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.