Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 515

Today, Slate Asset Management announced its latest condominium project: Corktown. Named after its neighborhood, Corktown is located in downtown Hamilton just south of the GO Centre station.

If you're a longtime reader of this blog, you might remember that I first wrote about this site a few years ago when we were just starting community engagement.

Since then, the design has evolved to include a tower on the southeast corner of the block (pictured above) and a mid-rise building along John Street South. This site is also now fully zoned.

So it's go time. Phase one, called Corktown East, will launch this summer and condo pre-registration is live as of today. To register, head over here .

Housing supply is one of those topics that a lot of people can't seem to agree on. Some people, including annoying city bloggers from Toronto, will tell you that we're not building nearly enough new housing. While others will tell you that, no, everything is just fine . We are totally building enough to meet demand.

So today I am going to encourage all of you to read Brian Potter's latest Construction Physics article . In it, he answers the question: Is there a housing shortage or not? But just in case some of you don't feel like doing that, here is the tl;dr:

• You can't look at construction rates alone and infer whether or not you have a housing shortage. There are so many other factors to consider, including household size (see above chart). A drop in household size alone, for example, means that you need more housing, even if nothing else is going on.

• The US is probably short at least several million housing units right now.

• Vacancy rates, within a market, are pretty useful for predicting housing cost increases. When vacancy rates fall, prices go up. This is one reason why housing supply matters.

• Looking at the gap between population increases and housing supply increases is "hilariously non-predictive" if you're trying to determine whether or not you need more housing. We've all seen this before: This city added X people, but only constructed Y new homes.

• Finally, there is an extremely strong correlation between housing supply restrictions (i.e. land use restrictions) and home prices. It turns out that the harder we make it to build new homes, the more expensive they become.

So yeah, Potter's article is definitely worth a read when you get a moment.

Chart via Construction Physics

Here are two interesting studies that explore the relationship between remote work (distributed teams) and innovation:

1. This one explores how distributed teams have impacted "disruptive scientific discoveries" from 1961 to 2020. To measure this they look at scientific discoveries that end up becoming widely cited, which they take to mean that the work has supplanted an existing body of knowledge. Here they find that distributed work is inversely correlated with disruptive innovation. It is fine for incremental improvements, but it is less than ideal for new foundational ideas. That said, they do note that new technologies -- stuff like Zoom -- have started to minimize the innovation gap by helping people communicate as if they were co-located.

2. But stuff like Zoom isn't perfect. The second study looks at the impact of virtual communication on idea generation. And what they find is that videoconferencing is bad for that, largely because it focuses people on a screen and "prompts a narrower cognitive focus." So if your job involves coming up with new ideas, Zoom may not be the best forum for that. But you probably already knew that.