Good morning. Canada needs livable apartments to help fix the housing crisis. And it’s not just that we want more homes, we want better ones, too. But in order to accomplish all that, cities are going to have to reform how to build both condos and rentals. A new era of housing is in focus today, along with more budget takeaways.

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Hi, I’m Erica Alini, The Globe’s personal economics reporter. I’m coming to you today from Toronto, the epicentre of the condo crisis.

The condo market is in a rut. Sales of newly built units haven’t been this low since 1990. Gone are the days when condo prices would only go up and investors could make big money by flipping properties at a profit, regardless of whether rents covered mortgage payments and other carrying costs.

Now that investors are giving the condo sector the cold shoulder, a seminal change has occurred. Developers have been talking about building apartments for the people who are supposed to live in them.

Cities say they want to see family-friendly units in buildings that foster community. And a lot of what’s being built is rental apartments, which are meant only for long-term use, thanks to a slew of government incentives such as cheap loans and tax breaks.

And yet, Canada is still, for the most part, building one- and two-bedroom apartments. Three-bedroom units remain rare in new buildings, be they rentals or condos.

My story looks at how we got here and tries to answer why. Why are we still adding almost exclusively small apartments, when we have a dearth of family-friendly housing in big cities? Why can’t we build the kind of spacious units that are common in older buildings and much of Western Europe and other parts of the world?

Cities must find a way to build apartments that can be desirable, long-term homes for the middle class to help secure their own economic viability, said professor Mike Moffatt, an economist and founding director of the Missing Middle Initiative at the University of Ottawa, which conducts research on housing affordability.

“You can’t have all of the older, rich people living in Toronto, but all the nurses and personal-support workers living in North Bay, right?” he said.

My reporting walks you through the intricate web of rules and guidelines that have for decades inhibited or prevented the construction of livable apartments. The hurdles include overly strict limits on building size, requirements for exorbitantly large and expensive elevators, high taxes and permitting costs, and one of the world’s most restrictive regimes on exit stairs.

I spoke with a building code researcher, urban planners, builders and developers to understand the financial and design challenges they face in trying to build better apartments within the current rules. And I paired up with my colleague Jeremy Agius on The Globe’s visuals team to translate some of what I heard into interactive displays.

Scroll through the story and you’ll see how eliminating a second set of stairs – which can be done safely thanks to features such as sprinklers, smoke-sealed doors and more reliable fire-alarm systems – can unlock enough space for a three-bedroom apartment even in a small, narrow building.

You’ll also see how builders do the math to gauge whether they can afford to buy land for a multiplex. And our interactive calculator lets you play around with various cost-saving options for lowering the price of a two-bedroom condo in Vancouver. I hope you’ll check it out.

Looking for more? You can catch Erica on The Decibel podcast as she explains why shoebox condos have been so appealing for North American developers, why the market for them has cratered and what needs to change to build cities with higher density at a liveable scale.

A striking example of how technological change reshapes jobs comes from the agricultural sector. A century ago, 37 per cent of Canada’s workforce was employed in agriculture; by 2025, that share has fallen to just 1.1 per cent. Yet Canada’s agricultural exports still exceed imports, meaning just 1 per cent of workers now feed the entire country. In a recent analysis piece, we have more lessons from agriculture on how AI will transform work.