Nolan Gray in Vancouver

Are Vancouver's high housing prices and rents 'a policy decision'? Dan Fumano, Vancouver Sun.

Reports on a talk by Nolan Gray of California YIMBY. For anyone interested in the housing shortage, Gray is well worth reading. A good description of the basic problem, from 2019:

Many U.S. cities force every development proposal to go through a long and costly discretionary review process. This is often done by making land-use regulations so restrictive that any development must pursue a discretionary action like a rezoning or a special permit. In practice, this submits all proposed development to months of negotiating and public review, in which locals can shout a project down to their preferred size (which is often a vacant lot) or extract large concessions from the developer.

In Vancouver, we set up institutions back in the 1970s to "manage growth," in the name of livability. The result is what Harmon Moon calls "Bonsai Vancouver": a city that's lovely, but much too small. Or as someone says: "You get what you plan for. Vancouver is a very pretty, very expensive city."

So how do we fix this? From Fumano's article:

Major zoning reforms are underway around the province, with the B.C. NDP implementing sweeping zoning reforms mandating housing density in municipalities, drawing the ire of some local governments.

Speaking after Friday’s event, Gray said he thinks that type of action from senior governments — similar to what has happened in some U.S. states — is “unavoidable” and will only become more common in the future.

“You’re not going to solve the housing crisis unless every local jurisdiction is doing its fair share to build housing,” Gray said. “I don’t see any other way around it. Of course, the ideal is that every local government sees the light and reforms on their own. But we can’t wait for that.”