It’s interesting to perspectives from elsewhere. The Netherlands is also facing a housing crisis, and they’re also talking about significant increases in construction. Part of that will be to limit local control.
Interestingly, they’re also talking about changing the type of construction: fewer rooms.
There isn’t quite enough context to explain why that would help, but it’s something I haven’t really heard politicians saying here in Canada.
What changes would you make to speed up housing growth here?
I guess the question is, what price would you require to drop down one or two bedrooms?
We used to have much smaller homes. Our enormous houses aren’t helping our cost, for sure, but its a difficult sell for many. I had to convince my wife we didn’t need a huge house when we moved, and managed to get her to look at sub2k sqft houses. The amount of space we STILL don’t use is ridiculous, but she wasn’t willing to go below 1750.
Post world war 2 the CMHC built all these houses that were perfectly adequate for families for one or two generations. The quality has fallen off as they were built with cheap materials, but they lasted long enough to solve a crisis.
I don’t know why we can’t mass build housing like that in areas like North Bay or small cities with suitable power and sewage capacity.
It’s not like North Bay doesn’t need workers either, it would go well with Ring of Fire type initiatives.
Tbh its not even that we need to sacrifice quality at this point. we have the knowledge to do good builds.
Build lowrise or duplex townhomes that are big enough for families, in the 800-1200sqft range, and save on building costs. Save on the space, so land costs and servicing costs stay low. Sure its not as appealing as a suburban house with a huge backyard and no shared walls, but its a lot cheaper, and it’ll alleviate the housing crunch.
I’ve said it before, but my firm works with municipalities as the external engineer to review development plans. Those have all dried up the in last 6months, despite the housing crunch still being here. Know why? Costs have come down since people can’t afford it, which means developers are willing to sit on vacant land and/or approved plans and hope that costs will rise again before building. They’re hoping this dip is a short term correction.
This isn’t sustainable. We need a nonprofit or govt funded builder providing supply regardless of what the financial feasibility of doing so is, based on the required demand for housing. Housing should not be a commodity, nor should be it a retirement plan.
That’s so relatable, and I don’t know where that desire for ever expanding housing comes from. And it’s not just the house sizes increasing themselves (and the associated price of housing going up) that’s a problem. Ever growing square footage also directly impact the cost of living for folks as maintenance, repairs, heating, and electricity costs all scale right along with the size of the building.
If we can get folks to accept smaller houses we can tackle the two biggest affordability problems we are dealing with, but nobody seems to want to accept that message.
We also need to address the fact that using houses as money-making ventures and also not paying people are both gigantic problems.
I find it’s a phase of life thing. My partner and I used to live in a 700ish square foot, single bedroom apartment. We loved that thing. With kids, that would be really hard. But I expect we’ll go back to something similar after our kids are established.
For sure- I think house size does need to scale with family size. But no family is big enough these days for a 3k sqft house, especially not a typical nuclear 4 person one. 12 or 1500 is sufficient for most 4 person families while still maintaining standards theyre used to, though obviously layout can make a big difference.