[alex_sf]

There is plenty of housing for plenty of people in most parts of North America. The 'problem' is that what people _want_ is cheap housing in urban centers, a.k.a cool spots. Because that doesn't exist, we claim to have a housing shortage.

[waterlaw]

In Ontario it's not just urban centers. Prices are going up almost everywhere. Towns with a grocery store and Tim Hortons are seeing prices explode.

One problem in Canadian provinces is your taxes remain the same regardless of where you live, but if you need access to healthcare or education, then you have to live near a major city. Particularly if you want quality healthcare.

In fact the cost of living goes up if you're a rural inhabitant in most of Ontario. Electricity is more expensive, heating is expensive, etc.

[AYBABTME]

You portray it as being some capricious choice by entitled brats, but ignore that there's economic and efficiency advantages for society to have more centrally located workforce and services.

[hpkuarg]

As the current supply chain crisis evinces, efficiency shouldn't be the end-all, be-all of policy.

[AYBABTME]

Strange argument to switch to. If your day to day life is better because you live near where you eat and work and obtain healthcare and what not, isn't sort of hard to argue against? Where's the downside to this efficiency? It looks to me like an entirely win-win situation for the individual and society. Sometimes efficiency translates directly into resiliency. In your argument, proximity and density makes urban populations easier and cheaper to deliver to.

[ericmay]

I think that used to be the case and I would have argued as such as early as 2018 w.r.t NIMBY and San Francisco but I think it's becoming less true. Now sure you can buy a trailer in the middle of nowhere in the Nevada desert, but what were previously considered "cheap" houses in places like Des Moines are increasing substantially in price, and that's not just the cool spots either. You might say "Well just rent then" but rent is going up too.

With that being said, naturally homes near economic activity should be more expensive. It's more expensive and always will be to live near Google's HQ in Mountain View than it will be to live in Grand Rapids, Michigan or Toledo, Ohio. That's just economic physics. It's ok, normal, natural, acceptable, and economically good. And these homes are only going to get more expensive over time as energy costs increase (EVs won't save us), road maintenance costs increase (already far out of control), and people move to live in more walkable areas. But as these costs increase, people who were expecting that it would be cheap to live in the suburbs are surprised because energy costs and moving far away just won't save them anymore like it did in the past (oh I'll live here and just have a 40 mile commute) - hence it appears that we have a housing shortage when in reality the costs are more reflective of economic reality and were artificially cheap. New housing won't help here because even if we could build more faster we'd still be building it in an economically handicapped way and rely on traveling far distances in cars and on highways, which just will not work when we can't pump cheap oil out of the ground.

You have two options. The first option is dense skyscrapers. But those aren't going to be efficient enough in places unconstrained by geography. They also have maintenance issues and it'll be too expensive to keep them going in the future with much higher energy costs. The second option is medium-density mixed-use development. Think the beautiful streets with brick single family homes next to townhouses and 2 story apartments with a cafe or an office at the bottom, bikes, walking, and street cars or other similar efficient transit. These you can repair yourself and the maintenance is much lower on the long-run and they don't rely on cheap oil to be livable.

But we'll keep building skyscrapers and suburbs (I didn't mention these as an option because they aren't) and the prices will just keep going up.

[throwaway894345]

> as energy costs increase (EVs won't save us)

I don't really disagree with your larger point, but I can't help but explore this nit because it seems interesting. I don't think anyone is arguing that EVs will markedly reduce energy prices; however, there is an argument that renewables will decrease energy prices by virtue of being cheaper per unit power. Of course, it will take at least a decade before renewable energy isn't supply-constrained, so I don't think anyone is expecting this to happen soon, and moreover I've heard counter-arguments that the figures associated with renewable energy aren't including the storage costs which would be required to make renewable energy suitable for base load generation or the costs to decommission/recycle hazardous solar panels and fiberglass wind turbine blades--maybe there will be a ~10 year window during which the supply of renewable energy meets/exceeds demand but before the recycling/decommissioning costs kick in en force? :)

[ericmay]

Oh yea I definitely think EVs are the future and to the extent that we have vehicles, in the majority of cases they should be EV. I guess what I'd say here is that even at a reduced cost (which is arguable) for a "commute" (self-driving, etc.) you aren't going to get EVs cheap enough to offset b/c the very act of driving 10, 20, 40, miles to a job or driving a mile down the road to the grocery store is just incomparable to just better design. If your grocery store is within a half mile and you can walk or bike there, EVs could never compete. So it's kind of like we're improving the technology of something we shouldn't be doing, versus just not doing that thing.

If I had to completely armchair it here, if you looked at total impact to society, the environment, car accidents, you name it something like a gallon of gas in the US should really be about $20-$30/gallon but it feels like it's expensive at $5 b/c we're so used to the low prices. We are probably experiencing these costs through inflation and things like housing prices.

Renewables (should) drop overall energy costs by virtue of capturing natural movements (I'd throw nuclear in renewable as well IMO but I understand why you wouldn't) but people are going to focus on kWh being expensive because they're used to extremely cheap gasoline. I guess in other words renewables on paper will be more expensive "at the pump" but externality cost to society will be lower. I wouldn't be surprised if in the future as more EVs come online that energy costs to charge even at home are approximate to gasoline.

[throwaway894345]

> If I had to completely armchair it here, if you looked at total impact to society, the environment, car accidents, you name it something like a gallon of gas in the US should really be about $20-$30/gallon but it feels like it's expensive at $5 b/c we're so used to the low prices

Price per gallon is probably the wrong unit. You probably want $/mile. Car accidents get priced in via insurance. Environment isn't priced in at all in the US, though a carbon tax could change that if there was any political appetite for it. EVs already significantly reduce fuel and maintenance costs even though ICE cars enjoy a "carbon subsidy" (i.e., pollution isn't priced into the cost of gas).

> people are going to focus on kWh being expensive because they're used to extremely cheap gasoline

Electricity is already much less expensive than gasoline. The current US-average gas price is $4.10/gallon and a 30mpg car will cost over $0.13/mile. The current US-average electricity price is $0.14/kwh--with ballpark 85% charge efficiency (not all energy drawn from the grid makes it into the battery) and 300wh/mile, an EV will cost less than $0.05/mile. EV fuel costs are just over a third of those of ICE vehicles.

[ericmay]

> Electricity is already much less expensive than gasoline.

How I'd phrase that is: "Electricity is currently much less expensive than gasoline "at the pump". What I think is likely to occur is that as we switch over to EVs (I own one btw if that helps here) there will be continued pure electricity demand which is going to cause prices to go up and up. Everything runs on electricity, and soon cars will too. So I think the kWh price is going to go up, and be measured and scrutinized much more (you can make an app to calculate this, not so much with gasoline easily) and it'll be more measurable. But gasoline costs just aren't "counted" in the same way. So eventually it'll cost, idk, $20 to go 300 miles and people will think that it's expensive because you could do it with gas much cheaper in the past, but the problem with that comparison is you wouldn't have accounted for the externalities so you're not really getting true costs. I hope that makes sense where I was going with that.

I agree $/mile is the right unit, I was just thinking about how to isolate true gas cost versus true kWh rate in some way. I personally pay closer to the $.05 kWh rate at home, but I see peak rates in California hitting $.4/kWh and all I see is the writing on the wall for the rest of the country.

If I had to summarize:

We live in an era of extremely cheap energy. It may go on for another 50-100 years, who knows. Maybe it goes on forever. But it won't be from fossil fuels. And if energy becomes much more expensive and we haven't designed cities and transit for optimizing cheap/efficient energy costs we're beyond screwed. Relating it back to housing, I think it makes sense the housing is getting much more expensive and that this phenomenon is more than just "living somewhere cool" and part of the reason that people want to live in these "cool" places is exactly because the implicit energy costs are less. You don't have to drive to a coffee shop. You walk.

I guess one good thing about America is we have all of these navigable waterways so we won't have big food shortages as distribution costs can remain reasonable, at least in the mid west and the east.

-edit-

One startup idea I have is a way to truly measure your total energy expenditure. Right now I just get a bill in the mail and figure that it makes sense because it's sooooo cheap to run all of this stuff. What happens once energy becomes 5x more expensive? Well, I want to know how much it really costs me to run dual monitors. Maybe it's an extra $50/year I don't want to spend (just a contrived example).

[throwaway894345]

Agreed that increased electrification of previously fossil fueled applications will create upward pressure on prices, as will the decomissioning of fossil fuel power plants. However, this will eventually stabilize as we (1) increase renewable capacity and (2) increase our efficiency (American energy consumption is decreasing gradually as we improve efficiency).

[bobthepanda]

It is worth noting that unlike some other energy sectors, unit costs of storage and renewable continue to trend down aggressively.

It’s still not quite so cheap that recycling it makes no economic sense, so if it is possible a way will be figured out sooner or later. (Metal is recyclable because recycling it requires so much less energy than producing it; plastic is super cheap and so is basically never recycled.)

[random314]

Imagine people wanting to live close to work, instead of 2 hours away.

[na85]

We do in fact have an affordability crisis in Canada. I bought a home in a small town outside Toronto (too far to be a commuter town) in 2017 for $425000, and sold it in 2020.

We're friends with the people that bought it from us and on the same street in that same small town in Ontario, houses are going for $1M+ now. This is not entitled millenials wanting to live in Vancouver. This is the place where things are supposed to be affordable. This is exactly the sort of place where Boomers love to tell us to go live if we can't afford the city.

Housing is cheaper if you are willing to relocate to e.g. Swift Current, Saskatchewan where a 2-bedroom home with 900 square feet will cost you $175000, but of course there are very few jobs in a small town of 15000 people that's 3 hours away from the nearest big city and the unemployment rate is among the highest in the province.

[raydev]

Just to add to this, we live in a town of ~50k people about 2 hours out of Toronto, and house prices are up 20% yearly since before COVID. 2-3 bedroom houses, are brushing up against $1million this year.

Not as bad as other parts of Canada to be sure, but most people living here have manufacturing jobs or are in the military. I don't see how this is sustainable, since there's nothing for rich people to do here.

[wizee]

Very ordinary detached family homes in decent shape pretty much anywhere in Ontario are near a million dollars or more. If people could buy a family home for vaguely affordable prices in even the most remote parts of the province, people would flock there. There's plenty of land, but getting permission to build anything in much of Canada is a difficult and slow process, even in remote areas.

[amanaplanacanal]

People also want to live where the jobs are, which is increasingly in cities. I expect most small towns are going to die over the next few decades.

[bobthepanda]

I don’t know that people want to live where the jobs are necessarily (although it helps for ease of switching jobs). Personally I think the move to remote work was very overhyped during the pandemic, but it is having an impact on the housing market of smaller areas.

People want to live where the amenities are, and all other things being equal more population can support more diverse sets of amenities. E.g. you need enough gay people in a town to support a regularly open gay bar, and generally speaking people want to have a choice of bars for going out.

[bcrl]

I live in a rural area with a small local town about an hour outside of Ottawa. Lots of rural houses are going up, as the hour drive is okay for the occasional commute. Nothing is being built in the town (which currently has about 350 dwellings). The problem? There is no local water / sewage system, and quite a few of the wells in town get contaminated with e-coli on a regular basis. Nobody wants to build a new subdivision in the town because it doesn't have the basic infrastructure need to support development.

The worst part of this is that the town has the money in the bank to build the water and sewage system. There's upwards of $8 million earmarked for the project. However, each homeowner is going to be responsible for $30k in hookup costs, and the town will have to shell out $500,000 per year to operate the new water system. Since it's a low income area, the >50% property tax increase needed to run the system won't fly, and neither will the hook-up costs. Instead, all the new builds are focused in rural areas where there is no infrastructure needed or in the larger towns / cities where costs are significantly higher but deemed to be an acceptable risk by developers.

[kbelder]

The trend in the last couple years has been the reverse of that, but it'll be interesting to see if that continues now that the most of the pandemic restrictions are over.

[vkou]

People don't want to live in cool spots, people want to live in spots where there is work.

Since agriculture industrialized, rural Canada has no work.

[howinteresting]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration

[ep103]

I'm not in Canada, but I am in the NYC region, and your comment is absurd. Assuming you want to live in a safe area, but not live inside the 5 city boros, you're looking at 1MM for a house, and an hour+ commute.

But yeah, "cool spots". /s

[tnel77]

There’s certainly an element of ignorance in their comment, but there’s also some truth.

I am originally from a rural area in the Midwest USA. I know a statistically significant number of people from high school and college who purposely moved to bigger cities because of “the culture” or “there’s so much more to do.” They are right. I live in a much bigger city now for those exact reasons, but the demand justifiably has resulted in wildly more expensive houses. I could buy a modest house in my hometown for $85k right now. That same house where I currently live would easily be selling for $300-350k. You make more money here, but not by much.

We need to work on improving our housing density issues, but there’s an undeniable element of “I don’t want to live there” going on.

[leshow]

The average house price in Canada is over 800k now. In a city like Toronto I would expect that to be higher.