centuries of living close to the ground in houses,  Charles Dickens Jr.  (son of the famous writer) observed that wealthy residents were starting “to avail themselves of the continental experience … and to adopt the foreign fashion of living in flats.”

The resulting housing typology was something known as the mansion block. And as the name suggests, one of the principal design ideas was that these blocks should, ideally, look like a single giant mansion. In other words, the individual homes were to be obfuscated :

The mansion block was a grand building that borrowed elements of the English terraced house (as a row house is known in British English), particularly the elite “ palace fronted ” terraced houses designed by Scottish architect  Robert Adam  and his brothers a century earlier, which concealed individual houses behind a grand facade to resemble a single palatial structure.

It is a design approach that makes sense. I mean, I can see wealthy people wanting to appear as if they're living in a palatial mansion. That said, it is an approach to multi-family housing that feels somewhat foreign today. Most people don't look up at tall buildings and wonder if it's one person's home.

And we don't aim for that.

Presumably this is, at least partially, because scales grew, builders were looking for economies of scale, and because modernism told us that mansion-looking structures were outdated. Whatever the reasons, multi-family buildings today are not generally conceived of as sub-divided mansions.

What's maybe ironic about this shift, though, is that we went from elaborate and varied facade designs intended to communicate single structures, to modern and repetitive facade designs that, somehow, better communicate the individual homes.

I suppose we got used to the "foreign fashion of living in flats".

Image: Josh Kramer for Bloomberg CityLab

This was a big week for construction progress at One Delisle . On Friday, we poured the first bit of our raft slab foundation on the west side of the site. Big concrete pours like this usually take all day and this case was no different. The team was there late into the evening. And then today, the first of our two tower cranes was erected:

https://videopress.com/v/FpI5u6Nx?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata&useAverageColor=true

The crane going up is always a big milestone because, in my mind, it signals the start of "real" construction. What I mean by this is that all of the stuff that comes before -- demolition, shoring, and excavation -- is really just to get the site ready for building. Well, now we're ready, and that means we're about to go vertical.

A big thanks to the team for working around the clock over the last few days.

About Here makes excellent videos about cities. Here's their latest about missing middle housing:

https://youtu.be/DX_-UcC14xw?si=xV99TXiMbuTQaEEH

In my view, there are two key takeaways.

The first is that cities need to spend way more time understanding the economics of missing middle housing. As Uytae Lee says in the video, our land use policies need to respond to real math and overall financial viability.

The second is that there's real potential here. Uytae gives the example of Auckland which, according to the video, managed to deliver 20,000 new missing middle homes in a 5-year time period.

This is meaningful! And, it is suggested that this has reduced rents in the city by somewhere between 13-35% compared to where they might have gone had this new housing not been built.

As I've said many times before on the blog, the devil is in the details. The headline may sound really great that some city is now allowing 4 or 6 homes on every single-family lot, but that doesn't necessarily mean that any new homes will actually be built.

It's important we change that.

P.S. Thanks to Michael Geller for sharing this video with me.