I’m Chris. I’m a partner in a real estate development firm called Toronto Standard. We build midrise rental housing in Toronto. We’ll start construction on 100+ new units this year.

I host an annual conference called the Missing Middle Summit, and I like to write and talk about housing policy, including on a podcast I co-host with my brother called Hogtown. Some other appearances:

I subscribe to the Housing Theory of Everything. If we get housing policy right, a lot of other social problems get resolved.

Lately, I’ve also become obsessed with the ways in which AI progress can help reduce housing development costs. I think that the next few years will see meaningful reductions in both design and construction costs.

On design, the best software business that I’m not yet seeing done well is a “Figma for architecture” that layers in automation over time, and eventually absorbs landscape architecture, interior design, and civil, structural, and MEP engineering too. This is mostly screen work, and AI should automate screen work first.

On construction, we’re all excited about humanoid robots. I specifically want humanoid masons to make high-quality masonry cladding cost-competitive with less attractive options like spandrel or (bad) stucco. The big bottleneck, I think, will be training data. Elon says he needs 10 billion miles for FSD. That’s roughly 200 million video hours. Masonry is far more complicated than driving. So how many hours of training data will we need, and where will they come from?

I’m working on something that might help.

You can find and contact me via Twitter here. You can subscribe to my newsletter here.