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Canada wants to make homes affordable without crushing prices
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this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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Please no, don’t stop building supply until we get the demand side just right. We also massively lack supply, with the lowest housing per capita in the G7. It takes years to build supply. It’s insane that people want to slow that down!
When are people going to understand it’s both? What makes housing such a “good investment” is that we don’t build enough of it for the people we have. Investors aren’t snatching up affordable housing in rural Arkansas because they have way more supply. We should absolutely deal with investors, make their lives miserable, but we ALSO need supply.
How about non-market housing supply, like the spacious comfortable middle class condos that Scandinavian countries provide? Vienna is also a model for government owned housing.
How about co-op housing supply, for people who want to live in communities and not live in an investment?
How about we free up zoning like they do in Japan, where you can buy a spacious new detached SFH in the middle of Tokyo for a fraction of the price of Toronto?
Do you know why the last housing bubble popped in Canada? Because we had a massive oversupply of condos and homes relative to demand. Being against supply is absolutely delusional.
It’s because public housing in the US is a ghetto to segregate poor people and undesirables. On the Scandinavian model, non-market and market housing are mixed together. Rich and poor live next to each other. These are highly successful.
Are you a NIMBY? Our zoning is horrible. It is mathematically impossible to reach our climate goals if we maintain the terrible zoning laws that we have.
You also totally misunderstand why we build tall expensive towers. It’s BECAUSE we don’t allow middle density in SFH areas. Please read about the “missing middle”. Both tall towers and SFH are symptoms of the same disease.
You might want to actually read about the last housing bubble. When the bubble finally burst, people couldn’t sell their homes and vacancies were high. That’s also why the government stopped building non-market housing. They thought we had built too much. 
If you think all the tenets of good urbanism from the academic and progressive community are just “buzzwords of the developer community”, then you are in the grips of an ideological NIMBYism.
Low supply is an empirical fact. Vacancies are low throughout the country, and we have less housing per capita than almost all of our peers. Views like yours do not take the lack of housing seriously enough.
Out of interest, what impact do you think zoning regulations play in all this? @PeleSpirit, care to comment as well?
Zoning plays an enormous role. The Lower Mainland is one of the densest regions in Canada, and it has a fraction of the density of virtually all European countries, even mountainous and rural Switzerland. Our urban planning is sprawly and terrible.
Even ignoring housing supply, if you want walkable livable cities, low transportation costs, low environmental impact, and high quality of life, then we should seriously rethink our zoning and urban planning. The consensus on here against more supply, which is also against better zoning and more density, is seriously mind boggling.
Interesting. I was thinking that if there were more openness to mixing zoning for housing and commercial then this would make room to put in housing in the dense areas you were talking about.