It's hard not to see the overall solution to the housing crisis in some North American cities as simply building more housing. A speculation and/or vacancy tax makes sense in cities with a high number of foreign buyers like Vancouver and New York but in other cities it seems like the biggest road block is simply zoning restrictions that prevent supply to meet demand. There are second order effects that need to go w/…
For the last 20 years Vancouver has been adding housing stock, mostly in the form of multi-family dwellings, at one of the highest rates in North America. We're adding as much as we can as fast as we can. The situation now is worse than ever, so "build more housing" is clearly not a solution, and in fact may be making things worse by adding a lot of investment vehicles that attract foreign capital.
Re: High-end house rents in Vancouver plunge up to 20% as inventory spikes: experts
#71Build more housing only works if you actually build enough to satisfy the demand — so it would be cool if we knew a number of houses built vs people trying to buy houses type of thing. Maybe you are right just I don’t know the data on the subject for Vancouver. I heard similar arguments while living in Bay Area that “we’ve tried to build our way out of this problem and it hasn’t worked for 20 years” but actually they were building one house for every 10 people moving there so, in that case it was a case that they under built for a long time because after people would move to their little corner of SF they would say ok no more people.. it’s good as is..
ultimately if you look at places like Dayton (good frontline episode on this recently), you see what happens when you build a ton of housing during a boom then factories leave and the houses then sell for basically $0.. often people are buying houses there for $5k, and buying 5 at a time then remodeling them. So overbuilding is bad as well as underbuilding.. my take is that the most sustainable building approach is to build in places that people still want to live in even when the economy is down. Like surprise surprise living 40 miles outside of Las Vegas next to a strip mall likely will drop in value when you can afford to buy a place that is more desirable closer to services and jobs and friends.