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by ZoomerCretin
1015 days ago
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Then make accommodations available. The analogy doesn't even hold to reality: you don't need to spend any money creating accommodations; you only need to repeal the extreme restrictions that prevent any more accommodations from being built. Most of the housing crisis is a result of politicians and homeowners refusing to cede even one plot of land for any building denser than a detached single family house. The other week on Twitter, a city councilmember from Toronto/some major Canadian city was complaining about an apartment tower being "out of scale with the neighbothood" as though 90th percentile incomes were still sufficient to get a loan for a house. |
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Even if the authorization was permitted to construct an entire new city capable of housing 3 million people, no reviews or permits, and assigned the highest priority and a blank-cheque budget to rush construction, it would take at least ten years to build. Vancouver's massive Oakridge redevelopment alone broke ground in 2019 and is expected to take until 2027 to complete. (The rezoning was approved in 2014.)
And that is what we should do! Yes! The country should be building brand new cities and linking them up with high-speed rail. But, even if that plan were shovel-ready today -- which it definitely, definitely isn't! -- it would still take years before it contributed to the solution, and all the while, the demand is continuing to grow!
The seeds of the supply solution to today's housing crisis needed to be planted at least ten years ago. But it wasn't, so we can plant those seeds now, but they'll take time to come to fruition. In the meantime, the only fast-acting measures are demand-side measures. And having to deploy demand-side measures is a very tragic consequence of not having taken timely action on the supply side. And that's even assuming we can plant those seeds today: if the city council squabbling about setbacks and floor-space-ratios continues today, then those seeds still aren't being planted, the demand-side measures will unfortunately need to last even longer, and the vitality of the country will suffer for it.