Million dollar townhouse the new normal for entry-level real estate

Get used to it.

We had some family business to attend to in the city today. Our journey took us to the northern reaches of North York, in the vicinity of the aptly-named Pleasant Avenue.

Pleasant Avenue was developed as a middle class subdivision, mostly in the sixties and into the seventies, when the middle class still had pleasant prospects. What's been happening in the neighbourhood, as in many other established Toronto neighbourhoods, is that whenever one of those 70's era middle class houses comes up for sale, it's marketed as a building lot. 

Hey Mr. Builder! Buy this perfectly viable four bed two bath home for a million five and rip 'er down. Put up four thousand feet of vinyl siding and particle board, (with quartz counters and Miele appliances, of course!) and turn it over for three million! 

Don't laugh. It's happening all over town.

But it's all affordable housing, because as my dear Daddy used to remind me, and he was in the business for fifty years; if somebody bought it, it must have been affordable.

What's even more amazing is that as we're negotiating our way into the city, we pass one "townhouse" development after another that isn't anywhere near anything that could be considered a town. There's million dollar plus "towns" for sale off King Road, where you're half-way between Newmarket and Richmond Hill, each of which is at least 15 kilometres distant.

How is that a town home?

But I digress. 

Point is, there's no housing shortage for folks who can arrange the financing on a million dollar townhouse in rural King township, or a three million McMansion on Pleasant Ave.

There is, however, a growing housing crisis for those who can't.

Neumann solves Toronto housing crisis!

Check this out.

That's from a couple years ago, but it's even more apropos today.

While leafing through the Globe today I briefly noted an advert for some urban development gab-fest, sponsored by the Globe, and featuring former City of Toronto Chief Planner Jenn Keesmaat as one of the key attractions.

Keesmaat was top dog in the City of Toronto's planning department for five years. During those five years the livability of Toronto got worse every year.

Apparently, that makes her an expert in urban planning! She's put out her shingle as a urban planning consultant. She even has Ted Talks on the matter!


I don't do Ted Talks, but I think we'll be seeing the favela solution to our housing crisis long before we see any Keesmaat solutions.

Favelas get a bad rap, but they're just what happens when the blue tarps give way to cinder-block shanties.





Those communities of "losers" are remarkably well self-governed. Just look at our Lima Group confreres. They've got bustling favela communities all over the place, and they've also got astronomical murder rates.

But they've solved their housing crises!

Building a Toronto for the Beautiful People

It's been twelve years since urban planning guru Richard Florida arrived, to much fanfare, at the University of Toronto.

His arrival coincided with a great awakening among Toronto's chattering classes as to how "world class" the city had become. The city was hungry for the "creative class" baloney Florida was serving up.

He's still serving. Check out Sidewalk Labs could make Toronto a world leader in urban tech in today's Globe and Mail. Richard's got the roadmap, just released by Alphabet-Google, "that can propel Toronto to the top of the heap..."

"...Sidewalk Labs can be the propellant Toronto needs to become a world leader..." and so forth. We've got cutting edge research, we attract the world's best talent, and there's a whole lotta catalyzing going on!

It's all about "Urban Tech," dontcha know (not to be confused with Turban Tech, although there is some overlap.)

And what's that?

This new sector involves the fusing of technology and urban living and spans a plethora of emerging industries such as ride-hailing, co-living, co-working, mobility, food delivery, real estate or property tech and construction tech.

Got it? Sounds like if we play our cards right, the Port Lands could be ground zero for the global gig economy!

Colour me sceptical, but isn't this more or less the same happy-talk we've heard from Florida all along? While he's been relentlessly trumpeting the pursuit of global greatness, the average price of a home in Toronto has more than doubled from under $400K to over $800K, the social housing wait-list stretches close to ten years, "affordable" housing remains much talked about but never built, and the rate of population growth going forward is expected to double.

Sounds to me like Florida is planning a city for the beautiful people sitting court-side at a Raptor's game, not the Uber drivers or the bicycle couriers delivering your shawarma to your co-working space.

No, looks like those folks will be "co-living," at maybe four or five to a studio rental.


What's not to like?

Own a French chateau in downtown Toronto for a mere $3.8 million

I've been trying to scale back my newsprint addiction. Picking up the Globe at the Korean Extortionist's runs about twenty-five bucks a week. You'd think that would entitle you to "free" access to their on-line edition, but you'd be wrong.

The Monday to Thursday papers are mighty thin. On Friday you get the thin paper plus a real estate and a car section, for the same price as you pay for those thin papers from Monday to Thursday, so the Friday paper is, relatively speaking, a good deal.

Today, in the Friday Real Estate section, I was pleased to find a French chateau available in the vicinity of downtown, at 111 Givins St. to be precise.

I don't know what picture forms in your mind when you read "French chateau," but for me the words conjure up images of sophisticated estates surrounded by opulent gardens.

Not that I'm seriously shopping for a French chateau or anything else in downtown, but it's nice to dream...

For $3.8 million, your French chateau in downtown Toronto is parked on a twenty foot lot.

That's not a chateau, it's a new build on an infill lot.

Nevertheless, somebody will buy it, probably above list price.

That's what Toronto has become. A great place to live if you've got four million to spend on a nice house with twenty feet of frontage.


For everyone else, it's best to look elsewhere.

Rise Up Toronto!

Here's a dismal headline from a couple months back: Average cost of a one bedroom rental in Toronto hits $2,260.

With that in mind, it's interesting to see the new Doug Ford installed board of directors for Waterfront Toronto, the agency tasked with developing 350 acres in the Port Lands; four white male millionaires reporting to a white male real estate billionaire.

Yup, that sounds like the crew you'd want in place to make sure there's a good mix of affordable housing included in those 350 acres! The headline in the Star announces "Expert disappointed new members all men." I'm no expert, but I'm more disappointed that there's no anti-poverty activists, no affordable housing advocates, and no one from academia, be they male, female, or genderfluid.

Toronto has a housing affordability crisis. This is not news and doesn't require any studying or debating. It needs shovels in the ground and cement trucks pouring concrete. Government controls the land and the approval process. What is the rationale for handing development to the same billionaire class of real estate moguls who are largely responsible for creating the affordability crisis in the first place?


It's time for a different approach!

The future's looking bleaker every day

It's amazing what the Globe and Mail can find room for when they don't give half the opinion section over to that self-aggrandising American harpy, Sarah Kendzior. Today's Sarah-free paper featured thoughtful and timely opinion pieces by a couple of Canadians instead.

Iconic Canadian architect Jack Diamond offers a scathing critique of Toronto's descent into dystopian uninhabitability. We're not there yet, but that's our general direction. He's clearly talking to the two mayoral candidates and the current preem, but it's a good read for anyone interested in the future of what could still be a great liveable city.

Just a few pages away you can find an advert for two-bedroom plus den condos starting at a mere $710,000... oh, wait a minute; this two-bed plus den measures out at 764 square feet!

WTF? How do you get two bedrooms and a den out of 764 feet? Well, the "den" is 5' by 6'4" for starters. Back in the day, when Toronto's first wave of highrises were going up at ten bucks a foot, 764 would have been considered a roomy one bedroom apartment. Fifty years later it's a two-bedroom + den condo that clocks in at a whisker under a thousand bucks a foot.

We're clearly trending in the wrong direction!

Elsewhere in the Opinion section, Canadian academic Marcel O'Gorman offers up a timely analysis of our tech enslavement. We even get a shout-out to the great Canadian obfuscator Marshall McLuhan! Marcel seems to be a little wary of our brave new tech-obsessed world, and who can blame him? You can fill your two-bedroom plus den 764 foot condo with all the tech gadgets you want; it ain't gonna get any bigger.


Those two articles alone were worth the price of admission (still $6.30 at the Korean extortionist).

Pot-addled hillbilly beats elite opinion makers to the story, again...

By a year!

More than a year ago I made the observation that the creatives, the innovators, the "disrupters" won't be moving to Toronto if they can't afford to live here. Jeff Gray tells you the same thing on page A17 of today's Globe and Mail.

The so-called "solutions" discussed in Gray's story don't fully address the problem, in part because any solution that relies on "developers" is asking the very people who have largely created the problem to remedy it. Incentivising for-profit developers to build affordable housing is another way of saying you're going to subsidize their profits. That's the wrong approach.

Putting up apartment blocks is not rocket science. It doesn't require "developers." The Romans were putting up multi-storey buildings well before the time of Jesus. Toronto should be cutting the for-profit developers out of the picture, not subsidizing them. What makes property development both risky and lucrative is the cost of land and the convoluted approval process. Since the city of Toronto already owns plenty of land and controls the approval process, what's holding them back from getting shovels in the ground?

You don't need "developers." You need young keeners with fresh Construction Technology diplomas in hand to work as project co-ordinators. The construction unions will be happy for the work whether the finished product is nonprofit or designed to further enrich Toronto's billionaire developers.

Elsewhere in the Globe, John Rapley offers a meditation on Canada's love affair with home ownership. He reports the imaginary conversation of a couple of his imaginary friends which segues into a philosophical treatise on the meaning of money.

That's just more BS that skirts around the fundamental problem causing our runaway real estate inflation and the crisis of affordability; supply and demand. When the federal government is fixated on continuously ramping up immigration while simultaneously washing their hands of any responsibility to provide housing, it's no wonder we are facing a crisis in housing affordability.

That's not the fault of the developers. They're folks who play by the rules we've made for them, and they wouldn't exist if they weren't profitable. We can't relegate housing to the private sector and then complain when market forces make the resulting product unaffordable to the majority of Canadians.


A robust policy of affordable public housing co-sponsored by all levels of government is long overdue.

Some thoughts on Toronto's housing crisis

I was reading in my G&M today that the median household income in Toronto is seventy-eight thousand and change.

Meanwhile, the average price of a house has now passed a million bucks.

The affordability crisis has been brewing for years, but it wasn't till this week that Mayor Tory gathered up federal and provincial pols for a sit-down about what to do about the crisis.

Luckily for us, they came up with a plan.

They're gonna study it!

That is so Canadian, eh? We don't even expect our various levels of government to solve problems anymore. As long as they're studying the problem they get a free pass.

PM Justin got elected a year and a half ago on a promise to legalize the weed 'o wisdom. Is it legal yet?

No. They have to study the matter a bit more.

The federal government (ie Justin) has been underfunding First Nation's education for as long as we've had education. They continue to underfund it by about 50% compared to what provincial school boards get. What are they doing about this blatantly racist legacy?

They're studying it, of course.

So don't get your hopes up about any resolution to Toronto's housing crisis...

They'll still be studying it a hundred years from now.