These projects had a similar formula. They were large, at least half a block with hundreds of units in each. They also had lots of parking spaces in extensive structured ramps, with a couple notably ugly parking podiums in downtown towers, and lots of excavation for underground ramps outside of downtown. The rents were and are pretty high, too, usually starting somewhere around $1,200/month for a studio overlooking the dumpster and shooting up pretty quickly from there. But there are a lot of amenities in the buildings, they're in good locations, and the land wasn't cheap.

And it's fine that these projects got built! They were going on surface parking lots and lumberyards and old car dealerships, and they filled up and kept people in the city and provided needed housing.

The interesting thing, though, is that the design and rents of these places tended to be largely driven by the parking. If you’re outside of downtown, and the land isn’t expensive enough (and the zoning isn’t permissive enough) to make a tower with an above ground ramp work but it’s not cheap enough to build a surface lot, you’re going to end up digging a big hole for a parking structure. And it doesn’t often make sense to dig a big hole in the ground for a 30 unit building, so we got a lot of these six story, 200 unit l*x*ry boxes that everyone in $400,000 houses complain about in lieu of having a personality.

But a couple years ago, shortly after loosening parking requirements in much of the city, we started to see a new type of project. These buildings had less than 100 units, and about one parking space for every two units.

When you're building that type of smaller project that, importantly, doesn’t require quite so much parking, one thing you can do that cuts down on costs substantially is not dig a gigantic hole. You can instead build some parking on the back side of the first floor where it's often tricky to put housing units anyway. Here's the first floor site plan for the building that's being built on Lyndale next to Mortimer's: