Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 545

I'm not exactly sure what a "pre-fall" menswear collection is all about. But Louis Vuitton recently honored the late and great fashion designer Virgil Abloh by photographing one of them in and around Le Corbusier's Firminy-Vert complex about an hour outside of Lyon, France.

Abloh was apparently a huge fan of the work of architect Le Corbusier . And he tried to apply the same kind of utilitarian approach to fashion as Le Corbusier had done to cities, buildings, and housing.

The Firminy-Vert complex is a series of buildings, one of which is the last of his "Housing Unit" designs (1965). Le Corbusier designed and built a number of these, with the most well known one being in the south of France in Marseille (1952).

They were a utopian model for high-density housing, with "streets" instead of corridors and with schools and other social functions being housed high up and inside the building. They were intended to act as a kind of vertical city.

To the untrained eye, they might resemble the kind of public housing that today goes unloved in many cities throughout the world. But for whatever reason, these particular renditions have largely stood the test of time.

Maybe it's because of their importance to the development of modernist architecture, or maybe it's because most of them (if not all of them) are now UNESCO World Heritages sites.

My take is that it shows you that architecture and built form alone can't solve every problem. The same building in different places and different contexts, can and will perform very differently. In this particular case, in Firminy-Vert, the complex seems to be doing rather well. The perfect backdrop for a luxury pre-fall fashion collection.

Yesterday I wrote about our housing doom loop .

Today, the province of Ontario responded (maybe not to my post) by publishing this Housing Affordability Task Force report . In it, are 55 recommendations to improve overall housing supply across the province, with the end goal of adding 1.5 million homes over the next 10 years.

I'm still making my way through the report, but the recommendations can basically be grouped into these five main buckets (taken verbatim from this press release ):

• Make changes to planning policies and zoning to allow for greater density and increase the variety of housing.

• Reduce and streamline urban design rules to lower costs of development.

• Depoliticize the approvals process to address NIMBYism and cut red tape to speed up housing.

• Prevent abuse of the appeal process and address the backlog at the Ontario Land Tribunal by prioritizing cases that increase housing.

• Align efforts between all levels of government to incentivize more housing.

Reform is badly needed. And I have gone on and on and on and on over the years about a number of the problems associated with how we build new homes and how we expect them to suddenly become more affordable.

Still, I think that most of the general public would be shocked to learn how long things take, how complicated we have decided to make land use approvals, and how a single person with a vested interested in seeing no development can hold up the delivery of thousands of new homes.

Progress is measured in years and decades. Months simply evaporate while you wait for the next PDF document to grant you access to some other labyrinthian planning hurdle. It doesn't need to be this way.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2uRUg7HPsK8oeLdnhPNCdg?si=b4ab87565f874547

This discussion between Patrick O'Shaughnessy and Marc Andreessen is a great follow-up to my recent post about the productization of housing . Broadly speaking it's about tech, software eating everything, and the future of the world. But if you skip to around the 15 minute mark, Marc talks about the growing divide in our economy between sectors that are changing rapidly and sectors that are changing slowly.

Examples of the former include things like computers, media, retail, cars, and a lot of the other stuff that we regular consume. Examples of the latter include things like healthcare, education, and housing (you know, the pillars of the American Dream).

The noteworthy problem with this divide is that the fast changing sectors are producing things that have been getting more affordable over time. The specific example that he gives is televisions. Think about how much more TV you can get today compared to when they were first introduced.

In contrast to this, things in the slow changing sectors keep getting more expensive. The same university education is exponentially more expensive today than it was a few decades ago, even though it's far more important for people to have an education than to own TVs.

A similar thing can be said about housing. How much has really changed in terms of the way we build new homes?

One of the common threads across these slow change sectors, Marc argues, is strong government intervention. We restrict supply such that we can't meet demand. We then respond to higher prices by trying to subsidize demand, but this only drives prices up even further. Because, at the end of the day, we haven't addressed the underlying issue.

The result is a doom loop.

If you can't see the embedded podcast above, click here .