(55) How to Unlock More Mid-Rise Housing in Toronto - Richard Witt - BDP Quadrangle

How to Unlock More Mid-Rise Housing in Toronto -  Richard Witt 

In this episode of the Real Estate Development Insights Podcast, Richard Witt, Global Head of Housing at BDP Quadrangle, discusses Toronto and the GTA’s housing trajectory, comparing global approaches and emphasizing housing as a commoditized product shaped by culture, human scale, and social interaction. He argues Toronto’s recent decade was distorted by speculation and investor-driven condo product, and says the city needs a broader mix—workforce, student, seniors, family, and end-user housing. Reflecting on Toronto’s 2007–08 midrise guidelines, he explains how outdated zoning, lack of density caps, required site-specific zoning bylaw amendments, and lengthy approvals fueled land speculation and slowed delivery. Whitt advises prioritizing certainty and speed, better subsurface information, and more pragmatic approaches to trees and heritage. He also explores modern methods of construction, including mass timber and prefabrication, citing 80 Atlantic’s quiet, fast installation and urging system-based, repeatable midrise strategies.

-          How does Toronto compare to Global Cities?

-          Speculation and Housing Needs

-          Midrise Guidelines Origins

-          Avenues and Built Form Rules

-          No Density Cap Problems

-          Zoning Amendments Slowdown

-          Toronto’s Patchwork Streets

-          Incentives Over Penalties

-          Midrise Developer Pitfalls

-          Systems First Construction

-          Modern Methods Explained

-          Mass Timber Lessons

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Transcript

payam_2_04-10-2026_115925 0:00

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Real Estate Development Insights podcast, where we bring you ideas, experiences, and best practices from the real estate development industry. My name is Payam nhi. My guest for this episode is Richard Witt. Richard is the principal and global head of housing at BDP, which is a design firm based in Toronto, and Richard has a very long and very productive. Bio, But basically he's been very active all over the globe. He has worked in Prague, Geneva, London, Shanghai, and I think India. And he has also been involved in some of the most iconic projects and planning projects in City of Toronto. one of the more, notable projects that he's been involved in has, is, uh, ad Atlantic, uh, which won the 2022 Governor General's, medal in Architecture, and it was Toronto's first mass timber framed office building in over a century. In addition to that, Richard has been part of the evolution process of the Midrise in Toronto and part of the original team who worked on the MIDRISE guidelines. And in this episode we're gonna talk to him about both of those things and also where we stand as nation, as a city, as a community compared. To other cities and other major cities across the world, what his thoughts are about, potential suggestions, potential improvements that we can make and make this as a better community. As always, you can find all the relevant information and link store on our website, real estate development insights.com, real estate development insights.com, and please remember to subscribe to the show and even better tell others about it and help us grow the show together. Thank you. I enjoy listening.

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 1:46

Hi, Richard. Welcome to the show. How are you doing today?

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 1:49

Very good. Thank you. Thanks for inviting me on.

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 1:52

My pleasure. Why don't we start by a little bit of an introduction? Who is Richard? Give us a little background. You have a long bio that I can read for about a half an hour, but I'd rather get your own version of it.

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 2:02

okay. Maybe I'll do something a bit more concise. I'm Richard Whitt. I'm an architect, living and working, based in Toronto. I work for a company called BDP Quadrangle, which is a tie up of Quadrangle Architects Limited, in Toronto since 1986. And BDPA global firm, working for 60 plus years. most of my, workers in the housing sector, variety of scales from, Mid-rise scales up to, big towers, six 60 story plus towers. quite a lot of, master planning work at different scales. And, really thinking about, housing as a typology, as a product, how we can deliver homes for people, how we can deliver value for clients who are in that business. This.

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 2:40

Perfect. Thank you for the short version of it. We'll put the long version of your bio in the text so people can check it as well.

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 2:47

If

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 2:47

what does your current title.

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 2:48

bedtime reading,

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 2:50

Yes. Yeah, about time reading. it's an actually interesting read. what does your title mean? your job title right now is Head of Global Housing. So can I take that as if you're working globally?

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 3:02

global Head of Housing. Yes. so I'm, responsible for the housing sector across, across all BDP studios, which is, 19, 20, 20 studios. Now we have quite, quite a lot in the uk, mainland Europe, the Middle East, India, Singapore, China, most of our housing work is in North America, probably about 75%. But, I'm charged with growing that, that sector globally across, across the studios. in Toronto's been a, been an amazing place to work in the housing sector for the past. 20 years and we've learned how to deliver housing at scale, and how to create product, which is, a marketable com, a marketable offering. I think we have a lot to offer to a lot of places.

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 3:41

Thank you Can you do me a favor? You have worked, obviously you're working as a global head, lived and worked, I believe, in Prague, Geneva, London, and I wanna say Shanghai if I'm not wrong. You've been.

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 3:53

yeah, I didn't live in Shanghai, but I've worked there as well, and also in

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 3:55

okay. And also in India, so quite a wide vision globally. Can you paint us a picture in terms of where we are as a community, as a society in Toronto, in GTA, in terms of the, not necessarily the quality of the build, but also the quality of the environment. What we are building, the type typologies that we are building. Just paint us a picture. Where are we on the curve? How are we doing?

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 4:21

To other places?

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 4:22

Correct, let's say what you've seen around the world. Like obviously Prague is like one of my favorite places to look at the architecture when you look at those midrise buildings or those arc setups. But if you were to take your best pick from all these places that you've worked with and in, and again, I don't mean in terms of quality, but main, more so in terms of qu, sorry. I don't mean in terms of quantity, more on the quality of living. Quality of having a future city inside. Paint us a picture. Where are we? What's good? What's bad? What's ugly?

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 4:53

what I've observed is that housing is, is always delivered as a commoditized, product. And sometimes that housing was delivered in a time when it was built differently and when people had different attitudes. But it exists, tend to, cities are built accretively. So you may have built housing 200 years ago that probably the housing may have, been tweaked. But it's essentially the same product a lot of. Single family housing. there was, which is the historic Toronto in the 19 hundreds, that was delivered, from 1900 to 1940, places like Prague, or the surrounding areas, a lot of the housing there was delivered. in the sort of Soviet era. So even though you are, you've been to pra I take it, and you've been on holiday and you've gone through the old city center and there is housing in there, but the bulk of the housing is in kind of communist, housing blocks, which are around the city center. that in, Bratislava even more China has been, delivering housing at scale, and very efficiently for a long time. And they've got a lot of people to house. there's. I remember going past, you drive out the city centers there and this housing that just goes on and on for miles there's, there's some things about that, which I saw, which I don't think, culturally it's always a bit different. The way that people live is a bit different, the way that people, eat, do those things is a bit different, but. That, some of it was quite nice. we have different attitudes, I think towards how much we'll accept light, how much we'll accept space, space between people, personal distance, different countries think about that, quite differently. But I think in essence, the art of delivering housing is understanding the human condition, understanding human proportion and scale, understanding social interaction. And those things are nuanced from culture to culture. But there's also quite a lot of similarity.

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 6:32

So would you think, because I know you work a lot in master planning and having worked on previous guidelines on how we're potentially thinking about our communities and cities, do you think we're set to have a future-proof community and city? E as strong and GTA as if it's gonna be a still attractive place to live for people.

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 6:52

we've gone through a bit of a wild and exciting time for, the past 20, particularly the past, 10 years where, I talked about housing as a commoditized thing. I think because it's. there are aspects of it which aren't, but it's usually private sector based, so it's based on somebody investing in the creation of it for the purposes of living. we got it. We got it into a point where the investment and the speculation of housing overtook the provision of housing for people. And, I've said this before, but I think. It's gonna be, it has been a difficult year or two, and I think it, that we're not through the, through difficult times. If you are primary activity is housing, but I think it's better for the city. I think, a lot of projects that I've worked on that I really like or of a different kind of scale that have a, that aren't just satisfying. Somebody buying something from a piece of paper based on, an amount of dollars and an amount of square feet. the, it, that's really been, I think the past, it's escalated and, there was a lot of, it's like an idea of investors and people who were investing, but a lot of them were local. And then it became speculators, which was a different proposition. The investor market's good. the end user market's great. I think we're returning to those things as a city Toronto. So Toronto's got a great future, I believe in Toronto as a, as it's emerging as a global city. it's going to have a lot of people coming to it. It's got a great positioning, I think, with adjacent neighbors and, relationships. I think it's, we've got a lot of great resources. So I believe long term in the future of the city, and I think that this is actually gonna help us to get to where we need to be, which is not just one kind of housing for one kind of, purchaser. we need workforce housing. We need student housing, we need seniors housing. we need housing for end users. We need housing for families. We need housing for first time people. And I think that once we get through a little bit of turbulence that we will revert to having a real city and building. Yeah, really great housing.

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 8:44

Thank. so let's zoom in. In Toronto. In Toronto, like you mentioned, for the past almost decade, the focus was on return, on investment, maximizing, intensities, getting more or the more, getting more densities and height and smaller units. And like we have, we're in troubled state right now with that type of product. but. These days, what we are seeing moving on the market, especially these days where there's not that much movement, there are the missing middle types, the multiplex size, the smaller project, the citizen developers, and we've talked extensively on this podcast with previous guests about the importance of that typology and enabling and new. Class of citizen developers to start those types of projects. I wanna focus with you more on the Midrise side 'cause I believe, and correct me if I'm wrong, I believe that you were one of the parties involved in the original design guidelines that Toronto came, came up with about, at this point, about 16 years ago, I think 15, 16 years ago on mid rises. Maybe walk us, I want to try, do a little bit of time travel with you. What were we thinking as a city back then in terms of mid-rise? What was the idea behind those guidelines? what went through that guideline? What was, what were lessons learned? And then I guess we moved through the time together.

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 10:02

Yeah, those, those guidelines. Yeah, I think 2007, 2008 is around when they were done. we were part of a team. There was other people on the team led by Brooke McElroy. but we provided a lot of built form, guidelines and diagrams, many of which still, Used until recently, the. The city as it's growing. Toronto has a very unusual structure, which is all what people call the yellow belt, which is all the single family neighborhoods. it's, it's quite odd and, not always ideal that some of those neighborhoods are very close to the city center, and are into the official plan of the city, protect it. So you can't intensify to any great extent those sites. I, what you've just referred to about missing middle, there's been some movement in that, which I think is encouraging is, we, you probably. most people will not wanna see very significant density deployed in those areas, but modest increases in density for, laneway houses has been a great initiative. six plexes, all those kind of things. I think that's really great. what has, happened historically has been that all density was directed to growth centers or to avenues. to, the city center to North York, to young Eggington, cer certain places where you're seeing real spikes in height. and then the idea was that other density, which is a more gentle density be, directed towards the city's avenue. So Dundas Street, college Street, places, like that, which, are real arteries into the city. and that's. Also, when you look at those ideals, it's a really great place to intensify because they're usually, they've got some kind of surface transit, not higher order transit, but street cars or buses or, so they're connected. They're also on the edge of neighborhoods. So you can increase gently, and then create, create a frame to the neighborhoods. and all of those things best intentions. Yeah. Then, when you zoom into that, what kind of built form should those things take? So mid-rise, which is historically, in scale to the width of the right of way to the height. So you end up with, on, on somewhere college Street you, or parts of College Street, you end up with a 20, six story ish kind of building. So they generally ended up being six or eight. the challenges, came with it was that, all of the zoning for the sites is done from the 1920s or, 1930s. So they're all saying this building should be. 14 meters or 12 meters or something like that. And they're also in very small slices. So in order to develop, a building of real scale, you need to assemble four or five sites. And people say, I'm gonna sell it for this. I'm gonna sell it for this. Before you know it, your land cost base is quite high. then the. With made with the best of intentions, definitely. the built form, became quite complicated. So while we want a street wall, and that's gonna be 80% of the right of way and it's gonna set back and that's great. Framing the street, creating pedestrian scale. That's great. then the terracing at the back, which I suppose, when you look at it, the idea of the, midrise guidelines is a built form guideline. So that works. What I always felt was really missing from it was a density cap. So if you said buildings on the avenues are three times density, 3.5 times density, then you have an amount of density and a built form envelope. which to build. But instead what happened was there is no density cap. So it all became speculation. and so people are betting on how much density can I get on this site, which relates to the value. So the landowners are then speculating on how much they can sell it. So everything goes up and up and up because there's no guideline. And Toronto is a very, you asked me what things are like in the world. Toronto is a very strange place in that the zoning is all massively out of date and you can't do it if you work in New York, you go to New York. If there is zoning in place, you can cap and trade. You can buy three sites and take some of the density from there to there. But essentially, a lot of the, you're not speculating on the margins of land price, which is what's caused us problem. The second big problem was that when, when you went to buy one of these sites, you went to do it and you had all this speculation. You also, were not able to do this within a, an easy framework, framework. So you can say, go and say, oh, the zoning says the city's put out guidelines that say six stories. Now, for example, the zoning says six stories. That's what I'm gonna build. Instead, it was required that you a by, zoning bylaw amendment for the site. sorry, hold on a second. Okay, I'll go back to that. The second problem with that was that, a zoning bylaw amendment was required for each site. So you can go to a site and say, this is, the city has the city's policies have said six stories. the approvals process says if I do what is being requested of me, then I can get that instead of zoning. Bylaw amendment means now you're suddenly in for a process, which is, a year, two years, an unknown amount of years. And so if you're going to invest into that process, which is very lengthy and very costly, then suddenly. why would I do that for exactly what's being asked of me for that, if I'm gonna demonstrate that actually I want eight stories, nine stories, 10 stories. And so then you move into a process where it's speculation on top of speculation, on top of speculation. And I made this point many times to, to the planning authorities, over the years saying. don't you just say, we've put out these guidelines that say six stories. If you do this, six stories or whatever. Right of way. Let's say, so six stories, eight stories, depending on the road, if you do it within that, you do it within this density committee of adjustment is your avenue. And a lot of people would've taken that. And I think, you refer to citizen developers, which is, in my experience has been most of the people that have tackled Midrise building over the years. I think that would encourage people to do more of that work. And we could have. you never know, but I think looking back, I feel like we would've unlocked a lot more avenue development because now that we've got to a point where authorities have put in place six stories. Yes, and you can do this, but the, the land prices have already risen quite a lot, so it's still remains quite difficult to do. so I, I hope that, I hope that more of this development will happen. 'cause I think this is a really good thing for the city to intensify, these avenues.

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 15:59

Thank you for the background. So I couldn't agree with what you said even more because, there was a report a few years back that. They had looked at all the Midrise project that had resulted as a result of that guideline, and they fell under that application. At that point. Over the course of 10 years, it was around 130 projects, which was basically 10 buildings per year. which. Just talked or spoke volumes about the complexity of the process that you just explained. I had the opportunity, privilege of being part of those projects, mul, multiple of them, and like exactly like you said, the minute you got into the ZBA application and site plan application. the asks were unlimited and they were infinite, and then we kept going back and forth for years on turning radiuses and setbacks and the garbage pickup and then. You name it

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 16:51

Yeah,

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 16:52

and it.

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 16:52

favorite one of mine. And, if our client who was on it, at the time, hears this, who, who will laugh, but we were working on a project on Sinclair Avenue, which was already zoned. so Sinclair actually stands out for me as a striking example of, you've put in a rapid, it's not really an LRT, but a dedicated streetcar right of way. you've. zoned all the sites to say on this site, this width, 12 stories, it's already zoned. You can skip that thing. we went into the first meeting and said, we see you've got this zoning and this is great. What we've noticed though, is that at the rear it's, you've done the zoning, but it's still very close to the neighbors. So we could be 12 stories right up against. So we proposed that we would take some of that density and just move it so it'll be set back from the street, but a little bit higher. And that opened the floodgates to all kinds of requests, one of which was a conical angular plane coming from the corner, anybody who's ever designed a building trying to implement a conical angular plane, it's not only a huge loss of density, but also,

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 17:49

It's a massive construction cost.

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 17:51

transfer, like an

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 17:52

Yeah.

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 17:53

And so it is just that sort of attitude, has caused a lot of problems. Now, my, my experience. is that the planning department has changed their mind about a lot of things. Quite a lot. there's been updated midrise guidelines, which have massively simplified the built form and those things are great.

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 18:08

Yeah, I agree. the ask at some point were just, they were basically killing the project. Let's put it this way. And like you mentioned, a lot of people. Made money or lost money, significant amount of money based on all those layers of speculations that you were just talking about. Because for a while there was a business of just, let's go get density and then we get more after what we got the first round to prove, or we just don't get it and we can't afford, we can't provide the returns that we've promised our investors, which unfortunately we're seeing a lot of those these days. Okay. So that we got the background set. These days we have Eon going on and like you mentioned, between Jason Thorn's team, which has been pretty active in terms of updating a few things. And even prior to that, correctly intern, when he was in, the Chief Planning officer in Sierra, Toronto, they were working on a whole bunch of things. If you were to give them advice in terms of, let's say the top three things they need to get really right in terms of the items that they're working on right now, because it's part of the Han and Major Streets and all the initiatives they have. I believe there is, there are thousands of parcels in City of Toronto that there zoning is being updated and changed. What are the top two, three things that you think they should really get right this time that will facilitate the process?

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 19:25

definitely the first one, and, we've already been talking about it, provide certainty is the first one if too much uncertainty, creates a compounding level of problems in buildings of this scale. if you're doing an eight story building, if you go two months over your construction schedule on an eight story building. that is a big problem. If you go two months over on a 50 story building, it's still a problem, but not as much of a problem. So creating certainty that, enables speed. Through things is very, is definitely, the number one. I mentioned that, the speed of things, that there's a lot of, further information, is also useful at site selection. I don't know if that's the city, can provide it or maybe it's not an easy way to do it. But, I think we, we talked about this before, but I feel like every single. midrise building ever did on a streetcar track. the sewer is also always on the other side,

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 20:18

true. Very true.

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 20:20

if it's a 40 story tower

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 20:21

it's a lottery ticket. You never know what you hit. That's very true.

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 20:24

So I think better, better information about things like that, which can create these sudden costs, I, I think is also very important. the speed of things is always a problem. And the. kind of subsurface conditions has also always been a problem. So this is not really for the city, but for any, person considering doing it. Get as much, subsoil information as you can in advance of tendering. Things that I, I remember one project we did and we'd done many boreholes on the site and there was a, an aquifer curving in between the thing. maybe it's just about providing context of where waterways used to be. 'cause the whole city is built on a series of now underground rivers. so there's a lot of water problems and soil conditions that are here. but approval, so certainty is good. approval speed is definitely second. I, I, if we were doing a house, you can get that, that permit in a short amount of time. site plan approval is probably a good thing for the city, but. Maybe there's a site plan light or something, which doesn't involve satisfying every condition. I've, I can't tell you the number of buildings which have to been, which have had to be shaped around trees. And I love trees as much as, as much as anybody. maybe not as much as anybody. I love trees. Toronto has a great tree canopy. It's a really important asset to the city, but not everything, not every tree, needs to be saved. And the good news about trees is that you can plant another one and that they'll grow. think so. Trees, site plant approval. Heritage. I'm not sure what's happened in Toronto and Heritage and I see you laughing there knowingly, but observation appears to be that, 50 years ago, we knocked down anything that was good or quite a lot of things that were really good. and I wish that we hadn't, but now that we've knocked them down, saving every old, Piece of townhouse facade that's meaningless is not a useful, thing.

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 22:16

Amen.

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 22:16

let's think, more about heritage and built form and cities as a layer of, accretive, elements rather than preservation, which is not useful because cities are only good if they're relevant and, an old piece of nonsensical townhouse facade doesn't add any value or inequality to anybody.

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 22:34

I would actually argue the other way as well, would say as we are losing lifeblood in certain parts of the city, just because we're trying to preserve more than what we're trying to. Create, it really bothers me sometimes when I drive downtown. There are certain part areas that you can literally see they're dying because they fall under a whole bunch of different heritage preservation requirements and you can't really touch anything. And if you can't touch it, it does. No one's gonna spend $2 million renovating something that's falling apart. And then

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 23:04

say I'm, I don't wanna say I'm anti heritage 'cause I'm not, and I do believe

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 23:07

I think you're saying we have to prioritize better.

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 23:09

a heritage conservation district doesn't mean preserving everything and, City. if you go somewhere Paris for example, everyone talks about Paris. there's houseman boulevards. They were all built in one go, so they all look the same and everyone likes that. There's a lot of consistency, but that's not Toronto. Toronto is not a consistent datums. You drive along, these avenues which are filled with, they look so old, like people might tie their horses up outside. it's got that kind of vibe to it. Like two, it's four. It's shanty. the other, another thing, and maybe this does relate a little bit to, to heritage, but other parts of the world, I have found really incentivized behaviors. They want to see which we don't. Instead we seem to tax behaviors that we wanna see, like development charges is a good example, but even if we collected development charges and then put them as incentives for heritage. So we really want you to keep this piece of building. We think this is important. If you do that, we will give you. Enough to make it worth your while or inclusionary zoning is another good one. And that's all. Just downloading costs to ultimately to end purchases. So if you say, social housing is really important, we want you to do it, here's an incentive for you to do it. And then people will do those things because they're, people aren't opposed to the philosophy of it. They're opposed to being in an untenable market position because of it, or having to. Pay for it, punitively in comparison to others who aren't doing it. So I think that's a bit of a mind shift that, that we need to adopt is incentivizing behaviors we wanna see and, enabling things that we wanna see, which seem to have been the case for a few years now.

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 24:41

I wanna say, keep. For anyone who's been listening to our podcast, I keep repeating what Jonathan Diamond said in our, one of our previous episodes where he pointed out, I, I believe that he was very correctly pointing it out that if you try to optimize for a hundred different things, you end up losing the main goal, which was actually providing quality housing, affordable housing in the place that people want to live and I think bottom line is that even with Heritage, like many other things when it comes to context of housing, pick your battles, prioritize it like you said, what you just said. Just give an incentive. We worked on a Heritage church conversion, which I, which was actually, I would argue that it was a good thing 'cause it was a very old church with a great facade, but it was very expensive for the developer. Like at the end of the day that particular job. Developer end up paying the difference basically out of their pocket. But not everyone can do, and we are not in a market that a lot of people can afford doing something like that. I wanna go back to, some of the conversation about the Midrise that we just had. So let's pretend I'm the citizen developer for a second. I want to go and take advantage of these recent changes in on terms of major streets or eons or try and start a new Midrise project for argument's sake. Let's is, let's say it's a six story building with 2030 units, whatever I can get in it. What are the top two or three decisions? That or pointers that you would give me as someone who's been around doing this for a while, for me to either make good decisions upfront or of some two or three pitfalls that I should be avoiding.

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 26:20

the. the first, thing and the what I see most with a problem. And are you, this does a little bit, if you're talking, depend a little bit on, if you're talking about if it's a rental building or if it's a condo for sale building.

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 26:31

I think let's focus on the rentals for now, because I think that's what's happening these days.

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 26:35

it, makes it easier, in a way and, is an obstacle that when people are trying to sell that they can't overcome. which is to join everything up. doing something which later costs you a lot of money, can cost you a lot more than the amount of money that it seems. line up. All the structure is like number one. we, the kind of condo world for, for years has been we're gonna optimize every single square feet. And you end up with a floor plate and then a transfer, and then a floor plate, and then a transfer, and then a floor plate. And so not only do you end up with a lot of. Difficult detailing conditions, maybe your unit is, is ultra optimized, but if that unit is so good, why isn't that the unit, all the way up? and maybe you don't get that extra a hundred square feet, but you're gonna save. you could tell me better, but, how long does it take to reset the forms to create a transfer slab and to do all of that stuff? And I feel like there's a lot of conversation about hard costs. It doesn't always flow through to hard cost plus time savings. So I, I think that's, that's quite important. also the other costs of, when you're developing on a, time is money is the, is an overarching thing to almost everything with, midrise scale, I think. but one of the other things is, do you have to close the street to do things or can you just deliver things quickly? think about. a very strong concrete, city and concrete's a great material for many things. But if you're trying to do something in a tight urban condition and you've got the trucks standing outside churning, and the guys on the site hammering for hours, that's, it's probably not the right response and maybe not doing it and cast in place concrete, means that you. you lose a few square feet. I think you more than make that up, in not having your neighbors complaining nonstop because it's so noisy, not, making a huge mess that everyone hates. and also just creating efficiency. that's the real one. Like top to bottom gravity always wins. So if, if you're fighting gravity, you're not gonna go, it's not gonna go well. what are the other

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 28:34

I love that response. and that goes to, speaks to your, actual experience the site because both of them would be the things that I would talk to our clients about that. guys, if you're trying to build a, and here's my frame of word reference and. Please correct me if I'm wrong. The way I look at it and these eon, initiative enabled projects is that when you're doing a six story building on a 60 55, 75 foot wide lot, it's a hard sell. It's a hard thing to make the performer work. So anything that you can avoid from day one by, yes, you want to build a building, you want to look at the. You wanna make sure it looks good, but you can also, it's important to appreciate how much you can afford on a footprint like that. When you're building 30, 40, 50,000 square feet, it's really hard to make, to basically distribute the extra cost of having that nice separation in your facade. For example, over 30,000 square foot be, 'cause it costs a lot or the setback or. the awkward shaping shapes that you have in the building. And I couldn't agree with you more in the, in terms of access. A lot of these sites, and this is, I think we've talked about this on podcasts before as well, that a lot of the sites, one of the things that we, when we come to a site and look at the project, we're like. Guys, there's like probably three quarters, a million dollars just in access cost, which has gone unnoticed prior to basically getting to happen because yes, you can, like you said, you can potentially do concrete or pour this or do that, but you have to close the street. You have to relocate tighter lines, you have to do a whole bunch of things, which will cause you normal leg, right or wrong. That's how it is operating these days, so

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 30:13

I

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 30:13

very much appreciate that.

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 30:14

my process of, going through mid dry sites is there's a death by a thousand cuts. it's,

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 30:18

Oh.

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 30:19

this, we've gotta pay for this. And, the performer's much better than me, but there's a, there's always just so many problems. I think, the great news is, I think, 10 years ago though, it was just, you were doing it in. cast in place concrete, and there wasn't really a lot of other options that were viable. Now I think you can do it in, with a kinda stubbies system. You could do it with, dimensional lumber, you can do it with mass

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 30:38

Yeah. Since CFS panelized, there are multiple systems. Yeah. Yeah.

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 30:43

there's always a also, And again, I'm sure that you know much better about this than me, but there's also a tendency to want to competitively tender everything. and by the point you get to that, I think you, even if you end up paying slightly more, than you think you would've paid, although, if you never really know, tying yourself to a system and making informed decisions very on saying, you know what, for this system we've done a look, we think of these five systems. This one is gonna be competitive. We want to. Just lay out our building using that system. So not thinking so much of, plans and laying out plans, but thinking of systems and purchasing a system which creates a product, I think is the right, is the only way to go to, to achieve these. I'm also gonna say one other thing, which I think is probably, is quite difficult for people to come to, Building is always complicated. if you are, if you're new to it, the, mid-rise is actually quite a complicated scale. if I do a tower, I've got all the complications of the mid-rise, and then another, 30 or 40 stories to amortize that cost over. thinking of one in itself, I don't think is a winner. If you want to concentrate on Meris. You're going to make, commit. I'm gonna do five of these. You're gonna do the first one, you're gonna work through it won't be your highest, performing financially, but you'll figure out all the problems, feed all of that learning back into the second one, the third one, the fourth one. after a couple, you'll have a system, the same way that you did it before, but tweaked and then the same way. the same way. And you can build on it. So I think not just of a building, but a strategy and a housing strategy.

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 32:12

Thank you. First of all, thank you very much for saying that because going forward, I'm gonna have our future clients listen to this part of the conversation before we enter into bid review meetings and design development meetings, because you're absolutely right. midrise, has its own. Unique character characteristics, which you need to lock in a lot of major decisions upfront. And you can't just leave it open until the very last minute. Let's see, 17 bits later, who is shorter by $10,000 or who is lower by 10,000? And the second part of that comment, you, you just made me smile and laugh a little bit because one of our clients who we've done multiple projects for multiple mid rises for. over the years he's heard me too many times saying it's complicated because we were dealing with details and it's complicated. a few years ago when we finished one of the projects, he actually bought me a hat that says it's complicated at the front, and I have it framed somewhere. It is a complicated project. And, yes, that's very true. And, to be honest with you, that's why we're doing this because, at the end of the day, we, I hate the one-offs because they typically end up making a lot of mistake on the first one. unfortunately, just because it's

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 33:18

say, this didn't work, so now I'm not gonna do it anymore. When

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 33:21

exactly.

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 33:21

learned a lot and the second one maybe would work.

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 33:24

Yes, and that, just take that and go to the second one, but go to the first one knowing that you're gonna make mistakes and have allowances. And if everything is tied to the last penny, very mar to very tight margins and cons and contingencies. We're gonna have problems. I want to zoom in even a little bit more. Yeah, we've talked about Toronto and now I want to talk about one of your, like I know you work with sustainable material. you've, you com your company works with what is these days referred to as Modern Methods of Construction. You guys have won awards spec specifically on the 80 Atlantic Project, which was an office project master and Timber project. I think you guys worked, won the Governor General's Award for that project. Walk us through that landscape a little bit. What are you seeing? How are you thinking about it in terms of new material or I guess new application of the old material and, modern methods of construction. And we'll go from there.

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 34:21

Yeah, we could, we could have a three hour conversation about modern methods of construction, or it's

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 34:24

I'm game.

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 34:25

parent piece of taxonomy designed for manufacturing and assembly. what, and I've referred to this already, but because we were in a, an up market and everything was going well, people didn't wanna risk trying something new. It's been fairly obvious for quite a while, to me anyway, to others that. What the way we're doing things is not the best way of doing things. That there's other newer ways and, construction has of, has often been identified as, one, I think the second least innovative industry. so that there is lots of great things that are coming and this, a decline in, housing provision. I think, opens. an opportunity, unlocks some mental space to think about how we should be doing things. And we've been giving it a lot of thought, and this partly comes back a little bit to a strategy of how you do things. when I was a, when I was a young architect, quite a while ago, somebody I was working with was actually in London. I worked with a guy and he said, don't forget whatever you're doing, it's always gonna come down to a man on a site with a hammer. and, 30, 20, 25, 30 years ago, there was, yeah, definitely probably was a man then. Maybe it's not now, but, and hopefully it, it isn't always just a hammer anymore, but it used to be, but. One of the most, interesting things about at Atlantic or interesting things, but like a sort of a thing which I wasn't necessarily expecting was when we went to the site was how quiet and clean it was. if you're doing a costume place, concrete thing, smash, there's a crew of, like a lot of people and doing all this stuff. When we saw them installing the, nail laminated timber and the glue la mass timber structure, There was four people there and they were. Installing the structure, and it went up very quickly and it was quiet. but also it was being manufactured in Barry, the deck was manufactured in Barry the, and the wood came from, somewhere north of Montreal and Quebec. but so it also unlocks industry a little bit. So right now we're concentrated on, everybody has to be here on the site doing things. but if you start to spread that out, I think there's a lot of economic benefit to the region. It takes the pressure off a little bit. If everybody needs to work in Toronto, then everybody needs to live in Toronto, which means, everything compounds. Whereas if you can spread that industry out, if you can ship things in and just install them quietly. There's obvious opportunities. The other, real opportunity is that when you're working outside under all weather conditions and good on them, like what I, this winter that we've just had, and you drive past the construction site and it's minus 4 million and there's someone you know there at seven in the morning. And I think that's, this is no way to build things. So building in a, in a climate controlled environment with, factory qual, factory oversight, you can get much better quality. Of things, under those conditions and then assemble them. So I think the, modern methods of construction is it inevitable, way that we're gonna, that we're gonna travel, but there's also a wide variety. it, it goes all the way from, the story. there's a hotel in, in New York, in, in the Bowery called Citizen m and the legend is that was made all in Poland and it was shipped. Complete units, even with the bedding on, with the sheets on the bed and put into place you can go all that way. And I quite rightly, people find that quite scary, that you're, you've got it so far, but there's a huge variety from that to just components, hospitals, they quite often do, all the bathrooms. A unit that's shipped, that's placed in there. So you can imagine the time savings, you can imagine the speed, you can imagine the quality just from having these pieces. we can do that with, with cladding components. So instead of, the. Recently the, the material of choice has been window wall because, 'cause everyone knows it, it's, it's has less risk people, understand it. that's become more difficult to use, I think partly 'cause of sustainability requirements because of, the performance issues of it. and, sensibilities have changed, but there's lots of other components. we did a, it's not a Midrise project, but we did a project recently. in, in Vaughan, which had pre glazed, precast system, which, took a quarter of the time to install. And, but it's not really all of these things are available. Many things are available to us. I think what's limiting us is risk management and imagination. I think we can do a lot within existing industries, which can save a lot of time. I think, I don't know how many, that's probably, we can talk about model methods of construction for a long time, but,

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 38:36

Yeah, the.

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 38:37

we're seeing a lot, structural systems, modular precast. We're doing a, an affordable housing project in, in Otoko, which is, using precast, precast structure, which is unusual, but makes sense. Why do you have to pour it under the, in the freezing cold? Pour it all in advance and put it in place quickly.

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 38:52

think that's one of the things that is very interesting, at least for me on the Midrise scale, is that it actually allows you to play with these different elements and try and figure out what works perfectly for your site and. Your project and your scale, because to your point, when you go to the 14, 15, 20, 30, 40 stories, you're going, you're gonna build in concrete. It's just, there's no real viable scale. I know they, someone might argue that, empire State was building would steal about a hundred years ago or so, but these days, at least, let's put it this way, in Toronto, I think it's very hard to convince someone to build a four story building with anything other than concrete. But when you talk about. Call it five to eight stories or 10 stories building. These days, there are probably a dozen different things that you can either commit to entirely or mix and match and try and get the hybrid solution for the project, which we've done over the years, and I've been lucky enough to work on probably half a dozen different variations of these hybrid systems. To your point, each of them has their own benefits, pros and cons, and you sometimes you go up really quickly and sometimes you end up, trying learning. For, hopefully for the next project. And it takes a little bit longer in terms of, I wanna go back to, 80 Atlantic because I did have a privilege of visiting that site probably just before it was opened or around the opening ceremony a few years back. And since then, I've also worked on mass timber projects, the project that we work on Hal, also two 30 Royal York with a prefabricated cassette system. So I want, I'm wondering what were your. One or two takeaways from a project in 80 Atlantic, some something that has to do with mass timber in terms of do this or don't do that on the next job. Does anything come to your mind?

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 40:37

I'm a bit

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 40:38

I.

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 40:38

but I think we did a, I think we did a good job with most of that project. one of the things was, in terms of managing cost is, mass timber, is there different options for mass timber? it's a system. it was the first, in a, in. the first ever really office building, all the other ones that were built a hundred years ago were really warehouses. think it's just, you know what, like understanding the system and working with the system. 'cause it's not just two lines that you draw, it's a system that works in a different way. the Royal York project with the cassettes, I think that's also a really great system, which, I think with. With evolution and understanding of how that system relates to residential builders, I think will, will go on to, to be, great. the, the challenge and any challenges I feel that we had at Atlantic were not related to the wood. The challenges were related. firstly it was the rainy, when we were doing the underground, it was the rainiest, season ever. And we had something like 40 weather days.

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 41:28

It has a tendency of doing that whenever you're taking on something new.

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 41:32

other, the other real problem always, with wood is moisture. you're in a battle with moisture and you can't control it. So I would advise anybody doing a mass timber building to tent it. afterwards. 'cause just takes the pressure off and,

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 41:44

A hundred percent agree.

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 41:45

that says, this costs this much, but if you can't open for an extra month because you have to let the building air out and dry, how much does that cost? I dunno. But I think those are really, important issues.

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 41:57

Perfect.

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 41:57

back though to something you were saying, and you were talking about modern methods of construction and, cost of things. So I, I had a sort of a joke and as a, as an immigrant, I never really grew up with hockey, as a sport for myself. Although I, I don't mind hockey. I can't, I can skate even a little bit. I.

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 42:11

You and I both.

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 42:12

like probably 50% of the city. but I always talked about midrise is what I refer to as the reverse hockey hair approach. you know what the hockey hair is with the, the sort of bad haircut coming out the back, which is supposed to be good and then short on top and you cover it with the helmet. the reverse hockey hair approach is, instead of a business upfront party in the back, it's a party upfront business in the back. that's because I. always hated working on projects, where you're spending money on things that you're not seeing. I think you ma Mass timber is a really great option and you can open that up and you can see it, and it adds a huge amount of warmth, to, to a living space. generally, structure is something that you cover up. And even in some of the earlier mass timber projects like Rock Commons in Vancouver, it was done as a cheaper system. How do we do it cheaper? How do we do it faster? And then it's covered in drywall. I think you develop a system. Which, is gonna be efficient, which you know, is gonna be available, which you know, is gonna satisfy exactly what you need. And then you can always change the front facade, which is the bit that people see. And I think that's through throughout time. Even. I was telling somebody about this yesterday on, 18 Atlantic was the second phase of a two phase project. And the first phase when we started off it was dirty. It'd been there for a hundred years, no one had ever cleaned it. So we, and you may have seen this when you went there, but the other project was very much an efficiency play, was, it's an old kind of, I dunno what it's built as a, like a wine warehouse, a little warehouse kind of thing. And so it was complicated. So we stripped out all of that complication and put it in a new edition, which was. At the threshold of what was necessary to not have to go through site plan approval. So it was sort of 10% additional density. we, the architecture, the design, we put in these, corten steel fins, which is the rusting metal, and it was done because we thought it looked really nice next to red brick. When they cleaned the building, though, the red brick, was only the front facade the side brick was some sort of buff one. So I'm assuming that, that's the cheap stuff that you normally wouldn't see. And we, I think it still looks good and we, but we accidentally exposed it. so I think that's the strategy is, what do you do at the front?

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 44:07

it gives it the character, right? it becomes a part of the character of the building.

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 44:11

So spend, spend the money, spend the money where you can see it, spend the money where it adds value, and then be ruthlessly efficient, everywhere else.

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 44:18

A hundred percent agree. And one of the good things, one, at least in my experience with Mass Timber was, we had to go, obviously we had to go through alternative solution path on that one project, but I know. Coat has been changed and a lot of changes have been made recently, and I think over there we had more than 75% of the wood in the ceiling left exposed, which gives you a very warm and nice feeling when you go inside the unit and even on the walls, we had a whole bunch of walls that were not covered with drywall. So that was a nice experience. I wanna try and wrap this up, Richard. This has been fun. we have a traditional question on the podcast. If we give you a magic wand for the next five minutes and if you could make your wish, whatever that wish can be, whatever, like in terms of changing the law regulation mindset. Whatever you want to help us move toward where we are as an industry, as a society, as a community, and pertains to, as it pertains to the housing crisis, housing affordability. What would be the one wish or one change you make to portray a better future for us?

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 45:26

That, that's quite a tough one. 'cause I think there's quite a lot of wishes.

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 45:29

Maybe we negotiate to give you two.

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 45:31

with the want? Or it's just one that I have to settle on? the first thing you know as it comes top down, I think that the private sector building industry in Toronto, in the greater Toronto area has been really good for a long time and it's really shouldered the burden of providing housing and housing's very important and quality housing is very important, but not all housing is equal. So think that the burden of affordable housing, which is very important of social housing, which is very important. I don't think that should be downloaded to the private sector except in cases like, RET Park I think is a great example of we've got some land, you can have some land for this, you build us that. that's a way of utilizing I think a very, effective, sector and system of building to unlock things that we need. Not downloading societal problems onto the housing industry, I think is a bit of an overarching, thing, incentivizing the, I said this before, but incentivizing the growth that we wanna see rather than, punishing people for providing housing. mid-rise housing. I love many of my favorite projects that I've done have been of that scale. And I, I feel very proud of the contributions they've made to the street and to the public realm and, the kind of housing options that we've provided in them. I would love to see more of that. the things that I've mentioned, I would like. I would like to think, the, my magic wand would be how can you unlock this for us rather than making it more difficult than doing a 50 story tower? Because we need all of these things, we need highrise density, we need midrise density, we need social housing. We need connected housing. Toronto is in a trajectory despite this little bump. Toronto is heading towards being a global city, and unfortunately, I think the inevitable result of that is that the city center becomes expensive. if you go to New York, you expect it to be expensive in the city center, you go to London, you expect it. Everything's connected outside. You can take a train to Brooklyn in, in, 12 minutes from the World Trade Center. So it's okay to have housing that may be slightly more affordable there 'cause you can get there. So we are suffering from having, trying to do too much with too little. my wonders do too much to do too much, not too little,

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 47:37

Too much to do. Too much. that's perfect. I appreciate that. Thank you very much, Richard. This was fun. And I'm hoping that in a year or two we can have a second round of this conversation with better news, better development, and we go from there. Thank you very much.

squadcaster-ib77_1_04-10-2026_110453 47:52

much for inviting me on. It's been a pleasure.

payam_1_04-10-2026_110452 47:54

Awesome.