The fact that Toronto has been the North American leader in residential condo development has been trumpeted loudly and proudly for a long time. It’s even been a part of election campaigns and public relations campaigns. But it might finally be over. According to a popular Toronto real estate site, the city has slid into second place on the real estate leader board with New York City now officially developing more multi-family housing units than Toronto.
Up until now, Toronto had held the top spot for residential developments, with 38,114 multi-family units currently underway. However, it still doesn’t beat New York’s 38,815. It may not seem like much of a difference, but it proves a good point.
“It reflects the strength of the City of Toronto,” said Mathew Rosenblatt, principal at Cityscape Development Corp., the group behind the developments at the Distillery District.
Despite New York City having a population triple the size of Toronto’s, their numbers in growing developments don’t lie.
“A city’s construction numbers are a reflection of a stable and growing economy. Toronto has led in the construction sector for years, despite the fact that New York City has a population more than three times that of Toronto,” said Matthew Slutsky, president and co-founder of BuzzBuzzHome.
So what’s the big deal?
According to Rosenblatt, “The big deal is that Toronto took pride in the fact that we were once the leader in residential development. We were the little guy building big condominiums, being compared to one of the biggest cities in the game.”
Measuring real estate data across different markets in North America, BuzzBuzzHome has found that Toronto actually has more residential units per capita than New York City, even though altogether New York City technically has more units.
The reason is that Toronto’s unit sizes are much smaller. Actually, only a mere six per cent of these Toronto units have three bedrooms or more. Location also makes a huge difference when it comes to the pace of building. Toronto’s downtown residential development projects are getting priority with more than half of the units being constructed in the core.
New York City is distributing 36 per cent of their units throughout the city in both midtown and downtown neighbourhoods.
“New York is just a much denser city. We still have a lot of pockets in Toronto that are available to develop in, and those don’t really exist anymore in New York City,” says Rosenblatt.
“Remember, we are always still building as a city, still growing. If we stopped growing so would our need for residential development,” he adds.
