Building rental housing

Most of what I do from day to day is work as a development manager for The Benvenuto Group.

I was offered this role through a series of serendipitous events that came out of advocating for more rental housing in Toronto. Though I was working as a project manager at a digital agency at the time, I had launched a YIMBY organization called Housing Matters that lead me to learn a lot about the mechanics urban planning and real estate development.

My thinking at the time was that I’d much rather help build rental housing than talk about how we need more rental housing, and the transition from activist to builder has been a good one. There are nuances to real estate development and construction that you can only fully appreciate when in the trenches.

In any case, I just received this cool drone shot of a purpose built rental building that we’re developing in midtown Toronto, and thought that I’d share it.

We’ve excavated to approximately a P3 level and will start pouring our foundations in the next week or two.

This building, when completed, will introduce 180 units of rental housing to the neighbourhood. In a City with a sub-1% rental vacancy rate, this is no small feat.