this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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I am very pro-immigration with the caveat that I absolutely don't think Canada is matching it's housing strategy with it's immigration strategy. We live in one of the largest, emptiest countries in the world and can absolutely find room to bring many people in. And bringing many people in would allow us to create a productive capacity that would allow us to decouple from the US economy and control our own fate in a way we don't right now.
That said, all that space means nothing without housing for people to live in, so the government needs to get back into the business of building public housing. We can look to the example of Vienna, Austria on how to create high quality, desirable public housing that people want to live in. Simply providing incentives to private industry hoping they will solve the problem has failed again and again. This is a problem where we need to make and execute a plan.
We need more housing density in cities, but that's never happening with municipal governments getting stuck in NIMBY hell while the people who actually want dense housing to be built do nothing to petition the government
Well, the cities are ultimately subject to the provinces, so if we can get enough support for this kind of stuff on the provincial level it can be used to overrule the NIMBYism that tends to dominate municipal politics. Of course, the problem with that is that most of the current slate of provincial governments would most definitely not be on board with this sort of thing. But hope springs eternal, I suppose.
BC is making progress here! The provincial government is planning on introducing legislation that effectively rezones all single family lots to allow for duplexes, triplexes, and if space permits, quadplexes. If the land is next to transit then some higher level of density is also permitted. Finally, they're threatening cities that don't build enough housing that they might take away their ability to control building permits, zoning, etc.
The people the municipalities are beholden to are the very same people the province is beholden to. The only way the province would seek to overrule a municipality is if sufficient people in other municipalities recognize a benefit that a single municipality is overlooking. However, your comment suggests that said NIMBYism is present across all of the municipalities, so there is no such divergence here.
Well what complicates it is the differing participation rates between municipal and provincial elections. NIMBYs don't tend to dominate municipal politics because they form a huge voting bloc, but rather a particularly motivated voting bloc in a low turnout environment. Provincial elections don't have the greatest turnout, but still tend to get much higher turnout rates than municipal. In that difference you can maybe find the electorate provincially to make this stuff happen where it doesn't turn out on the city level.
Governance doesn't happen at election time. That is only the hiring process to select the employee you wish to work with going forward. Governance happens after the election when you are down at the constituency office (or equivalent) working with and guiding the employee you hired.
I suspect, and experience corroborates, that those who think they can throw their employee to the wolves, never speaking to them again, and everything will work out just fine at the municipal level are the same people who make the same mistake at the provincial level. Similarly, the people who understand that democracy is a process of continual hard work understand that no matter which government it is.
As such, the NIMBYs who are constantly talking to their councillor are no doubt the same NIMBYs constantly talking to their MPP/MLA. And those who leave life to chance, hoping that their hired employee is a mind reader...
The Canadian government has crown land that is offered for free to those willing to settle those empty spaces. It is not that we can't find room, but that people don't want to occupy the space.
That's a bit of a chicken and egg scenario; people don't want to live out in the boonies in the middle of nowhere, they like amenities like "restaurants" and "clothing stores". Maybe even a super market that can stock a few international ingredients from home.
Who is going to build all that infrastructure to prop up a new town before the residents move in?
Free crown land costs you nothing because just trying to live there means you'll be doing some of the developing.
Affordable housing isn't even an immigration problem, it also gets tied to birth rates as a population spike.
This is just a failure of the free market to address the needs of the populace, and is evidence that housing either needs to be provided by the government like any other see public service, or a public competitor needs to exist to drive prices down.
Yes, the failure of the free market to exist is understandably a problem. For example:
The list goes on and on.
I don't know if I consider myself a free market type. I think smart regulation can be useful. But our specific attempt to avoid a free market is certainly broken, at least when optimizing for allowing housing for all. No doubt a free market would bring improvement over what we currently have for those in need of somewhere to live.