Canada

My pet peeve is the provincial policy that as well pushes the needle to be expensive.

I own a home in Calgary that is zoned to allow for secondary suites. I already have a kitchen down there. I wanted to add a walk-out exit but the province said no, unless:

I redo the HVAC for the whole house so that the basement is on a completely isolated loop with a completely seperate furnace, and I rip apart the roof and walls to apply sound dampening materials.

The hurdle is insane. I spent a great portion of my life living in basement suites without either of those... And much worse!

I'm all about safety, but this is far past that.

We talk about densifying urban spaces but the new regulations make it cost prohibitive to do so on an existing build. I'd love to help ease the stress on the INSANE rental market in Calgary... But even provincial policy makes it extremely difficult to densify.

Ah yes the "let's build our way out of an monetary imbalance" policy that literally cannot possibly work.

Most notably because such concepts never include massive infrastructure spending nor a way to prevent 1%ers from just buying up stock as investment vehicles.

The only viable solution is punishing people who buy housing as an investment, strict rent control, building denser, more efficient housing And completely redoing our cities to remove car reliance.

Barking at the wrong tree, zoning, housing, municipalities... All of that is provincial.

The article actually mentions fixing (butchering is what's needed, really) zoning for the moment it wanders away from parliamentary politics.

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At the federal level, it seems absolutely nobody cares about pushing the real solutions – abolishing our insane zoning codes that bake in inequality, abolishing other crazy land use regulations like parking minimums, and taxing land.

How do you suggest the federal level tackle those problems without breaking the law?

Or are you saying that the feds should try to overthrow the power that be in some kind of coup? That would be interesting, but how could that happen when the people who control the feds are, ultimately, the same people who control the power that would need to be overthrown?

In fact, the same people who went out of their way to ensure that the feds don't have legal authority over these kinds of matters. It would be kind of strange to walk back on that now after all the toil to set that up in the first place.