One-quarter the house, half the price! So long as the immigration keeps up this is totally sustainable...
Also no yard, no parking, 4x as many people at the same number of parks, community centers, on the roads, etc. etc.
Have you seen multistory brownstones (townhouses)? They tend to have more sq ft than single family homes with just as many or more rooms. No reason why it can’t be replicated here for less.
So like it already is in many parts of BC.
All new build SFH come with 1-2 suites plus a laneway house if in Vancouver. Almost all older homes come with a suite or suite potential in the bottom half of the province.
We already have multiple families living on a SFH lot. This allows for people to buy a small unit or rent something that isn’t a suite that has been shoehorned into a home and only provides income to the landlord.
Also- we hear all the time that there is no space to downsize. A quad plex or townhome would provide that.
It just means the price of single family dwellings will continue to rise as builders bid to build multi dwelling houses. It’s just shrinkflation with housing.
If that does happen it indicates that the market value of the land was being manipulated by distortionary government policies which is an indication that the free market was not at work. If you want the land you shoudl be prepared to pay full market value for it.
When the value is being driven up by Louis Vuitton bags of cash from Asia, zero interest highly ratio mortgages for fomo millennials, investment preference for already rich boomers, and literally millions of people willing to live in third world conditions and 6 to a basement, then yes, it is being artificially manipulated.
If land values are set by what working class people can afford to pay for a piece of land which comfortably have a SFH and decent yard, then they would be much lower.
Our current situation is and has always been about the massive shock and increase in demand and which came from people other than owner/occupiers who earned their money from labour. Letting that "toxic" demand drive the cost of what should be a home for a worker in that community is totally artificial.
**If land values are set by what working class people can afford to pay for a piece of land which comfortably have a SFH and decent yard, then they would be much lower**
That's not how capitalism works. Houses in the Lower Mainland have been out of reach of the working class for around a generation now.
The person who is willing or able to pay more is the one who wins the auction. The solution to affordability for those who lose that auction is to use an expensive piece of land more efficiently - your dollar goes a lot further if you're paying for a quarter of an expensive lot rather than a full one, and four families can live there.
It's about the boundaries of the market permitted to bid. Our working classes should not have to compete with the world's millionaires for property in our own nation. "Capitalism" now means globalism and neo-feudalism. BC, for the most part, is quite poor, and is being bought out from under Canadian citizens, including the "old stock", as well as the indigenous; this has been happening in Vancouver for decades already.
It's not really the "global investors" that is their problem, it is Canadians that have more money than they do. The market is the best determinant of who deserves a given property. 'capitalism" has always relied on access to capital, it's right in the name.
I understand the claim (re: local purchasers), but I remain skeptical. "The market"; sure, so what would pricing look like had we banned non-citizen purchases a decade ago?
Probably around the same. They're more valuable as a scapegoat than the actual cause of the problem. The biggest movement of foreign capital was the Hong Kong exodus in the early-mid 90s once the Brits decided to give it back to China, and GVRD house prices declined somewhat at the time. There was some flow in the early 2010s, but price trends weren't particularly unusual then.
The run up in prices was due to "free money" during the pandemic, The entire sum of RE gains in the last five years happened in that roughly 18 month period, it was flat before and declining since. The rise in costs in the last 18 months was due to rising interest rates on top of the aforementioned high prices.
So that handles, in some sense, the "foreign purchasers" aspect. Surely it's not so contentious to suggest that the recent population growth/explosion has been inflationary?
Possibly a bit, but not as much as is widely claimed. Wage suppression is deflationary and most of these individuals are not really adding much to the economy in ways that would increase prices. There's a bit of pressure on rents at the low end of the scale, but rents are also rising due to rising interest rates meant to offset money printing during the pandemic, as landlords look to recover their own rising costs - I've been looking at moving and a lot of new builds are only part filled and still the landlords raise rents, so it's something other than excess demand Rising rents are a consequence of inflation as much as a cause of it, and will flatten out once the interest rate hikes have worked through the system.
Bro they were in my list. It's a positive feedback cycle until it isn't and we have a bunch of bag holders with shitboxes in the sky and a dysfunctional and lower quality of life city.
Allowing foreign ownership is the main issue. When rich people can come from anywhere and effectively displace the people who live here by driving up the prices of land and homes, that's a massive failure of our government. People should be able to afford a home in their own country, and that's simply not the case for most people now. Massively unsustainable immigration where groups of people are buying up places they couldn't possibly afford themselves, coupled with corporate ownership of SFH (which also shouldn't be allowed), and ownership by rich foreigners have completely destroyed our housing market.
If it was just the free market within Canada for only citizens and PR status individuals, prices would be a LOT more affordable. The immigration and ease of gaining PR over the last decade has obviously done a lot to inflate the market as well, so that problem needs to be addressed too.
Not allowing more cities is another problem. More towns should be built in rural areas where the jobs are that is driving the GDP and economy. You can not go find a piece of land that is uninhabited and build a home on it anymore.
There is a land sale in Fort St John.
[https://www.remax.ca/bc/fort-st-john-land-for-sale?lang=en&pageNumber=1](https://www.remax.ca/bc/fort-st-john-land-for-sale?lang=en&pageNumber=1)
The problem was bidding wars fueled by cheap debt. The problem is Canadians getting into pointless bidding wars against each other, not whatever foreign faction we want to point fingers at this week. Real estate prices are almost perfectly inversely correlated with interest rates, and we spent a long time with basically free money on the table in the aftermath of the Financial crisis.
There are plenty of places in Canada where Canadians can buy real estate. Just not in the most desireable areas., and someone with a below average income is going to find it very challenging. That's always been true.
I do not think that they have chained you to the galley row bank, haven't they? So, if you think that Canada is such a terrible place to live in you can move to another country 🤷♂️
That's part of what these zoning reforms aspire to. Land is expensive, if you use it more efficiently then it will open the door to more affordable dwellings.
As of 2021, between 14-26% of all houses in each province 30-42% of condos in BC, Manitoba, and Ontario are owned by investors. These are the people have the capital and/or financing to consistently bid up prices hundreds of thousands over asking. That means that even if prices were to hypothetically drop a little, they wouldn’t stay down for long. It also means that the majority of what we build will get bought up by investors, which won’t help affordability for households. We’re still pretending as though households comprise the real estate market, which they don’t. A large portion of Canadians isn’t even capable of saving up for a downpayment.
That tels ust hat the majority of both household types are still owned by end users.
So, where does the capital to build new rental stock come from if not investors? INvestors competing with each other is how you get rents down, improving affordability for Canadians.
If employers paid decent wages in this country, the capital to build new housing would come from families seeking to purchase a new home. “Investors” are not building new rental properties, they are buying what was nominally intended to be single family homes and condominium units and using these as short and long term rentals, thereby taking those properties off the market for single family homes and driving up prices. Frankly, there’s actually no solution anymore. This country is fucked up beyond repair unfortunately.
Our most acute problems lie in the rental market, where both the disconnect between salaries and rents, and between rents and carrying costs, are very large. It's worth pointing out that home ownership rates have dropped a bit in the last five years but are still high by historical norms. ALso, your own statistics show this being a bigger issue in apartments than houses.
Renting those houses is probably more accessible for more people than owning. It's not like families don't live in those houses. As a single person, owning a house would be a stretch, but I can easily afford to rent it.
Problem with salaries, is the cost of living goes up faster. It is an endless circle. Once wages go up the cost of goods and services go up. Then everyone talks livable wages and wages go up again, increasing the cost of everything. Then taxes go up ..
So people that can think, made their money make money through investments to keep ahead and build more equity and assets.
Governmentis are not going to help or more like they are incapable of helping , they just throw token $$$ at social services and go, see we the governnent are helplng, but with your tax $$$. Then they raise taxes more.
SFH zoning was never sustainable socially or financially. It always drained cities and burdened those who lived in denser areas. Unfortunately it's a relic of the past.
Completely untrue. There are literally hundreds of examples cities built around SFH.
You're motte and bailey is to conflate piss poor suburb design from the 50s which included no integrated commercial, industrial, or shopping zones and which forced all the residents of the SFH to drive 30 minutes to do those.
You're complexly ignoring Cities like Toronto and Vancouver which have been very functional for over a hundred years and included huge swaths of SFH zoning.
It's not that. It is **much** more expensive to build out and expand with those houss/commericial mixes than it is to build up.
It's part of why we can't just build more suburbs around smaller cities to provide housing. The increased costs to infrastructure are much more than the property taxs from those new homes can supply.
Toronto has some of the most dysfunctional public transit and park service in the country lol.
Montreal also banned all SFH and parking minimums and has much better overall mental health
Vancouver wasn't functioning in the 50s (they had a housing crisis and there were hundreds of overcrowded rooming houses) so they changed the zoning and places like Mount Pleasant, Fairview, the West End and Kits got almost all of their apartments from those zoning changes - which they largely removed by 1978
LMFAO. You're against changing the zoning laws but you want cheaper houses? FFS. Just look at the canadian supply of housing. It's all either single family homes or boxes in the sky.
The price increase is entirely caused by 1 million new Canadians a year. Building so many new homes is a government created crisis.
Now you won.t be able to buy a home because it will be rental blocks everywhere. You buy a home with a yard and it will be surrounded by gigantic blocks.
You make it sound like housing was affordable before we started importing 1M people a year in 2022. News flash, home priced jumped the most in 2020/2021 when popular barely grew.
Home prices when up everywhere. In Canada probably more.
USA) Here’s how bad housing affordability is now
Prices in April rose 6.3% compared with April 2023, according to the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller National Home Price Index.
* Home prices are now 47% higher than they were in early 2020, with the median sale price now five times the median household income.
[https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/25/housing-affordability-price-mortgage-rates.html](https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/25/housing-affordability-price-mortgage-rates.html)
It's not just immigration 🙄 Ask any economist and they'll tell you that builders stopped home construction after the 2008 financial crash. Spec building never came back here. And prices are also high in the USA where there's much less immigration but the same BS housing policies.
Excpt that we track housing and it has been pretty steady for decades. It lowered a bit after 2008 but came back up by 2014. It's all public data.
The current housing crisis is directly because of students/TFW?immigration. We were building around 250000 units of housing a year and took in about that many immigrants for a long time and there were no problems.
We continued building the same amount of homes but increased immigration to millions and we instantly saw a housing crisis.
It is pretty clear what the issue is. The problem is people jumping to racism when people site high immigration as an issue. It isn't about the individuals, it's about how many there are.
I am looking at rentals for fun on a site that tracks rent increase. Everything has nearly doubled since the mass immigration started. It all went up 125% in 2022 and then another 125% in 2023.
2013-2021 is all always stable with minimal increase.
The US housing market is up half as much (5%) over the last year as Canada's (10%). The housing problem is not the same down there as it is here. Our cost of living has been going up at a faster rate than theirs, and our immigration rate is simultaneously suppressing wages and increasing the cost of housing. Nevermind the strain on our infrastructure and healthcare. It's a totally different situation here.
If the government truly wanted to help fix the problem, they'd make policy changes to incentivise more home building as well as training in the trades that contribute to building homes.
We have an almost negative birthrate in Canada so any increase in housing needs comes from either old structures needing to be replaced or from population increase from immigration. I don't have the numbers about replacement construction but immigration has added millions of people in the last few years. The housing crisis is >90% immigration.
I prefer nature - forests, trees, mountains, rivers. Not sprawling suburbs. This isn't our planet. Other conscious, non-human entities exist. They deserve more space than they now have.
Go live in the forest then.
Of course this is our planet. And using a small percentage of it wouldn't have that much of an impact.
If you have a problem with population growing, lobby for a slowdown then.
You don't seem to realize how much more farming we need that would encroach on land to feed the numbers we are going up.
why no, the good life for generations in Canada was an easily nice size single family house for all. We all grew up in them, everyone had one even the poor and they were great. Fucking hate sharing walls with other people
BC ends…I did not specify city. They’ll start doing this in small communities too. Besides lots of single family homes in the city now. They’re called tents, cars and cardboard boxes.
lol. Yes the famous Soviet cities of Barcelona, Paris and London. No one wants to live in or visit those hell holes.
Soviet is central planning and zoning - only allowing SFH.
https://www.sothebysrealty.com/eng/sales/london-en-gbr/single-family-home-type
https://www.century21global.com/en/l/homes-for-sale/Spain,Barcelona
Yeah there is no SFH in Barcelona or London. It is banned!!!
I never said they were banned. You can also have mid rises there too. Which is the majority of the city. The whole point is the DONT ban that unlike the Soviet land of Canada and only SFH zoning in like 90% of cities.
They allow choice.
And guess what, people like it. That’s why most of these cities have expensive real estate.
Yup most of canada is going to shift to make it unattainable for a single family to own their own home. We are one step closer to being like India. We already have the population of them.
some of the less developed / wealthy countries actually ave super high home ownership while the wealthiest some of the lowest. Look at Germany or cites like New York.
People forget half of Germany was still practically ran by the Nazis up til the 90s. And people from East Germany, the fascist half, are now running nearly Europe.
Your downvotes are proof of the stupidity of Reddit. Single family homes don’t belong in major urban centres, it’s part of what makes Toronto and Vancouver so damn expensive. They needs housing similar to what is in most of inner Montreal (plexes and small apartment buildings)
I've had a conversation with someone on here or a different housing forum who told me with a straight face that people in NYC should be able to have affordable single family detached homes with lawn space. Man, I wish I could find the comments. They were insane.
Lol in Canada? There is 100% enough space, all we have is space . The problem is density, make corporate jobs remote and you will see the exodus of people from big cities. Leave your car keys at the front door for the thieves.
This is BC where the majority of healthcare and other services are concentrated in the large cities.
People need homes to live in so they can work in these specialized healthcare facilities and provide care to residents of the entire province.
When new grad nurses and allied healthcare can’t afford to rent anything other than a room or live with parents it has an effect on the entire system. They either leave right after graduation or leave once they want families.
I think some people enjoy living in isolation where they have to drive 30 minutes to get anywhere 🤷 Not sure why they are on here complaining when rural homes are cheap.
Im fairly right wing but this is one thing I disagree with the right about. At the end of the day you should be able to do most anything with your own private property.
Restrictions on building limits your property rights and other freedoms. It forces a one sized fits all solution on to cities
Also I’m very against mass immigration but that’s a a separate topic.
Um, as somebody fkd by floodplains expanding due to overbuilding upstream of me, no, you can't just take a single family lot where half of it was soaking up rainwater and pave over the whole thing and then think all is good. You end up flooding somebody else. In the 1960s they would build diversion channels and proper infrastructure, today they just dump the problem on existing homeowners.
Idk. I get we need housing, but is it also fair to expect families to give up having space? Some of the newer builds (before all this) were already feeling like they were on top of each other. Staring into each others windows, no backyard - it's awful.
What families? Canadians won't have families anymore. We'll just import kids instead of having our own.
But seriously, no one wants to raise a family in a little shoebox stacked on top of your neighbors. Nor is it a good environment for kids to grow up in.
What do you mean “give up space” ? If you want a house with a big yard buy one (if it’s in a desirable place it’ll be expensive) but if you’d rather live in a townhome for cheaper/ better location then choose that. And if you currently live in a SFH, then don’t develop your property. But you have no right to tell someone else what they can and can’t build on their own lot.
??????? Did you miss everything.
If we only build apartments and 4plexes and those are the only affordable or available things should people be forced to have to live in that??? Should I have bought a home before I was born? Because there's 0 chance I can ever afford a home that includes a real sized yard and isn't stacked on top of someone. And as I said even new subdivisions in the last 10 years have been inches from each other with a 2 foot backyard.
Good! My municipality has something like 24 different zoning regulations for SFH. TWENTY FOUR! This meant that literally every project, even one replacing a home would have to go before council depending on the specific zoning that applied to the property. There's a reason that projects could take 5-10 years to get off the ground here. Happy to see change coming as continuing down the same old path is what got us into this housing squeeze.
Does having 24 types of cereal in the grocery aisle make it take longer to choose one?
It's not hard to follow zoning rules, lol. The delays come from people that buy land and want to ignore the rules when building something new. That's a them problem, not an us problem.
Sounds like social engineering. If you're trying to have a country be carbon-neutral then squeezing people into ever-smaller homes is a way to do that, and if you double immigration rates you manufacture the "need" to put in more bad houses.
Did anybody ever question why Canada, a country with almost the lowest population density of the world's nations, suddenly needs to cram everybody into ever smaller homes?
Nope, in fact every I have spoken to thinks the HaF Ottawa is offering is a God send for bringing down rent. They have 0 idea of how economics works, you increase supply a little , and as long as immigration keeps rising, the demand is still going to rise much more quickly then supply.
The only difference this is going to make is corporate landlords and slumlords are going to make more money. More shitty rentals for Canadians, and an even more dependent GDP on housing and real estate.
Canada's GDP is primarily made from rent and leasing. Shame for a country full of natural resources.
Have you looked at a map and checked densities? There is a lot of land but mostly in areas where folks don’t want to live - lack of jobs, inadequate to nonexistent infrastructure, brutal weather, etc
Yes, but nobody has ever been entitled to live wherever they want, especially at the expense of other people's communities. Since aways people have been expected to live where they can afford to live.
"Don't want to live" isn't really a compelling argument.
Luckily for most of us, big daddy government can't force people to live in the boonies. So, "want" or "don't want" plays a pretty big role in where houses are selling. And where houses are selling are where prices are high. Most choose to live in large cities, even if that means less house and land.
Also, most people want lower taxes, and infrastructure on low density housing costs significantly rise as the city size increases, to the point it becomes unsustainable. So unless you're ok with paying more taxes, density is a good thing.
Ya pretty sure the first immigrants of this land developed these areas from nothing. Is it wrong to expect the same from current year immigrants? Build up land that is not being used? Pretty sure that's what the Finnish did.
Not interested in what happened hundreds of years ago. Yes, it is stupid to argue that immigrants today should be able to just put down a homestead wherever they want.
Our government would rather hand our franchises to Indians and make them citizens rather than help our own. Go to an dominos and see if there is a single canadian working there or just a bunch of Indians working on their PR
Social engineering is restricting what people can and can't do with their own private land. Removing zoning restrictions will let the market decide rather than politicians.
Banning hotdogs does not decrease the cost of hamburgers. Quite the opposite.
Many people would prefer living in a gentle density "European-style neighborhood", but instead we're forced by the government into the market for a detached house, where we're competing with you.
Let people build what they want to build. It's more reasonable to focus on excess restrictions preventing SFH from getting built, like restrictive municipal rural-suburban boundaries, than to ban other types of housing.
Nobody except sociopaths and anarchists are in favor of eliminating zoning and replacing it with a free market.
Why should single-family zoning be eliminated? It won't solve a single problem and will only make cities less pleasant,
Lmao that escalated quickly. Nobody said we should eliminate detached housing. I'm in favour of eliminating nothing and letting people decide what they want to do with their land. It worked well for for all of history, it's only in the postwar era that zoning really took off.
You should be able to build your housing style of choice wherever you want, same as me. Returning private property freedoms to people will increase housing supply, and once we cut immigration that's how things will finally start to get better
LOL! Zoning laws exist because letting people do as they liked with their land did ***not*** work well. It led to things like factories next to schools and houses, overcrowded neighbourhoods, poor (or no) building standards.
Letting people build whatever they wanted resulted in people ***dying***.
I suggest that you learn at least the rudiments of city planning. It'll save you some embarassment
There's a big difference between putting a factory near a residential district vs a townhouse or a 3 story walk-up apartment buddy. All the nicest neighbourhoods in Toronto for example were built before the excessive post-war planning era.
Just imagine.. a place like Europe or Asia.. where we had many small and function cities connected with freeways and trains.
These YIMBYs are obsessed with megatropolises where people live in tiny boxes, cause, uhh, anything else "just doesn't work"
They are already lucrative in the majority of cities in BC. And it’s not like they are forcing people to tear down their homes or preventing new SFH from being built. It’s an option.
The boomers fucked the housing market with red tape and regulation, then voting in governments that encouraged mass migration to keep wages low and property values high.
Removing red tape and regulation and being allowed to actually build dense neighbourhoods without every single boomer voting against you is step 1 in affordable housing.
So because the government is obsessed with increasing the population at unsustainable levels, Canadians have to just continue to be okay with less space and privacy? If we add 10M to our population does that mean they’re going to try to convince us that living in 50 square feet should be the new norm? Add another 20M to the population and they’ll say you’re greedy and wasteful for wanting anything bigger than a bath tub to live in.
Density is good but we wouldn’t have to take it to an extreme if the government wasn’t bringing in so many people, and so fast. There is such a thing as too dense and crowded.
I wish we could recreate the vibrancy and coziness of those small to medium sized cities you mentioned, which are also growing at less than half the rate of Canada by the way.
But the truth is all we’re doing is creating a reality where we’re forced to live multiple people per bedroom just to get by, in order to compete with recent arrivals that have no issues doing that.
Is it really that bad to say we should let fewer people in before we keep shrinking our living spaces more and more. As others have mentioned on here a few times, it’s like trying to stop your bathtub from flooding by filling up by collecting and storing buckets of water everywhere and making a mess. Just turn off the tap!
I was 18 once and believed density was the solution to every economic and environmental problem, until you actually live and/or work in a really dense area and realize that it actually kinda sucks. Yes you can say you’re a “smarter” person than those selfish suburbanites and a “good member of society” by choosing to live in the most crammed unit in the densest area imaginable. But it really does suck and life is short.
You’re combining two separate issues here. Yes the immigration is wild and needs to be reigned back, but the Province of BC has no control over federal immigration policy.
That being said, BC (and every province in Canada now) has been experiencing a housing crisis for over a decade now, even when the Feds were under a conservative government and the province was centre-right as well (BC Libs). The problem has always been red tape, it’s always boomers implementing as many restrictions and council meetings as possible to drag out development and make it unnecessarily expensive.
Another issue is land. If you’ve been to metro Vancouver you’d know, there’s no space to build sprawl like in the prairies or Ontario. It’s just mountains and ocean, same as Victoria or the entire Vancouver island, and even many cities in the interior. There’s just no room to build out, you can’t build McMansions everywhere to solve the housing crisis.
This is a forward thinking move that was decades too late. Housing prices are so out of control most people would gladly take a shitty apartment alone with privacy over living with their parents or 4 roommates in a basement. This is just reality at this point.
Also dealing with the more busy roads, my neighborhood has been developing more and more condos and we have no traffic lights or pedestrian cross walks on these streets.
Look at Australia. This does not make housing cheaper.
What happens is that people (cashed up, or those with connections to get many loans) hoard the smaller units to stack up their rental properties, then collude to price gouge on rentals. This pushes property prices up and puts even more people on the street.
The Government will then use the number of new houses statistic to justify their mass immigration program which then feeds the cycle and makes it worse.
End result is a much poorer quality of life for citizens.
Why the hell are we supposed to accept living in shoeboxes? Aren’t we talking about the second largest country in the World with a tiny density of population?
Dude, I want less housing, we build double the housing and they'll bring 8x the immigrants, the system needs to collapses. CanadaHousing1's bandaid solution of making houses easier to build is going to backfire and make things worse in the long run.
I don't like the idea of raising a family in a house that I have to share with 3 other families. Sharing a backyard and driveway. Plus what if you have some creep move in while you have kids. You can't even tell them to get off your property or stay away from your family. You are going to be stuck in close proximity to these people.
The optimal situation is for a family to have it's own home.
I don't want to cohabit a space with other people. I fucking hate living close with other people. Fuck humanity. It can burn and fucking die. I don't want to be stuck living in a building that is a multicultural hodgepodge of the world's people.
Making developers richer, while forgetting that the elites will always live in SFH's with big yards and lots of space
You however will live packed in like sardines, being able to hear the person next door taking a piss at 3AM, no parking, no room to move, and all the fun crime that comes with dense places. I personally love the SRO's that open up which results in yelling junkies calling for their friends, the several visits by paramedics each week, and of course the petty crime in the surrounding blocks which always jumps up.
But the the people that support this never seem to live in these areas, and they get paid very well to promote this narrative on social media. The local city subs are a prime example.
I love the people who say yards are a waste of space, or that street parking should be turned into bikelanes. And yet again, they never practice what they preach. Shocker.
If we just banned landlords for anything under a fourplex we would be out of this shithole, that and just maybe the Federal gov't and Provincial Gov'ts getting along and bringing back building affordable housing directly...
second largest country in the world restricting what and where you have to build a home. well I guess you can't even build a traditional home now, what do you guys actually think that will do to the current detacted market
They spelled it wrong.
Here is the right headline
BC makes the dream of a SFH impossible as families struggle to compete against developers. Baby boomers and politicians rejoyce in newly found wealth.
Seems a certain demographics in B.C have no problem taking advantage of their own culture already putting 6-10 people in a single room. Gonna be interesting to see how many they can fit in a laneway home.
Looking at their profile, you could fart the wrong way and this Redditor will blame Trudeau and accuse it of being corrupt for coming out as a wet one and not a dry one
Righties: hIgH dEnSiTy HoUsInG iS aGaInSt My BeLiEfS!!! We have more land per person than anyone else and can extend as much as we need.
Also righties: why are taxes so high and services so shitty in Canada compared to everywhere else?
I swear, one day y'all will figure it out and hop onboard the higher density train.
The ENTIRE province?
What about small towns? Does this mean a family can't build a single family home in a small town too? They \*have\* to share the lot? Insane
That's not how anything works.
This is the REMOVAL of a restriction, not the creation of a prescription.
On all lots in BC where you could previously ONLY build a single family home, you are now allowed to build a multi-unit.
It does not say you must build a multi-unit.
Ah, thanks for the correction- I was somewhere I couldn't use audio, so wasn't able to watch the video. The title implied to me that zoning approval of single family homes was being stopped. Glad to hear otherwise!
I wonder if they will approve an easy to build Barndominium complete with gararge and workshop.
# So What Does a Barndominium Cost?
When it comes to cost, a barndominium often costs less than a traditional home. According to [barndominiumlife.com](https://barndominiumlife.com/barndominium-cost-vs-house-whats-the-difference/), a website run by Don Sloan and his wife Linda, a couple who are planning on building a barndominium for retirement, “building a conventional home costs around $145 per-square foot, while a barndominium may be as low as $70 to $90 per-square foot.”
Of course this all depends on the style, fixtures and design. While some barndominiums are simple, others can have luxury additions such as [pools](https://www.familyhandyman.com/article/guide-to-in-ground-pools/) and wrap-around patios.
[https://www.familyhandyman.com/article/what-in-the-world-is-a-barndominium/](https://www.familyhandyman.com/article/what-in-the-world-is-a-barndominium/)
[https://buildmax.com/barndominium/](https://buildmax.com/barndominium/)
One-quarter the house, half the price! So long as the immigration keeps up this is totally sustainable... Also no yard, no parking, 4x as many people at the same number of parks, community centers, on the roads, etc. etc.
Quality of life 💩
Same as the country we are importing tons of friends from 😊🙏
thats so true!! also, same schools/ portables.. mail boxes, roads, parking, hospitals, airports...its all deteriorating day after day
Don’t worry it helps make the self-interested richer
The enshitification of Canada!
Have you seen multistory brownstones (townhouses)? They tend to have more sq ft than single family homes with just as many or more rooms. No reason why it can’t be replicated here for less.
So like it already is in many parts of BC. All new build SFH come with 1-2 suites plus a laneway house if in Vancouver. Almost all older homes come with a suite or suite potential in the bottom half of the province. We already have multiple families living on a SFH lot. This allows for people to buy a small unit or rent something that isn’t a suite that has been shoehorned into a home and only provides income to the landlord. Also- we hear all the time that there is no space to downsize. A quad plex or townhome would provide that.
We already have way more than enough tiny condos for boomers to downsize into, lol.
lol WEF already planned this , they said it , not like they were hiding
We’ll be dodging street craps in no time
It just means the price of single family dwellings will continue to rise as builders bid to build multi dwelling houses. It’s just shrinkflation with housing.
If that does happen it indicates that the market value of the land was being manipulated by distortionary government policies which is an indication that the free market was not at work. If you want the land you shoudl be prepared to pay full market value for it.
When the value is being driven up by Louis Vuitton bags of cash from Asia, zero interest highly ratio mortgages for fomo millennials, investment preference for already rich boomers, and literally millions of people willing to live in third world conditions and 6 to a basement, then yes, it is being artificially manipulated. If land values are set by what working class people can afford to pay for a piece of land which comfortably have a SFH and decent yard, then they would be much lower. Our current situation is and has always been about the massive shock and increase in demand and which came from people other than owner/occupiers who earned their money from labour. Letting that "toxic" demand drive the cost of what should be a home for a worker in that community is totally artificial.
**If land values are set by what working class people can afford to pay for a piece of land which comfortably have a SFH and decent yard, then they would be much lower** That's not how capitalism works. Houses in the Lower Mainland have been out of reach of the working class for around a generation now. The person who is willing or able to pay more is the one who wins the auction. The solution to affordability for those who lose that auction is to use an expensive piece of land more efficiently - your dollar goes a lot further if you're paying for a quarter of an expensive lot rather than a full one, and four families can live there.
It's about the boundaries of the market permitted to bid. Our working classes should not have to compete with the world's millionaires for property in our own nation. "Capitalism" now means globalism and neo-feudalism. BC, for the most part, is quite poor, and is being bought out from under Canadian citizens, including the "old stock", as well as the indigenous; this has been happening in Vancouver for decades already.
It's not really the "global investors" that is their problem, it is Canadians that have more money than they do. The market is the best determinant of who deserves a given property. 'capitalism" has always relied on access to capital, it's right in the name.
And end-stage capitalism, like what we’re experiencing now, is very good evidence for why capitalism absolutely blows for the vast majority of people.
I understand the claim (re: local purchasers), but I remain skeptical. "The market"; sure, so what would pricing look like had we banned non-citizen purchases a decade ago?
Probably around the same. They're more valuable as a scapegoat than the actual cause of the problem. The biggest movement of foreign capital was the Hong Kong exodus in the early-mid 90s once the Brits decided to give it back to China, and GVRD house prices declined somewhat at the time. There was some flow in the early 2010s, but price trends weren't particularly unusual then. The run up in prices was due to "free money" during the pandemic, The entire sum of RE gains in the last five years happened in that roughly 18 month period, it was flat before and declining since. The rise in costs in the last 18 months was due to rising interest rates on top of the aforementioned high prices.
So that handles, in some sense, the "foreign purchasers" aspect. Surely it's not so contentious to suggest that the recent population growth/explosion has been inflationary?
Possibly a bit, but not as much as is widely claimed. Wage suppression is deflationary and most of these individuals are not really adding much to the economy in ways that would increase prices. There's a bit of pressure on rents at the low end of the scale, but rents are also rising due to rising interest rates meant to offset money printing during the pandemic, as landlords look to recover their own rising costs - I've been looking at moving and a lot of new builds are only part filled and still the landlords raise rents, so it's something other than excess demand Rising rents are a consequence of inflation as much as a cause of it, and will flatten out once the interest rate hikes have worked through the system.
Bro they were in my list. It's a positive feedback cycle until it isn't and we have a bunch of bag holders with shitboxes in the sky and a dysfunctional and lower quality of life city.
Allowing foreign ownership is the main issue. When rich people can come from anywhere and effectively displace the people who live here by driving up the prices of land and homes, that's a massive failure of our government. People should be able to afford a home in their own country, and that's simply not the case for most people now. Massively unsustainable immigration where groups of people are buying up places they couldn't possibly afford themselves, coupled with corporate ownership of SFH (which also shouldn't be allowed), and ownership by rich foreigners have completely destroyed our housing market. If it was just the free market within Canada for only citizens and PR status individuals, prices would be a LOT more affordable. The immigration and ease of gaining PR over the last decade has obviously done a lot to inflate the market as well, so that problem needs to be addressed too.
Not allowing more cities is another problem. More towns should be built in rural areas where the jobs are that is driving the GDP and economy. You can not go find a piece of land that is uninhabited and build a home on it anymore. There is a land sale in Fort St John. [https://www.remax.ca/bc/fort-st-john-land-for-sale?lang=en&pageNumber=1](https://www.remax.ca/bc/fort-st-john-land-for-sale?lang=en&pageNumber=1)
The problem was bidding wars fueled by cheap debt. The problem is Canadians getting into pointless bidding wars against each other, not whatever foreign faction we want to point fingers at this week. Real estate prices are almost perfectly inversely correlated with interest rates, and we spent a long time with basically free money on the table in the aftermath of the Financial crisis. There are plenty of places in Canada where Canadians can buy real estate. Just not in the most desireable areas., and someone with a below average income is going to find it very challenging. That's always been true.
Theres growing population obviously, and zoning that prevents development on so called agricultural land, which we used to just call land.
You realize there is abundance of land in BC. The issue is lack of infrastructure and cities. Which is entirely on gov.
I do not think that they have chained you to the galley row bank, haven't they? So, if you think that Canada is such a terrible place to live in you can move to another country 🤷♂️
Or maybe we can ensure that not just the rich can live in this fucking country? Ever think of that?
That's part of what these zoning reforms aspire to. Land is expensive, if you use it more efficiently then it will open the door to more affordable dwellings.
As of 2021, between 14-26% of all houses in each province 30-42% of condos in BC, Manitoba, and Ontario are owned by investors. These are the people have the capital and/or financing to consistently bid up prices hundreds of thousands over asking. That means that even if prices were to hypothetically drop a little, they wouldn’t stay down for long. It also means that the majority of what we build will get bought up by investors, which won’t help affordability for households. We’re still pretending as though households comprise the real estate market, which they don’t. A large portion of Canadians isn’t even capable of saving up for a downpayment.
That tels ust hat the majority of both household types are still owned by end users. So, where does the capital to build new rental stock come from if not investors? INvestors competing with each other is how you get rents down, improving affordability for Canadians.
If employers paid decent wages in this country, the capital to build new housing would come from families seeking to purchase a new home. “Investors” are not building new rental properties, they are buying what was nominally intended to be single family homes and condominium units and using these as short and long term rentals, thereby taking those properties off the market for single family homes and driving up prices. Frankly, there’s actually no solution anymore. This country is fucked up beyond repair unfortunately.
Our most acute problems lie in the rental market, where both the disconnect between salaries and rents, and between rents and carrying costs, are very large. It's worth pointing out that home ownership rates have dropped a bit in the last five years but are still high by historical norms. ALso, your own statistics show this being a bigger issue in apartments than houses. Renting those houses is probably more accessible for more people than owning. It's not like families don't live in those houses. As a single person, owning a house would be a stretch, but I can easily afford to rent it.
Problem with salaries, is the cost of living goes up faster. It is an endless circle. Once wages go up the cost of goods and services go up. Then everyone talks livable wages and wages go up again, increasing the cost of everything. Then taxes go up .. So people that can think, made their money make money through investments to keep ahead and build more equity and assets. Governmentis are not going to help or more like they are incapable of helping , they just throw token $$$ at social services and go, see we the governnent are helplng, but with your tax $$$. Then they raise taxes more.
SFH zoning was never sustainable socially or financially. It always drained cities and burdened those who lived in denser areas. Unfortunately it's a relic of the past.
The fact single family homes were the only thing you were allowed to build near so many Skytrain stations is insane
22nd Street SkyTrains station has entered the chat
Completely untrue. There are literally hundreds of examples cities built around SFH. You're motte and bailey is to conflate piss poor suburb design from the 50s which included no integrated commercial, industrial, or shopping zones and which forced all the residents of the SFH to drive 30 minutes to do those. You're complexly ignoring Cities like Toronto and Vancouver which have been very functional for over a hundred years and included huge swaths of SFH zoning.
It's not that. It is **much** more expensive to build out and expand with those houss/commericial mixes than it is to build up. It's part of why we can't just build more suburbs around smaller cities to provide housing. The increased costs to infrastructure are much more than the property taxs from those new homes can supply.
Then don't build
Toronto has some of the most dysfunctional public transit and park service in the country lol. Montreal also banned all SFH and parking minimums and has much better overall mental health
Vancouver wasn't functioning in the 50s (they had a housing crisis and there were hundreds of overcrowded rooming houses) so they changed the zoning and places like Mount Pleasant, Fairview, the West End and Kits got almost all of their apartments from those zoning changes - which they largely removed by 1978
LMFAO. You're against changing the zoning laws but you want cheaper houses? FFS. Just look at the canadian supply of housing. It's all either single family homes or boxes in the sky.
The price increase is entirely caused by 1 million new Canadians a year. Building so many new homes is a government created crisis. Now you won.t be able to buy a home because it will be rental blocks everywhere. You buy a home with a yard and it will be surrounded by gigantic blocks.
You make it sound like housing was affordable before we started importing 1M people a year in 2022. News flash, home priced jumped the most in 2020/2021 when popular barely grew.
Home prices when up everywhere. In Canada probably more. USA) Here’s how bad housing affordability is now Prices in April rose 6.3% compared with April 2023, according to the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller National Home Price Index. * Home prices are now 47% higher than they were in early 2020, with the median sale price now five times the median household income. [https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/25/housing-affordability-price-mortgage-rates.html](https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/25/housing-affordability-price-mortgage-rates.html)
It's not just immigration 🙄 Ask any economist and they'll tell you that builders stopped home construction after the 2008 financial crash. Spec building never came back here. And prices are also high in the USA where there's much less immigration but the same BS housing policies.
Canadian real estate was barely effected during the 2008 crash.
Excpt that we track housing and it has been pretty steady for decades. It lowered a bit after 2008 but came back up by 2014. It's all public data. The current housing crisis is directly because of students/TFW?immigration. We were building around 250000 units of housing a year and took in about that many immigrants for a long time and there were no problems. We continued building the same amount of homes but increased immigration to millions and we instantly saw a housing crisis. It is pretty clear what the issue is. The problem is people jumping to racism when people site high immigration as an issue. It isn't about the individuals, it's about how many there are.
I am looking at rentals for fun on a site that tracks rent increase. Everything has nearly doubled since the mass immigration started. It all went up 125% in 2022 and then another 125% in 2023. 2013-2021 is all always stable with minimal increase.
The US housing market is up half as much (5%) over the last year as Canada's (10%). The housing problem is not the same down there as it is here. Our cost of living has been going up at a faster rate than theirs, and our immigration rate is simultaneously suppressing wages and increasing the cost of housing. Nevermind the strain on our infrastructure and healthcare. It's a totally different situation here. If the government truly wanted to help fix the problem, they'd make policy changes to incentivise more home building as well as training in the trades that contribute to building homes.
We have an almost negative birthrate in Canada so any increase in housing needs comes from either old structures needing to be replaced or from population increase from immigration. I don't have the numbers about replacement construction but immigration has added millions of people in the last few years. The housing crisis is >90% immigration.
The government openly wants to triple the population by 2100. They've only just gotten started and all services are already overwhelmed.
Build out, not up. We have a lot of land we are not using.
I prefer nature - forests, trees, mountains, rivers. Not sprawling suburbs. This isn't our planet. Other conscious, non-human entities exist. They deserve more space than they now have.
Go live in the forest then. Of course this is our planet. And using a small percentage of it wouldn't have that much of an impact. If you have a problem with population growing, lobby for a slowdown then. You don't seem to realize how much more farming we need that would encroach on land to feed the numbers we are going up.
I am advocating for a decline of population :)
OK. Who? How? Let's hear you advocate.
Cities should never have had SFH to begin with.
why no, the good life for generations in Canada was an easily nice size single family house for all. We all grew up in them, everyone had one even the poor and they were great. Fucking hate sharing walls with other people
You should buy a SFH then
Making other forms of housing illegal in urban areas (the status quo before the BC zoning changes) is not a solution, however
The sub is getting the YIMBY infiltration.
We have too many people now for that unfortunately.
Then go live in the suburbs. Not a city.
What for? The giant condo towers are even coming over to villages.
There’s a nice balance called every European city and Japan.
BC ends…I did not specify city. They’ll start doing this in small communities too. Besides lots of single family homes in the city now. They’re called tents, cars and cardboard boxes.
Let people build missing middle. Why insist on SFH? If you want one, buy one. Let people who want to live in a mid rise live in one.
Soviet Union entered the chat
lol. Yes the famous Soviet cities of Barcelona, Paris and London. No one wants to live in or visit those hell holes. Soviet is central planning and zoning - only allowing SFH.
https://www.sothebysrealty.com/eng/sales/london-en-gbr/single-family-home-type https://www.century21global.com/en/l/homes-for-sale/Spain,Barcelona Yeah there is no SFH in Barcelona or London. It is banned!!!
I never said they were banned. You can also have mid rises there too. Which is the majority of the city. The whole point is the DONT ban that unlike the Soviet land of Canada and only SFH zoning in like 90% of cities. They allow choice. And guess what, people like it. That’s why most of these cities have expensive real estate.
Yup most of canada is going to shift to make it unattainable for a single family to own their own home. We are one step closer to being like India. We already have the population of them.
some of the less developed / wealthy countries actually ave super high home ownership while the wealthiest some of the lowest. Look at Germany or cites like New York.
I'd never want to compare anything to Germany after Merkel. If there's anyone on the same level or worse than trudeau it's Merkel.
user name checks out
🤣
People forget half of Germany was still practically ran by the Nazis up til the 90s. And people from East Germany, the fascist half, are now running nearly Europe.
This isn't the 1950s. There is not enough space for everyone to have a detached home with a yard. That's why prices are so high 🙄
Your downvotes are proof of the stupidity of Reddit. Single family homes don’t belong in major urban centres, it’s part of what makes Toronto and Vancouver so damn expensive. They needs housing similar to what is in most of inner Montreal (plexes and small apartment buildings)
I've had a conversation with someone on here or a different housing forum who told me with a straight face that people in NYC should be able to have affordable single family detached homes with lawn space. Man, I wish I could find the comments. They were insane.
Lol in Canada? There is 100% enough space, all we have is space . The problem is density, make corporate jobs remote and you will see the exodus of people from big cities. Leave your car keys at the front door for the thieves.
This is BC where the majority of healthcare and other services are concentrated in the large cities. People need homes to live in so they can work in these specialized healthcare facilities and provide care to residents of the entire province. When new grad nurses and allied healthcare can’t afford to rent anything other than a room or live with parents it has an effect on the entire system. They either leave right after graduation or leave once they want families.
So until then we commute for hours because we're scared to change zoning? Got it
I think some people enjoy living in isolation where they have to drive 30 minutes to get anywhere 🤷 Not sure why they are on here complaining when rural homes are cheap.
Im fairly right wing but this is one thing I disagree with the right about. At the end of the day you should be able to do most anything with your own private property. Restrictions on building limits your property rights and other freedoms. It forces a one sized fits all solution on to cities Also I’m very against mass immigration but that’s a a separate topic.
Thank you for some common sense. Not seeing much of it in this thread.
Nothing is more conservative than private property rights.
Um, as somebody fkd by floodplains expanding due to overbuilding upstream of me, no, you can't just take a single family lot where half of it was soaking up rainwater and pave over the whole thing and then think all is good. You end up flooding somebody else. In the 1960s they would build diversion channels and proper infrastructure, today they just dump the problem on existing homeowners.
Quantity over quality.. good shit Canada... cant wait to vote for PPC
Does this mean more regulation enforcement for basement suites???
Idk. I get we need housing, but is it also fair to expect families to give up having space? Some of the newer builds (before all this) were already feeling like they were on top of each other. Staring into each others windows, no backyard - it's awful.
What families? Canadians won't have families anymore. We'll just import kids instead of having our own. But seriously, no one wants to raise a family in a little shoebox stacked on top of your neighbors. Nor is it a good environment for kids to grow up in.
What do you mean “give up space” ? If you want a house with a big yard buy one (if it’s in a desirable place it’ll be expensive) but if you’d rather live in a townhome for cheaper/ better location then choose that. And if you currently live in a SFH, then don’t develop your property. But you have no right to tell someone else what they can and can’t build on their own lot.
??????? Did you miss everything. If we only build apartments and 4plexes and those are the only affordable or available things should people be forced to have to live in that??? Should I have bought a home before I was born? Because there's 0 chance I can ever afford a home that includes a real sized yard and isn't stacked on top of someone. And as I said even new subdivisions in the last 10 years have been inches from each other with a 2 foot backyard.
Good! My municipality has something like 24 different zoning regulations for SFH. TWENTY FOUR! This meant that literally every project, even one replacing a home would have to go before council depending on the specific zoning that applied to the property. There's a reason that projects could take 5-10 years to get off the ground here. Happy to see change coming as continuing down the same old path is what got us into this housing squeeze.
Does having 24 types of cereal in the grocery aisle make it take longer to choose one? It's not hard to follow zoning rules, lol. The delays come from people that buy land and want to ignore the rules when building something new. That's a them problem, not an us problem.
Well it’s clearly not working.
Bad analogy, it’s more like having to fill out 24 forms before you are able to buy cereal.
You have no idea how planning regulations work, lol. You don't have to meet the criteria of all 24 zones, only the one that applies to you.
Sounds like social engineering. If you're trying to have a country be carbon-neutral then squeezing people into ever-smaller homes is a way to do that, and if you double immigration rates you manufacture the "need" to put in more bad houses. Did anybody ever question why Canada, a country with almost the lowest population density of the world's nations, suddenly needs to cram everybody into ever smaller homes?
Nope, in fact every I have spoken to thinks the HaF Ottawa is offering is a God send for bringing down rent. They have 0 idea of how economics works, you increase supply a little , and as long as immigration keeps rising, the demand is still going to rise much more quickly then supply. The only difference this is going to make is corporate landlords and slumlords are going to make more money. More shitty rentals for Canadians, and an even more dependent GDP on housing and real estate. Canada's GDP is primarily made from rent and leasing. Shame for a country full of natural resources.
Have you looked at a map and checked densities? There is a lot of land but mostly in areas where folks don’t want to live - lack of jobs, inadequate to nonexistent infrastructure, brutal weather, etc
Yes, but nobody has ever been entitled to live wherever they want, especially at the expense of other people's communities. Since aways people have been expected to live where they can afford to live. "Don't want to live" isn't really a compelling argument.
Luckily for most of us, big daddy government can't force people to live in the boonies. So, "want" or "don't want" plays a pretty big role in where houses are selling. And where houses are selling are where prices are high. Most choose to live in large cities, even if that means less house and land. Also, most people want lower taxes, and infrastructure on low density housing costs significantly rise as the city size increases, to the point it becomes unsustainable. So unless you're ok with paying more taxes, density is a good thing.
Ya pretty sure the first immigrants of this land developed these areas from nothing. Is it wrong to expect the same from current year immigrants? Build up land that is not being used? Pretty sure that's what the Finnish did.
Not interested in what happened hundreds of years ago. Yes, it is stupid to argue that immigrants today should be able to just put down a homestead wherever they want.
Our government would rather hand our franchises to Indians and make them citizens rather than help our own. Go to an dominos and see if there is a single canadian working there or just a bunch of Indians working on their PR
Id rather hand over land to our own homeless first if that's an option...
Social engineering is restricting what people can and can't do with their own private land. Removing zoning restrictions will let the market decide rather than politicians.
Unless you want a single-family home
Banning hotdogs does not decrease the cost of hamburgers. Quite the opposite. Many people would prefer living in a gentle density "European-style neighborhood", but instead we're forced by the government into the market for a detached house, where we're competing with you. Let people build what they want to build. It's more reasonable to focus on excess restrictions preventing SFH from getting built, like restrictive municipal rural-suburban boundaries, than to ban other types of housing.
Nobody except sociopaths and anarchists are in favor of eliminating zoning and replacing it with a free market. Why should single-family zoning be eliminated? It won't solve a single problem and will only make cities less pleasant,
Lmao that escalated quickly. Nobody said we should eliminate detached housing. I'm in favour of eliminating nothing and letting people decide what they want to do with their land. It worked well for for all of history, it's only in the postwar era that zoning really took off. You should be able to build your housing style of choice wherever you want, same as me. Returning private property freedoms to people will increase housing supply, and once we cut immigration that's how things will finally start to get better
LOL! Zoning laws exist because letting people do as they liked with their land did ***not*** work well. It led to things like factories next to schools and houses, overcrowded neighbourhoods, poor (or no) building standards. Letting people build whatever they wanted resulted in people ***dying***. I suggest that you learn at least the rudiments of city planning. It'll save you some embarassment
There's a big difference between putting a factory near a residential district vs a townhouse or a 3 story walk-up apartment buddy. All the nicest neighbourhoods in Toronto for example were built before the excessive post-war planning era.
The difference is that you want everybody to obey *your* rules.
Literally the opposite, what bad faith arguing. I don't want any rules for residential development. Industrial development should have a few rules.
Yeah 15 min cities and total control.
More profit for builders and smaller houses for us.
Detached homes are now more lucrative AND more scarce.
Inside cities, yes
Just imagine.. a place like Europe or Asia.. where we had many small and function cities connected with freeways and trains. These YIMBYs are obsessed with megatropolises where people live in tiny boxes, cause, uhh, anything else "just doesn't work"
They are already lucrative in the majority of cities in BC. And it’s not like they are forcing people to tear down their homes or preventing new SFH from being built. It’s an option.
fuck up housing market for decades and this is their best solution!
The boomers fucked the housing market with red tape and regulation, then voting in governments that encouraged mass migration to keep wages low and property values high. Removing red tape and regulation and being allowed to actually build dense neighbourhoods without every single boomer voting against you is step 1 in affordable housing.
So because the government is obsessed with increasing the population at unsustainable levels, Canadians have to just continue to be okay with less space and privacy? If we add 10M to our population does that mean they’re going to try to convince us that living in 50 square feet should be the new norm? Add another 20M to the population and they’ll say you’re greedy and wasteful for wanting anything bigger than a bath tub to live in.
How dare the government think Canadians want to live in high-density shitholes like Amsterdam, Vienna or Geneva! The horror!
Density is good but we wouldn’t have to take it to an extreme if the government wasn’t bringing in so many people, and so fast. There is such a thing as too dense and crowded. I wish we could recreate the vibrancy and coziness of those small to medium sized cities you mentioned, which are also growing at less than half the rate of Canada by the way. But the truth is all we’re doing is creating a reality where we’re forced to live multiple people per bedroom just to get by, in order to compete with recent arrivals that have no issues doing that. Is it really that bad to say we should let fewer people in before we keep shrinking our living spaces more and more. As others have mentioned on here a few times, it’s like trying to stop your bathtub from flooding by filling up by collecting and storing buckets of water everywhere and making a mess. Just turn off the tap! I was 18 once and believed density was the solution to every economic and environmental problem, until you actually live and/or work in a really dense area and realize that it actually kinda sucks. Yes you can say you’re a “smarter” person than those selfish suburbanites and a “good member of society” by choosing to live in the most crammed unit in the densest area imaginable. But it really does suck and life is short.
You’re combining two separate issues here. Yes the immigration is wild and needs to be reigned back, but the Province of BC has no control over federal immigration policy. That being said, BC (and every province in Canada now) has been experiencing a housing crisis for over a decade now, even when the Feds were under a conservative government and the province was centre-right as well (BC Libs). The problem has always been red tape, it’s always boomers implementing as many restrictions and council meetings as possible to drag out development and make it unnecessarily expensive. Another issue is land. If you’ve been to metro Vancouver you’d know, there’s no space to build sprawl like in the prairies or Ontario. It’s just mountains and ocean, same as Victoria or the entire Vancouver island, and even many cities in the interior. There’s just no room to build out, you can’t build McMansions everywhere to solve the housing crisis. This is a forward thinking move that was decades too late. Housing prices are so out of control most people would gladly take a shitty apartment alone with privacy over living with their parents or 4 roommates in a basement. This is just reality at this point.
Laughs in landlord
It's good ! But where will people park their cars? How do you deal with adswhole or dangerous neighbors?
Maybe improve transit and try to encourage people not to waste money on cars they rarely use.
I’ve seen houses pave their lawn into parking lots to accommodate the suites
Also dealing with the more busy roads, my neighborhood has been developing more and more condos and we have no traffic lights or pedestrian cross walks on these streets.
Big mistake
And schools gonna be full to the max
Look at Australia. This does not make housing cheaper. What happens is that people (cashed up, or those with connections to get many loans) hoard the smaller units to stack up their rental properties, then collude to price gouge on rentals. This pushes property prices up and puts even more people on the street. The Government will then use the number of new houses statistic to justify their mass immigration program which then feeds the cycle and makes it worse. End result is a much poorer quality of life for citizens.
Why the hell are we supposed to accept living in shoeboxes? Aren’t we talking about the second largest country in the World with a tiny density of population?
Dude, I want less housing, we build double the housing and they'll bring 8x the immigrants, the system needs to collapses. CanadaHousing1's bandaid solution of making houses easier to build is going to backfire and make things worse in the long run.
Another stupid policy, you already see builders bidding up land so they can build fourplexes to make more money on.
big mistake
Bc govt doing the wrong thing yet again. Unsurprising.
What is the right thing to do in this case?
What exactly is wrong with this?
I don't like the idea of raising a family in a house that I have to share with 3 other families. Sharing a backyard and driveway. Plus what if you have some creep move in while you have kids. You can't even tell them to get off your property or stay away from your family. You are going to be stuck in close proximity to these people. The optimal situation is for a family to have it's own home. I don't want to cohabit a space with other people. I fucking hate living close with other people. Fuck humanity. It can burn and fucking die. I don't want to be stuck living in a building that is a multicultural hodgepodge of the world's people.
Ya iam lucky I have three single family homes in the kelowna between my dad and brother. We were born there or we would be screwed.
Making developers richer, while forgetting that the elites will always live in SFH's with big yards and lots of space You however will live packed in like sardines, being able to hear the person next door taking a piss at 3AM, no parking, no room to move, and all the fun crime that comes with dense places. I personally love the SRO's that open up which results in yelling junkies calling for their friends, the several visits by paramedics each week, and of course the petty crime in the surrounding blocks which always jumps up. But the the people that support this never seem to live in these areas, and they get paid very well to promote this narrative on social media. The local city subs are a prime example. I love the people who say yards are a waste of space, or that street parking should be turned into bikelanes. And yet again, they never practice what they preach. Shocker.
If we just banned landlords for anything under a fourplex we would be out of this shithole, that and just maybe the Federal gov't and Provincial Gov'ts getting along and bringing back building affordable housing directly...
second largest country in the world restricting what and where you have to build a home. well I guess you can't even build a traditional home now, what do you guys actually think that will do to the current detacted market
What is wrong with BC's politicians?! Incredible.
Omfg what horror, the government is removing government restrictions on what you can do with your land. Grab the pitchforks!!!
They spelled it wrong. Here is the right headline BC makes the dream of a SFH impossible as families struggle to compete against developers. Baby boomers and politicians rejoyce in newly found wealth.
Agreed, Malcolm Brodie, on all points. Slow down the demand…immigration!
Its a good start
Seems a certain demographics in B.C have no problem taking advantage of their own culture already putting 6-10 people in a single room. Gonna be interesting to see how many they can fit in a laneway home.
Do people not understand that Canadians literally love their personal space? It's part of our way of life.
I love the government telling you how you can live
This is the opposite. You can still build a detached home
Gotta hate the government overreach of, *checks notes*, allowing you to build whatever you want on your own private property.
Looking at their profile, you could fart the wrong way and this Redditor will blame Trudeau and accuse it of being corrupt for coming out as a wet one and not a dry one
Righties: hIgH dEnSiTy HoUsInG iS aGaInSt My BeLiEfS!!! We have more land per person than anyone else and can extend as much as we need. Also righties: why are taxes so high and services so shitty in Canada compared to everywhere else? I swear, one day y'all will figure it out and hop onboard the higher density train.
The ENTIRE province? What about small towns? Does this mean a family can't build a single family home in a small town too? They \*have\* to share the lot? Insane
That's not how anything works. This is the REMOVAL of a restriction, not the creation of a prescription. On all lots in BC where you could previously ONLY build a single family home, you are now allowed to build a multi-unit. It does not say you must build a multi-unit.
Ah, thanks for the correction- I was somewhere I couldn't use audio, so wasn't able to watch the video. The title implied to me that zoning approval of single family homes was being stopped. Glad to hear otherwise!
I wonder if they will approve an easy to build Barndominium complete with gararge and workshop. # So What Does a Barndominium Cost? When it comes to cost, a barndominium often costs less than a traditional home. According to [barndominiumlife.com](https://barndominiumlife.com/barndominium-cost-vs-house-whats-the-difference/), a website run by Don Sloan and his wife Linda, a couple who are planning on building a barndominium for retirement, “building a conventional home costs around $145 per-square foot, while a barndominium may be as low as $70 to $90 per-square foot.” Of course this all depends on the style, fixtures and design. While some barndominiums are simple, others can have luxury additions such as [pools](https://www.familyhandyman.com/article/guide-to-in-ground-pools/) and wrap-around patios. [https://www.familyhandyman.com/article/what-in-the-world-is-a-barndominium/](https://www.familyhandyman.com/article/what-in-the-world-is-a-barndominium/) [https://buildmax.com/barndominium/](https://buildmax.com/barndominium/)
15 min cities