Planner Sean Hertel shared this (embedded above) on Twitter over the weekend. It is a lawn sign from Toronto's Junction neighborhood that is calling for a stop to demolishing family houses for high rises.
One, high-rises are monstrous beings that enjoy praying on innocent low-rise houses and squashing them with their feet, and sometimes their asymmetric hands.
Two, it is mostly impossible to conceive of a world in Toronto where families live in high-rises and don't live in grade-related housing with a backyard.
And three, there is little value in building more, rather than less, housing in order to help with affordability concerns. Perhaps the thinking is that it needs to be low-rise affordable housing, or nothing .
With all of this said, let's do a little thought exercise today on the blog.
Let's for a second assume that there aren't any high-rises proposed in the Junction; only European-scaled mid-rise buildings that sit on the area's main avenues and back onto low-rise single-family neighborhoods. Let's also assume that these buildings will be sculpted in complete deference to their rear neighbors so that things like shadows are minimized.
Let's assume that more housing is better than less housing.
Finally, let's assume that, get this, noble families may actually be able to live in mid-rise and high-rise buildings. And that there are already many successful examples of this taking place in the city, such as over here in CityPlace .
What key messages would this lawn sign be then communicating?
We poured the last section of our level 4 slab at Junction House yesterday. As I was leaving the site, I tweeted this photo out from Watkinson Avenue. What you are seeing is the northwest corner of the building where we have seven two-storey towns that front onto our rear laneway. In response to this tweet, Andrew Williamson asked a most excellent question: "timber next?"
My response was that we would love to do a mass timber building. We have certainly looked at it in the past, and we will continue to look for opportunities to use more sustainable building materials wherever possible. But there are challenges to overcome and a project like Junction House would have been far more difficult to do in mass timber. I'm not an expert when it comes to wood construction, but I will offer up three items that have come up for us in the past.
The first is trade familiarity. We are in a highly inflationary hard cost environment right now. Everyone is hyper focused on costs and the market is competitive. So switching to a construction method that is less common comes with some additional risks. But this will almost certainly change over time as the market evolves and more people adopt mass timber.
The second is water. The Junction area, or at least parts of it, have a relatively high water table. That is certainly the case with our site. One of the things you need to do during construction is dewater, or draw down the water level within your site so that you can actually build. In our case, we built a watertight below-grade parking structure, though that isn't always the case.
Dewatering comes at a cost and so generally you want to stop dewatering as soon as it is feasible to do so. But you need to make sure that you have enough weight to counteract the buoyancy forces associated with groundwater returning to the site. Generally this means you need to wait until you've finished constructing a certain level in the building so that there's enough mass. The engineers will say things, "we can shut off the dewatering once we complete our level 4 slab."
The thing to consider with all of this is that concrete is heavier than wood, which means that you may need to run your dewatering program for longer (increasing your costs). Or, if your building isn't all that big, maybe you'll never have enough weight to offset the below-grade water forces and so you have to look at other methods for keeping your building from floating away. Again, this will increase your costs.
The last thing I'll mention is that mass timber buildings generally have higher floor-to-floor heights compared to cast-in-place concrete. What this means is that a 9 storey building in timber is going to be taller, in meters, compared to a 9 storey building in concrete -- even if the clear heights within the suites are the same. This is a massive deal when you're operating in an environment that is highly sensitive to building height.
In the case of Junction House, we were negotiating our final height in centimeter increments -- literally arguing whether it could be 50cm to 1.3m taller than some perceived maximum height. This is, in my mind, absurd, but it became a hill that people were willing to die on. The result is that our laneway towns (pictured above) went from having an entrance that was a few steps up off the lane to having an entrance that is now a few steps down off the lane. That is how we ultimately solved our centimeter problem.
This wounded me to my core because, at the end of the day, what are people going to remark: The additional meter at the top of the building or the relationship that these towns will now have to the street? It will, of course, be the latter. So please know that our hearts were in the right place. But what this also means is that had we been trying to build in wood, we likely would have lost a floor during this negotiation and that would have killed the entire project.
This Twitter thread by UC Davis Law Professor, Chris Elmendorf, is a good reminder that there can be a meaningful difference between actual completed homes and zoned land that might one day becoming new housing.
The point he makes is as follows: The state of California's housing needs allocation for the city of San Francisco is approximately 80,000 new homes over the next decade. In the past, cities could demonstrate that they were able to meet these targets through, as I understand it, some fairly loose assumptions. But more recently, amendments have made it such that the probability of new homes actually getting built needs to be considered.
San Francisco has been doing this and, according to Chris, the conclusion was that the city should upzone portions of the city -- primarily on the west side -- to allow for some 22,000 new homes. Sounds cool. But as part of this process, the city also hired an outside consultant to run indicative pro formas and assess overall development feasibility. This is what they found:
I haven't seen any of the actual numbers, but what this chart is saying is that nobody is going to develop on the west side of the city no matter what entitlements you put in place (tier 3 and tier 4 market areas). The only new development that is likely to take place is high-rise development over 24 storeys in the highest value submarkets (tier 1 and tier 2 market areas).
Based on this, the 22,000 new homes figure is probably closer to 0 new homes.
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Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly.
