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Less Is the New More
Is the 500-square-foot condo the insane brainchild of greedy developers or a triumphant symbol of the new downtown? By Bert Archer
Tight squeeze: Kajsa Erickson and Andrew Long in the King West condo they share with two cats
Image credit: Carolyn C
You may have noticed there are some condominiums going up around town. At the beginning of the boom, roughly a decade ago, developers were adding 4,000 units to our skies a year. Now the number is 16,000, with condos accounting for 40 per cent of all new dwellings.
Alain de Botton, in his latest book The Architecture of Happiness, makes the case that where we choose to live directly reflects what we’re lacking in the rest of our lives. Right after World War I, for example, when people believed that civilization itself was crumbling around them, Bauhaus and Le Corbusier came along and offered perfectly calibrated machines for living, with clean, white walls and straight lines that were a defiant response to Vimy’s mud.
Toronto condos have been getting smaller and smaller since the ’90s. About three per cent of new ones are truly teeny: 500 square feet or less. In other words, a few thousand people in this city have opted to live in a space the size of a suburban one-car garage.
You could argue that the rush on the itty-bitty is because we’re running out of space and our real estate is getting more expensive. Tokyo, for example, has almost no land and its houses and apartments are correspondingly petite. But it’s an argument you’d probably lose.
Sprawl in Toronto is legion; with no natural boundaries to the north, east or west, we’re not going to run out of land to build on any time soon. Yes, the cost of real estate has been rising precipitously, as any of your friends who bought in 1998 will be only too happy to remind you. But our economy is ballooning, too, with interest rates making mortgages close to free and new regulations allowing us to buy a place even if we don’t have money in the bank. It is also good to remind ourselves that, despite all our kvetching about house prices, Toronto is only the 82nd most expensive city on earth (Moscow’s number one, followed by London, Seoul and Tokyo). We have the room, and we can afford it: the real reason our condos are getting smaller is that our city is getting more fun to be out in.
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