this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
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Building more density in well-designed, walkable neighbourhoods is absolutely part of the answer.
We need to make it so that there are about as many homes as people who need homes. Right now the numbers are wildly out of wack. The reason prices won't go down is because the government is resistant to opening the floodgates of density (as you said, because too many of their constituents are homeowners).
If we just abolished single family zoning and said anyone can build dense housing anywhere that is residentially zoned, we'd have affordable housing within a few years. Zoning is an artificial bottleneck on the supply of housing. Imagine if every shitty carbrained suburb suddenly could house 2x or 3x as many people! But then of course we would need to make them a bit less carbrained by introducing more walkability, better public transit, and more mixed use. That can all be done gradually by relaxing zoning restrictions.
This is just objectively false.
Japan didn't have single family zoning, anyone could build dense housing anywhere residential in any of the major cities and they absolutely did, and yet it was never affordable. They have massively walkable cities, with great public transportation, and yet... not affordable unless you want to live in a 100 square foot closet that most north Americans couldn't even fit through the door on.
A bunch of US cities have no zoning and are still not affordable.
Zoning is a slight bottleneck, but it's not even close to the core problem.
I'm not saying don't change the zoning, go ahead, but expecting things to become affordable in a few years is an absolute pipe dream.
BC just did it, and developers are just shit talking the policy saying it doesn't change anything.