Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 435

Lloyd Alter of Treehugger recently wrote about this infill housing project in Paris . Designed by Mobile Architectural Office (MAO), it is a 6-storey building with 6 residential suites (two of which are 3-storey triplex suites) and 1 ground floor non-residential space.

Building section:

But here’s where things get really remarkable: the area of this corner site is less than 100 m2 (~1,000 sf), the construction budget was €940,000 (excluding VAT), and almost the entire structure was built out of cross-laminated timber. So overall, this is an incredibly sustainable build: it uses land and services efficiently and it uses low-carbon materials.

At this point, you should now be wondering, “why can’t we just do this everywhere?” And this would be the right question.

Lloyd correctly points out in his article that one of the things that makes this building feasible is that it only has one exit stair (as well as no elevator). Typically you need two means of egress, which can serve as a real barrier to smaller builds like this one here.

But in this case, and this is part of the argument, the building is small enough that, should a fire or emergency happen, occupants could be rescued through their windows. So technically there are still two ways of getting out.

In this year’s predictions , I mentioned that we would see “supportive building code changes”, which would help to encourage more infill housing. Exiting is one of the changes I had in mind when I wrote the post. So here’s hoping that policy makers are reading this blog, looking to projects like this one in Paris, and recognizing the benefits.

Talking about exit stairs may not be as exciting and seemingly impactful as something like a foreign buyer ban , but I promise you that removing the many barriers to building this scale of housing would ultimately bring more benefit to our cities.

P.S. This project is also social rental housing.

Image: MAO

Here is an interactive map , created by the Robert Redford Conservancy for Southern California Sustainability, showing the approximately 1,573,777,062 square feet of industrial space that can be found in Los Angeles, Riverside, and San Bernardino.

The map allows you to zoom in on specific parcels to see things like site area, warehouse size, and year built. You can also play around with different map radii to create a rollup of warehouse space within a specific area, which includes an estimate of daily truck traffic and CO2 produced.

The Guardian also used this data to create the following chart, which is helpful in showing the dominance of certain cities, as well as how much of this industrial space has been built since 2010:

The point of this interactive map, this data, and the accompanying articles is to highlight just how disruptive all of this new industrial space is to these southern California communities and to the environment in general. But I think it is also an important reminder that, whether we like it or not, our online activities have real-world physical implications.

Online shopping requires warehouses and logistics. Online food delivery requires (ghost) kitchens . And online activity, in general, requires the storage of unprecedented amounts of data. All of these "back-end spaces" take up room, even if they're mostly easy to ignore when we're just looking at our phones.

This is our new " phygital " world and, yes, it is changing the landscape of our cities. Now our task is to figure out how to do this in a way that respects communities and respects the environment.

Here's the thing about housing:

The delegates insisted on one hand that “housing is for living not speculation”, but on the other, emphasised the critical importance of real estate to China’s economic growth.

In other words, things are complicated. We want housing to be affordable to more people, but at the same time, we recognize that housing appreciation is kind of useful for overall economic growth. So we're a bit conflicted. And that may be why we tend to take contradictory actions.

Broadly speaking, the current playbook in Canada seems to be as follows: heavily tax new housing , force those who can afford new market-rate housing to subsidize those who can't , and then tax/ban foreign buyers .

https://twitter.com/donnelly_b/status/1611177601220968449?s=20&t=6fy7zjUvjlQEEEhYKURIGQ

Canada's new foreign buyer ban came into effect on January 1 of this year. And for the next 2 years, it prohibits companies and people who are not Canadian citizens or permanent residents from acquiring non-recreational, residential property in Canada. (What is the definition of non-recreational?)

While this may sound good to some -- finally, more homes for Canadians -- we're talking about a relatively small portion of the market, which is likely why there's also little evidence that any of our foreign buyer taxes have been all that effective.

It's really hard to imagine this one working much better. But it certainly sounds like something.