[rehitman]

I bet if you got that city to get a permit to build a new condo, you need to spend shit ton of money and worst wait 6 months to get a permit, and at some point a neighbor blocks you because you are blocking a view or something. The problem is building, and in USA we have tons of land, we just some how don't let people to build homes

[Tiktaalik]

I generally agree with you, though within the particular context of small Canadian towns like the OP is discussion there's an additional issue that there's actually a dearth of investment and housing investment. In contrast to the vibrant cities like Vancouver where developers would love to build but they're blocked, in small towns there's often no developers, no builders, and no investment.

The remoteness and limited market of smaller towns can drive up the costs of creating new things.

In these cases of the lack of it's remarkably easier to simply buy a SFH and rent it out on Airbnb and I think that's how we get to these outcomes where there's seemingly tourist demand, but no one is creating anything new except trading around old SFHs.

[voisin]

In Canada the major issue is that zoning bylaws are generally 30 years old and so no one can do anything “as of right” which means that everyone has to go through a very long public engagement process and negotiation / shake down from the municipality to fund whatever the latest political desire is. So 6 months is, unfortunately, very very optimistic. Most of my developer friends spend 2-3 years and then still have to fight through the tribunals to get to build anything, even things ostensibly in line with what the city says it wants (like density around new rapid transit).