Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 627

https://twitter.com/JeremiahDJohns/status/1401349626385534977?s=20

A friend of mine circulated this tweet storm over the weekend. It is an explanation of how NYC's housing market works using the example of oranges. The author ends by saying that, "it is a parody and an exaggeration, but I promise you it's not much of one."

The crux of this story about oranges is that if you don't deliver enough to meet market demand, you're going to invariably run into a problem of affordability. If people really want oranges, they are going to bid up the price of whatever oranges they can get their hands on. The same is true for housing.

But there are, of course, some obvious differences between homes and oranges. People don't live in oranges. And I would imagine that there are other ways to get your daily recommended intake of vitamin C.

As far as I know, people also don't buy oranges with the hope that they can derive a rental income stream and/or that they will be worth more tomorrow. And so I'm sure that many of you will be quick to point out that it is perhaps the speculative nature of housing that makes it different from most oranges.

Still, there's no denying that, in most cities around the world, we do a lot to make it exceedingly difficult to build new housing. We constrain supply -- such that we perpetually underserve the market -- and then we wonder why prices continue to rise.

Disagree with this take? Let me know in the comment section below.

I was searching for a location this morning on Google Maps and I came across the "popular times" chart that many of you are probably familiar with. It shows you how busy the location you're looking at tends to be throughout the day. But this time around, I noticed a pulsing "live" dot and it got me wondering: How live is live?

Google collects this data from of our phones.

It is aggregated and anonymized Location History data from anyone who has opted in on their Google Account. If you're using Google Maps and have your location services set to "always", you can actually see a timeline of the places you've visited -- even if you haven't explicitly navigated to them (see above).

So the short answer is that the live data is really live. If there's a spike in the busyness of a particular venue -- one that doesn't match historical busyness patterns -- the Google network can pick it up.

I'm fascinated by this kind of city data because I see it as part of the future of city building. Why not use more data to inform the way in which we plan and build our cities. Retail data, traffic data, migratory patterns, population densities -- all of this and more is now available to us.

Here are two charts from a recent blog post by Ryerson University's Centre for Urban Research and Land Development. The charts compare residential building permits issued for ground-related housing vs. apartment suites.

Over the last two quarters (Q4 2020 and Q1 2021), the Greater Golden Horseshoe (GGH) issued a record (all-time record?) number of permits: 39,734 housing units. This represents a 56% year-over-year increase.

The biggest contributor to this increase is, not surprisingly, apartment units. These permits saw a 73.6% year-over-year increase. There's simply no other way to deliver this amount of new housing -- at least in the context of the GGH. You have to go up.

But given the price increases that we have seen across the region for ground-related housing, Ryerson's CUR concludes that there must be a strong home buyer preference that is simply not being met by the amount of low-rise supply we are delivering.

Notwithstanding this potential mismatch, I don't see things changing anytime soon.