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?
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.