OUR LAND is facing a housing crisis we can no longer ignore. Our bigger problem is that any traditional response to provide reasonably priced housing will more likely exacerbate, rather than solve our issues: our system has set us up for failure.

Our issues won’t simply be fixed through clever loan structures and interest rates, nor high-density supply, instead they penetrate our broader policy, economic, architectural, and cultural thinking. It is a hard puzzle to unpack, so we will focus in on the condo tower, the dominant architectural response to our housing shortages, to better understand the crisis at hand.

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The Tower and Transitional Units

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By the end of 2020, the demand pressure on the Greater Toronto Area market indicated a missing supply from the simplest perspective of traditional economics. In fact, in January 2021, Toronto and surrounding areas were missing 52 towers* of housing market supply needed in order to quell ongoing demand pressure. Of course, things are not so simple. In the face of a housing crisis, our immediate response has been to build condo towers as high-density suppliers of dwelling units. This has in fact perpetuated our housing issues to a point that has become absurd.

Typically, small condo units are understood as "transitional", meant for first-time homebuyers to get into the market. The typical Canadian will go through 5 homes in their lifetime, and the condo unit is designer as your perfect starter. It's cheap, and generally most are getting out in a short matter of time. Thus, transitional.

As we increasingly bring to market these units which are transitional in nature, we produce an affordability crisis and a false sense of supply security: transactions and market activity increases because we have a market designed for owners to continuously transition, but our long-term supply issue remains unaddressed as we increasingly support higher density, transitional units to enter the marketplace. At the same time, these high density developments eliminate the economic viability of relatively lower density projects in a speculative market with high base land costs. We need to be very careful we do not entirely eliminate the viability of producing a regional housing stock with longer term appeal for owners.

The tower is just an object that indicates a much deeper system at play. Our development process, from policy and economics, to design and construction, favour certain types of responses, which tend to only get further reinforced by increasingly layered, policy. Regardless of appropriateness, we can only respond one way to our housing crisis if our system thoroughly favours a specific response for very specific cases.

This is the curse of cumbersome, over-politicized space, hardly any decisions are left to be made, and negotiating with planning departments is a slow and expensive process. In fact, in Canada we have the second slowest permitting time of all OECD countries. This is a cost that every homeowner is carrying, with interest, on their mortgage. Everyone should deeply care about housing policy.

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The issue is that the more we continue to think a certain way, and through certain responses, our understanding of space gets more reinforced and limited. It becomes impossible to produce outside the status quo: we effectively eliminate the possibility of alternative responses.

Ultimately we are exploring the questions: What is the legacy of the condo tower? How might we make other architectural responses economically and socially viable? And what is the public's role in demanding better housing and getting involved?

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