this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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Historically, past housing crises have been resolved with massive input from the federal government. I hope this government acts with urgency, people are suffering out there, but given that the last housing minister was literally a housing investor I'm not very hopeful. I think only the NDP has the right alignment of interest and values.
By building medium density, transit oriented, neighborhoods; the feds can get after housing, environmental, and cost of living issues at the same time. Get three birds stoned at one.
If provinces fight it, give the housing to another province.
God I wish this would happen. The BCNDP are actually making substantial changes to our legislation but its not enough without major investments into transit infrastructure. Rail corridors need to be reopened/established and active transit projects need to be heavily subsidized.
Heavily subsidized?
It obviously varies wildly, but a road can cost $1,500k per lane km (NS highway planning figure). A multiuse path costs $10k per km (City of Toronto). That's 150:1 ratio.
And that's just construction, path maintenance is basically just snow clearance, roads are expensive; though maintenance data varies incredibly wildly based on how it's annualized and traffic volume.
Make every lane km of road built require the construction of 0.5km of path. Sure, construction costs increase 0.3%, but I'd wager the reduction in car use would see that recovered in maintenance costs (personal guess, not data driven).
But that's all municipal and to some degree, provincial.
What the feds need to do is curb immigration for a while until we figure this out and also create legislation for the realtor business/profession or just make it obsolete. Why the fuck do we need these dweebs when we can just simplify the process instead. There would be no more incentive from those bastards to blow up prices and give bad advice to people for a bigger commission.
It's all within the mandate of CMHC, they have used the tools to achieve this before.
Housing plans. Municipal planning. Housing construction. Planned, self-contained, communities. Housing quality improvement. Urban renewal. Density enforcement. Non-profit low income housing.
These are all things CMHC has done in the past, and can do again in the future.
Curbing immigration may help housing, but I don't know what the impacts to that on the labour for are. We're already in a labour crunch and using foreign workers.
Realtors are one I hadn't thought of. They should go the way of travel agencies, or be replaced by non-profits of there is something about them I'm missing.
I keep hearing about this labour crunch, and yet as someone who builds houses as a job (carpenter) this is the slowest summer since 2020 for building houses in Alberta. The builders only seem to want to build pre-purchashed houses and have limited the "spec" houses they build and sell later. It's the same for a lot of friends we have in the industry, people are scrambling to find work, not workers.
And I've been putting out resumes to nearby industries & not getting much attention. So really, how much is there a real labour shortage, and where? Because the 4th & 5th biggest cities in the country aren't doing so well.
Industries 62, 72, and 81 are all above 6% vacancy.
Construction had 64k vacancies last quarter, 12k of those in Alberta.
I get it, it sucks when the jobs aren't where you want to live, I've moved my family 6 times (in 15 years) for work, it's harder every time.
Immigration isn't driving the housing crisis, though. Real estate speculation and short-term rentals are.
Massively tax short-term rentals and non-primary-resident housing and watch the problem go away
Immigration doesn't help. We let a million people into the country last year and only built 250k housing units.
Here's another report that says it's an important factor.
https://sh.itjust.works/post/2211653
It's not driving the crisis, but it's making it a lot worse.