1. Homeowners in functional local democracies block new construction because it reduces the prices of their homes in exchange for no benefit to them, but...
2. When new, higher-density homes are constructed the total value of all houses increases much more than the total decline in the price of all old houses. This implies...
3. There is enough money available in the overall venture of new construction to compensate previous owners for the decline in prices, and although there could be many ways to accomplish it,
4. A tax on changes in assessed value that can go negative if the change is below a threshold, where the threshold is set so that the city collects net-zero revenue from this tax, would result in lump sum payments from developers (who dramatically increase assessed value) to people for whom the growth in their home prices had been depressed below the city's average by a nearby supply increase (whose assessed value would increase the least in that year if there was any truth to their objections).
Unfortunately, the coalition of people who oppose housing is not purely financially motivated.
There our groups of people for whom low density living is all about status and excluding others, and there is no amount of money that would compensate them for loss of status and exclusion.
There are others for whom the argument is purely aesthetic or sentimental - they legit cannot imagine any type of nice neighbourhood composed the buildings that are single-family homes with triangle roofs.
Some have never lived in anything other than a single-family home, and their understanding of multifamily buildings comes from news media and cultural stereotypes. They believe that as soon as you have a multi family structure, it’s automatically a ghetto of some sort, while simultaneously being luxury housing.
Many fear increased traffic, but will also oppose any effort to limit cars.
Others just fear change of any kind.
I have been to more housing hearings than I can count, and the reasons people oppose housing are myriad. I don’t think there’s any sort of silver bullet to lessen opposition, and I suspect people have been opposing housing for as long as housing has existed.
What I think went wrong is that we gave people an unusually powerful set of tools in the 20th century to really lock down the aggregate total of floor space that it’s possible to build in a given region, so there’s almost no wiggle room. We made the default that building is unusual and bad, and put the onus on builders to justify construction, rather than forcing opponents to justify using government power to ban construction.
To get out of it, we either need to abolish this set of tools, or at least raise the default so significantly that it is higher than any foreseeable demand. Not only does this accomplish the goal of simply allowing housing to be built, but by ensuring that the amount that can be built is much higher than any amount anyone would ever want to build, it removes the leverage of landholders. No particular plot is more special than any other simply because the government said so.
Just imagine going to one of those meetings and asking everyone in the room to do a trust fall exercise. Even if the thought that you wouldn't catch them is totally unfounded, I bet you wouldn't be able to get a plurality. :-)
I grew up in single family homes and when I moved out on my own I lived in apartments
Hearing my neighbours screaming through the walls and floors did a lot to convince me that multi-family housing only works when either the homes are very soundproofed, or the culture is a lot more respectful of shared space
I bought a detached home as soon as I could and got the hell out of dense housing, it sucks to live like that
I do like cities but, at this point, I can just travel to for trips and that makes more sense.
"Canada has one of the highest immigration rates per capita in the world."
https://www.statista.com/statistics/443063/number-of-immigra...
It's a shortage of 3.8 million homes in a country of 15.6 million households.
Once again, there is NO SHORTAGE of affordable housing either in the US or in Canada.
None. Nada. Zilch. Ноль. 零
And that's important. A simple "not enough housing" problem is easily solved with "just build more".
Instead, there is a shortage of housing _near_ _large_ _cities_. And it can't be solved. Simply "building more" housing in dense cities makes it _worse_.
It is illegal to build such a neighborhood in 99% of Canada. People love it here, people start families here, tourists visit, it's quite, lots of parks and shops.
And it's 3-4 as dense as most areas of most major cities. But we've made it illegal to build. For zoning, double stairway rules, minimum parking rules, setback rules, strict permitting requirements, and thousands of other things.
And that is good. It's making Canada liveable and keeps the prices from skyrocketing EVEN HIGHER.
That's a pretty large part of the problem
It sounds crazy, right? Supply/demand, and all of that.
But it's an example of one of the things in economics where the effects end up being different because of collective actions. As a result, no large growing city within the US within the last 30 years managed to lower down housing prices by increasing density. I checked that using the Census statistics database.
And no, Austin (TX) doesn't count. It decreased prices by decreasing the _population_.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/22926/aust...
Its population continues to grow. Basically monotonically increasing.
For example, in Whitehorse in Yukon the average house was $420k (or $550k inflation adjusted to 2024) in 2015, and $660k in 2024. So less than 20% growth after inflation within the last decade.
During that time, Vancouver BC went from $640k ($820k after inflation) to $1300k.
The average square footage also went down in BC, but stayed stable in YK.
These are already insanely high prices for such small, remote, and undesirable cities
My point is that smaller cities in Canada are not experiencing runaway price growth.
This should make it clear that it's not a housing shortage problem. Otherwise, it'd be experienced equally across the board.
Also, no, we definitely aren’t saying the same thing you and I.
The only problem is that they are more expensive than people wish they were. But that high price condition comes as a result of people wanting to live there. The way to undo high prices is to see people no longer want to live there (or, at least want to live elsewhere just as much).
If you truly believe you can build new houses in Vancouver for less than the cost of its used houses, you've found one amazing arbitrage opportunity. You should be asking yourself why investors aren't lined up at your door.
Coincidentally, the price of used cars went way up during the pandemic, right when the supply of new cars was bottlenecked by industry shutdowns and a global semiconductor shortage. Even though new cars generally cost more than used cars. Strange but true!
You're not wrong if you live in a house inside a vacuum, but, again, in the real world, if people are already struggling with the used price, who is going to pay even more to build new?
As surprising as it may be, houses won't magically materialize on the back of hopes and dreams. They require intense amounts of real labour to build and labour isn't going to show up if you aren't throwing copious amounts of money constantly in their face. If nobody wants to pay that labour the unfathomable amounts of money they require, a house is not getting built.
> Strange but true!
Not particularly strange, but cars are now stuck in the same situation, with the price of new cars having become prohibitively expensive and used cars are failing to come back down even as supply chains are no longer bottlenecked. In fact, the assembly plant near me just closed citing weak demand, so it seems there is even excess capacity. Much like houses, cars don't magically materialize either. They need willing buyers. But if you have no willing buyers...
I think you have a somewhat skewed idea of mild climate, tbh, because the Territories aren't what I think most people consider mild
I'm also not talking about necessarily the scenery. What is the nightlife like? The job market? The restaurants?
Also being that far north you have the problem of the length of days and nights being very skewed throughout the year
Mild from June to August but the winter months do not look appealing.
https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/canada/whitehorse/climat...
The solution is not to build ever denser communities, but to make it so that people don't _have_ to move into a large city from an ever-shrinking list.
No. Only 59% (and shrinking!) of the population live in places with more than 100,000 people. You are correct that ~80% of the population live in urban areas, but Canada's definition for urban includes places with 1,000 people.
> If a large portion of your population is living in large cities and large cities are experiencing a housing shortage then it makes sense to me to say there is a housing shortage in Canada.
59% is still a large portion, to be fair. But what is a housing shortage anyway? The technical definition for shortage is a situation where price is unable to rise (e.g. due to government regulation), but that is literally the opposite of what these cities see. If you have the money, you can pay as much as you want for a house, and you'll have no trouble acquiring one as you pay more and more. That's a normally functioning market, not an exceptional circumstance like shortage is meant to call attention to.
I expect you are alluding to the real problem being that many people in these cities are too poor to be able to reasonably participate in the city's economy. That is a problem, a big problem even, but to call that problem a "housing shortage" seems like a misnomer in every way.
> None. Nada. Zilch. Ноль. 零
Interesting. 零 means zero. But my (non-native!) instinct says that it's impossible to use it this way. I feel like you'd need 没有.
Classical Chinese has a negative universal quantifier 莫 (though in a technical sense it's an adverb and doesn't modify or stand in for nouns), but I don't think I've ever seen anything similar in modern Mandarin. I feel like I'd have to use a positive quantifier and a negative claim.
One of the worst developments in the history of government is this incessant creep of regulations and codes that specify, in excruciating detail, how residential land must be developed. How wide the streets are, how many lanes of traffic there are, how far the sidewalks are from the road, how far the front door is from the sidewalk, how much of the back yard is visible from the sidewalk, how houses must be arranged, how wide a house must be relative to the property width, how short/tall a house must be, how many separate entrances are allowed, … and on and on and on the regulations go. This has the effect of making old style neighbourhoods (with real character) impossible to build in the modern day. It also highly restricts the usage of the land and the number of structures in a way that make it impossible to have multi-family dwellings, studio apartments above houses, artists’ cottages in the back yard, coach houses, small used book stores or cafes in residential neighbourhoods, etc.
The new urbanist movement [1] talks a lot about this. They’ve argued for the return of streetcar suburbs [2] and I agree with them. These places are extremely beautiful to live in. They foster a far deeper sense of community than modern suburbia. They are wonderful spaces for humans to live in rather than places for urban planners who want to play SimCity in real life.
I don’t blame old people or any other particular group though. This is a widespread phenomenon of cultural and regulatory evolution by people who did not anticipate the final result. Now we’re stuck with this morass and the political will to fix it is still in its infancy. There’s also simply the hard problem that we can’t just bulldoze whole neighbourhoods to rebuild them the old way.
I’m pretty sure none of these came about by random happenstance, they all had either specific reasons behind them or specific lobbying groups pushing for them, or both.
Of course there’s no guarantee that the whole amalgamation was reasonable or even coherent… but that applies to everything ever that involved millions of people and interests.
Is there a specific reason why your “fix” wouldn’t just make it even more incoherent, given real world constraints like limited will, political influence, credibility, etc…?
The root cause of these problems has been classism and racism and people trying to gate off their communities from "undesirable" people, via the zoning code.
Defacto banning apartments for example is a very effective way to eliminate everyone who can't afford a single family home from your neighbourhood. etc
All of this sort of NIMBYism stems from a deep core problem of exclusivity seeking behaviours, classism and even racism.
Decades of political opposition toward any and all redevelopment of existing low density single family dominated residentially zoned areas has meant that practically all creation of new housing in the major cities of Canada has meant greenfield sprawl or for urban areas, creeping into brownfield redevelopment, rezoning old industrial areas into new condo developments.
The problem with this is that the arts and gallery system has long relied on repurposing old and affordable industrial space into arts production space gallery and performance space. So what we've been seeing as the housing crisis has become more severe, is an increasing amount of destruction and rezoning of irreplaceable industrial land, aiding a shortage of industrial space, badly wanted by the Amazon's of the world too.
So artists are being squeezed on both ends. The shortage of affordable housing is especially severe for low income working artists, and the political solution for solving this problem is to destroy the artist spaces which makes things more expensive for artists too.
This could all be better fixed if we simply left industrial as industrial and actually allowed people to more intensively develop residential homes to meet our housing goals, and add more arts uses into residential areas (because let's be clear, everything mentioned in this article is likely on the down low, breaking municipal bylaws and Provincial liquor laws), but people have been incredibly resistant to this, no matter how much they claim to love the arts etc etc.