From a recent thread on Reddit: Metro Vancouver report shows region building only half the housing that municipalities need.
There's always going to be a bottleneck somewhere. In the case of housing, I think of the bottlenecks as:
Approval. "It's easier to elect a pope than to approve a small apartment building in the city of Vancouver."
Costs. Even when something is legal to build, if costs are too high it won't get built.
Physical construction. This is where the bottleneck should be: we should be building as fast as physically possible.
What can municipal governments do about it?
They can speed up approvals by setting priorities instead of continuously adding more regulatory requirements. Every regulatory requirement is higher priority than housing.
They can lower costs by lowering their development charges - a "leaky bucket" because it pushes up prices and rents for existing housing as well as new housing, but the city doesn't get any of that revenue.
They can also lower costs by allowing more density, which reduces the cost of land per square foot of floor space.
Problem is, municipal incentives are backwards: regulating new housing like it's a nuclear power plant and taxing it like it's a gold mine means that they can extract a lot of revenue, keeping property taxes low. The city of Vancouver alone extracted $2.5 billion in supposedly-voluntary Community Amenity Contributions over the 10 years from 2011 to 2020. If they lifted their restrictions and made housing less scarce and expensive, it'd be a financial disaster for them.
So we're going to need intervention from the provincial and federal governments. In BC, the Eby government has been pushing hard for more density and lower charges. The federal government has been using the Housing Accelerator Fund and now the Canada Housing Infrastructure Fund as a combined carrot and stick. See the Blueprint for More and Better Housing.
One concrete idea: in the recent federal election, I volunteered with Amy K. Gill, the Liberal candidate in Vancouver Kingsway, to try to unseat Don Davies, a 17-year NDP MP who usually wins by 20-25% of the vote. (This time around, he still won but it was extremely close - Amy lost by about 300 votes, or less than 1%.) Vancouver Kingsway has three SkyTrain stations: Nanaimo, 29th Avenue, and Joyce. Joyce has a lot of high-rises, but Nanaimo and 29th Avenue still look like they did in the 1980s. Why? Apparently the city hasn't upgraded the sewer capacity near the stations. But as Deny Sullivan has observed, because building housing is so expensive in relation to water and sewer upgrades, this is a small tail wagging a very big dog. Federal funding to upgrade the sewer capacity near these stations more rapidly, combined with municipal upzoning of the land, would unlock a tremendous amount of new housing investment.
Helpful graph! Would be nice to convert it into homes per household, as - with falling household size - the downward trend would be even clearer.