Truly feels like a “we’ve tried nothing, and we’re out of ideas!” situation, it’s almost comical.
It seems like these are blueprints for single family homes, so we’ll be stuck with car-based city designs that aren’t helping us solve the housing crisis in the first place…
You can build as many houses as you want but until you restrict investment firms and landlords buying all of them you won’t put a dent in the problem.
Then you should talk to your provincial government as the federal one has no power over that.
They couldn’t implement a tax to help make it less lucrative? I honestly don’t know, but it does seem like something they could do.
It’s it wasn’t lucrative, they wouldn’t build them. Unfortunately.
Edit: that’s why we need social housing programs where social housing is built by the government.
Taxes are an issue for people that aren’t already rich enough to not care and the people actually hoarding residences and leaving them empty are in that category.
It seems like a lot of people have a very hard time understanding the governments division of powers and I think it’s a very big problem because it gives the provinces a free pass for many things as people blame the federal government without realising that they don’t have the means to solve these issues…
Cities aren’t even political entities from a constitutional perspective, they’re fully dependent of the provincial governments and are called their pets, so guess who could force them to increase density? Not Trudeau!
I really wish those politicians would address the issue of unoccupied housing as well. I feel like saying that the solution is to build more housing is to play in the pockets of investors while pushing for less unoccupied residencies is going against it and why I believe it is not talked as much on the political front.
It’s exciting to see that the government could cut up to a year of development time with these blueprints. I’m curious what they’ll come up with that reflects the best of what modern BIM, digital twin, offsite manufacturing, CLT, and modular construction technologies can do.
Hopefully there will be a variety of to choose from for different kinds of environments and tastes. Personally I’d like to see some 6 storey apartments complexes, designed to accommodate car free lifestyles.
This is still only one piece of the puzzle though. To restore affordability it would make sense to prioritize building and converting more existing stock to non-market housing so there’s competitive pressure on the remaining/existing landlords to keep rent low.
Vienna has done a wonderful job to show the world what’s possible after a century of continuous improvements with non market housing.
It’s not a supply issue — there’s enough empty homes in Canada right now to house every single person in this country.
Sauce?
