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The Conservative Party Has No Real Solutions For The Affordability Crisis
(www.readthemaple.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
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I haven't heard of these plans to force municipalities to build housing, but am curious how that is supposed to work.
Municipalities don't have their own construction crews, housing is built by private contractors and land developers.
Are municipalities supposed to buy up land and hire contractors to build housing themselves? Then sell it once completed? Or rent it out for little to no profit?
Force cities to allow housing to be built, technjcally. Basically, the YIMBY argument is that the private sector and non-profit sector are lining up to build housing that will help the housing crisis by both attacking the supply/demand problem with more market supply at large and also there are specialized affordable housing builders that will directly target renters needing affordable rent.
These people are being directly blocked by municipal zoning rules like height limits and ambiguous planning guidelines, and indirectly blocked by long and slow approval processes that are costing them millions in carrying costs owning expensive property they can't build on while they fight city halls.
I downloaded this great video from Xitter of an affordable housing builder giving a deputation to the city of Toronto about this -- it's posted on my Mastodon.
https://mastodon.social/@Pxtl/110300343308877005
A choice quote:
"$20 billion dollar intersection in Forest Hill; somebody said that should be a 7-storey and 70-unit building in 2018. How...where did that number come from? Somebody picked that number. Because it "conformed to the current planning policy for Forest Hill" and somebody adjacent to the site had a backyard swimming pool. That can't be our priority in 2023."
Relevant to this, PP's housing plan includes forcing cities to upzone such transit hubs.
To me that really only seems like half a solution.
The BC government already implemented a rule that any single home lot can have buildings which contain up to 4 separate dwellings to be built no matter the local zoning, which I find can have many issues down the road with providing infrastructure to areas with 4x more people than was planned for.
But you still need developers to buy that land and take the risk of funding the construction of houses and apartments and hire work crews which are already limited and can only build so fast. Developers are not willing to take out as many loans to fund these contractions which interest rates as high as they are.
We need to have low interest rate loans for home construction and some sort of incentive to get residential construction crews to expand or new construction companies to start up and the trades to train on more apprentices.