Mike Moffatt: Canada’s housing crisis demands a war-time effort
Mike Moffatt: Canada’s housing crisis demands a war-time effort
The key to an effective housing strategy is speed. The federal government must avoid setting up new approvals processes and micromanaging the system.
The federal government must prioritize speed over micromanagement
Sorry, best we can do is sell off farmland to billionaire developers who'll build luxury McMansions on them.
Here are a few highlights from the piece:
- The CMHC can facilitate this by creating a free catalogue of designs as they did in the 1940s. This catalogue would include designs for various housing types incorporating these technologies, from midrise apartment buildings to student residences, .... Builders using these designs could be fast-tracked for regulatory approvals
- Government can act as the first customer for these projects, further accelerating uptake. It can build homes to address the estimated 4,500-unit shortage for Canadian Armed Forces families. Social housing can be built with the use of an acquisition fund.
- Colleges and universities should be given funding and instructed to build on-campus student housing to support a rapidly growing population of international students or risk losing their status as designated learning institutions, which would eliminate their ability to bring in those international students.
- The federal government cannot alter municipal zoning codes, but it can offer incentives to do so. It could set up a set of minimum standards (call it a National Zoning Code), and any municipality that altered its zoning code to be compliant could be given one-time per-capita funding to spend on infrastructure construction and maintenance, no other strings attached.
There may be other bits, but those are the ones that caught my attention.
Good bot
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If Canada is anything like the US there isn’t a housing shortage, there’s a shortage of will to rein in developers and landlords.
there’s a shortage of will to rein in developers and landlords.
yeah, that's pretty much it.
I don't agree with that.
While yes, developers and landlords are a problem, they're a symptom of the problem, which is a genuine shortage of housing. If there's plenty of homes to go around, then it won't be possible for homes to be sold for millions and apartments requiring a salary over 60k.
There's a major supply issue, and the key components for it is zoning laws and the need for neighbourhood association approval. Change zoning to allow mixed use housing in all commercial spaces, and all residential to allow townhouses and low/midrise apartments, as well as remove the need or any association approval, and we wouldn't have a housing issue at all.
Most new homes are massive condos and apartments because it takes years to go from purchasing a piece of land to having it approved. So every developer is going to try to maximize their profits by making it as big and expensive as possible since they can't just pump out a ton of projects quickly. That, and the fact that anybody who tries to get into the business just gets blocked because they get put into the backend of a wait list for association review that takes over a decade, and thus, all the developments are expensive.
Yet, if it's imperfect the opposition will do their usual.
The legalization of marijuana has taught me that the federal government shouldn't be involved in anything involving the market place. Theyll fuck it up.