Repost: What the cost bottleneck looks like

Slides from a presentation to the Metro Vancouver board

I’m doing an informal presentation today as part of the YIMBYtown “Unconference.” It’ll be based on a presentation to the Metro Vancouver Regional District board that I did back in November.

In short, there’s three bottlenecks to building more housing:

• The approval bottleneck (“it’s easier to elect a pope”)

• The cost bottleneck (even if it’s legal to build, it won’t get built if costs are too high)

• Actual construction

In some ways the approval bottleneck is more obvious - why is it illegal to build a fourplex or a small apartment building? So I thought I’d talk a bit about the cost bottleneck.