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?
In Canada, we have loads of housing with few rooms. That’s part of the whole fucking problem, that housing that does get built is not designed to serve people’s needs but to be an asset whose value will appreciate the most over time. So you get entire towers of 1 bedroom apartments that then can’t be sold because people need space to leave and aren’t willing to pay “asset” prices.
The most important thing we can do to address the housing crisis is to break the back of the insane system that financializes housing. And yes, that includes building, and building a lot, but not little “asset” shoeboxes in the sky, but non-market apartments where people can live and have families.
I think we agree on 99% of the issue; we do need non-market housing and we need a diverse range of sizes; we do need to reduce the attractiveness of housing as an investment class.
But I disagree that we have excess 1bd units directly because of housing is seen as an investment. Small time investors bought these like hot cake because those investors, in large part having no idea about what they’re doing, were hyped about just getting into the market purely due to speculation, and of course the lowest entry into the market is the smallest unit possible. Pre-sale marketing treated these people like a Ponzi scheme: let’s sell as many as possible while it’s still profitable, these suckers will eat the price drop when it inevitably lands.
The reason why I’m nitpicking the root cause is that the main problem is not the investing, but that this investment is a badly regulated market, with a lot of silly myths going around (housing will never be a bad investment, rent is throwing money away etc). Basically Millennial’s covered call ETFs but for boomers. Or Gen Z’s shitcoints, but for boomers. A properly regulated market should mandate diversity of unit sizes, land use, non-market housing etc. Even if we spend zero energy on de-incentivizing buying homes for investment, at least a regulated market would prevent a bunch of idiots betting their retirement on “housing only go up” to cause the market to get distorted. Of course I do also agree we should work to not treat housing as investment, count me in for a 5000% increase on property taxes for non-primary residences.