So how do we actually fix the housing affordability problem in Vancouver?
I think of it like this: housing is a ladder, it's all connected. When we're not building enough new housing, people end up moving down the ladder to compete for existing housing, and you get tremendous pressure on people near the bottom of the ladder.
When we don't have enough housing, prices and asking rents have to rise to unbearable levels to keep people out, and to force people who are looking for a place to give up and leave.
Somehow we've ended up with a system where it's easiest and fastest to get approval to build the most expensive housing, at the very top of the housing ladder: single-detached houses, which almost nobody can afford.
If we're serious about fixing the housing shortage, I think what we need is to make it much easier and faster to build a lot more low- and mid-rise housing (like small apartment buildings) across the city, and to bring down costs (including development charges) as much as we can. In other words, for Vancouver to be more like Montreal than like Shaughnessy.
The big advantage of low- and mid-rise buildings, compared to high-rises, is that they should be much easier and faster to plan and build, and construction costs are lower than for high-rises. (To be clear, we still do need high-rises in places where a lot of people want to live and land prices are particularly high, like city centres and next to SkyTrain stations.)
Ideally, small apartment buildings would be legal by right. Waterloo just moved forward on making it legal to build four storeys and four units on a single lot in residential neighbourhoods. According to public opinion polls, 70% of people in the city of Vancouver would support this as well.
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In Montreal, selling prices per square foot closely track hard construction costs: when prices rise, that’s a strong incentive for people to build more housing. In Metro Vancouver, there’s a huge gap: because so much housing is built as high-rises, which are slow to plan and build, it’s hard to adapt quickly to rising prices.