Author Archives: Niloo Nouri

Bridging the gap between houses and high-rises

As the nation grapples with a housing shortage, cities must balance efforts to build new homes and achieve affordability goals with economic realities. That lesson has come to San Francisco, where planning commissioners and supervisors have come to understand that the city’s approach to encouraging affordable housing needs to change.

This week, the band got together to announce a development charge reduction program here in Toronto. Basically the way it works is that the City is receiving “up to $1.5 billion for eligible housing-enabling infrastructure projects” and this, in turn, will allow the city to reduce its reliance on DCs and lower them by 40-60% (depending on the housing type) between 2026 and 2029.

It has been said that the definition of a habit is that you don’t feel normal until you do it, and that’s certainly how I’ve been feeling over the last few days without writing this blog. I’ve been unusually preoccupied.

Over the last few months we’ve examined the extent of the construction industry’s productivity problem. We’ve looked at a variety of construction productivity metrics, both for the US and for countries around the world, and found that construction productivity almost always rises much less in construction than it does in industries like manufacturing;

Designed for local nonprofit, BOSS – Step Up Housing provides 39 units of supportive housing for people experiencing homelessness along a centrally-located stretch of downtown Berkeley.
Step-Up Housing redefines the classic SRO by creating a model for the 50×100 Californian lot in Berkeley.

San Francisco has seen demand for space explode in the past three years. Amid an ongoing artificial intelligence boom, office vacancy has finally begun to fall, apartment rents are hitting records and demand for single-family homes has exploded.

The state-of-the-art facility will be the new home of the UC Berkeley College of Computing, Data Science, and Society, promoting cross-collaboration and accelerating AI-driven discovery.

The measure ushers in more light-filled, infill-suited apartment homes—and sets a model for other states.

From May 2017:  For many years I lived in Northwest Portland, Oregon.

It was a part of the city first settled by white pioneers in the 1860s, but development really took off when the streetcar arrived in the first half of the 1900s. (A century later, the old streetcar tracks had to be dug up so they could put down the new streetcar tracks.)