It’s interesting to perspectives from elsewhere. The Netherlands is also facing a housing crisis, and they’re also talking about significant increases in construction. Part of that will be to limit local control.
Interestingly, they’re also talking about changing the type of construction: fewer rooms.
There isn’t quite enough context to explain why that would help, but it’s something I haven’t really heard politicians saying here in Canada.
What changes would you make to speed up housing growth here?
I guess the question is, what price would you require to drop down one or two bedrooms?
We used to have much smaller homes. Our enormous houses aren’t helping our cost, for sure, but its a difficult sell for many. I had to convince my wife we didn’t need a huge house when we moved, and managed to get her to look at sub2k sqft houses. The amount of space we STILL don’t use is ridiculous, but she wasn’t willing to go below 1750.
Post world war 2 the CMHC built all these houses that were perfectly adequate for families for one or two generations. The quality has fallen off as they were built with cheap materials, but they lasted long enough to solve a crisis.
I don’t know why we can’t mass build housing like that in areas like North Bay or small cities with suitable power and sewage capacity.
It’s not like North Bay doesn’t need workers either, it would go well with Ring of Fire type initiatives.
Tbh its not even that we need to sacrifice quality at this point. we have the knowledge to do good builds.
Build lowrise or duplex townhomes that are big enough for families, in the 800-1200sqft range, and save on building costs. Save on the space, so land costs and servicing costs stay low. Sure its not as appealing as a suburban house with a huge backyard and no shared walls, but its a lot cheaper, and it’ll alleviate the housing crunch.
I’ve said it before, but my firm works with municipalities as the external engineer to review development plans. Those have all dried up the in last 6months, despite the housing crunch still being here. Know why? Costs have come down since people can’t afford it, which means developers are willing to sit on vacant land and/or approved plans and hope that costs will rise again before building. They’re hoping this dip is a short term correction.
This isn’t sustainable. We need a nonprofit or govt funded builder providing supply regardless of what the financial feasibility of doing so is, based on the required demand for housing. Housing should not be a commodity, nor should be it a retirement plan.
I find it’s a phase of life thing. My partner and I used to live in a 700ish square foot, single bedroom apartment. We loved that thing. With kids, that would be really hard. But I expect we’ll go back to something similar after our kids are established.
For sure- I think house size does need to scale with family size. But no family is big enough these days for a 3k sqft house, especially not a typical nuclear 4 person one. 12 or 1500 is sufficient for most 4 person families while still maintaining standards theyre used to, though obviously layout can make a big difference.
This is how Japan has “affordable” housing. 300 square foot per person or less on average. Bedrooms get reused during the day by putting the bed away.
Laundry is in the kitchen or bathroom, no dedicated space. No utility closets.
No yards, no property setbacks, and for a lot of apartments no parking at all or only single stalls for some people.
You can see all of this in the way they name their rental/sales listings.
1DK means 1 bedroom, with a dining room and a kitchen. Dining room meaning that the kitchen is large enough for a table, not a separate room.
1LDK adds a living room. That’s still likely under 400 square feet.
1K also exists. It’s literally 100-200 square feet and a kitchen in the main area, and a bathroom. The bathroom has a clothes washer, but no dryer. Most people hang dry in their room or balcony.
We honestly should build entire towers with a hundred 1K units here within 1 block of transit hubs and no parking.
Even our micro housing is not usually this small and most zoning bylaws dont allow for anything like that.
Giving people an absolute minimum option relieves stress on the other larger units which brings overall prices down. Such buildings would be much cheaper because they use less land and as the original post mentions they have zero luxuries. It’s copy paste of the simplest possible housing unit and your only customization is wall paint colour.
Those sound like rooms in a boarding house. That would be way better for some people than larger units, or living on the street.
I guess the key is that they need to be affordable.
That’s the problem. Here it would be billed as a “Luxury Tiny Home Experience” and they’d charge $3k/month rent. Corpos know plebs don’t have money, so the only market is the luxury market.
A boarding house usually has shared spaces as well. These units do not. They almost all have external facing doors too. More like a tiny motel than a boarding house or dorms.
We honestly should build entire towers with a hundred 1K units here within 1 block of transit hubs and no parking.
And we are looking for the cause why people aren’t starting families…
You are only thinking one step at a time.
A lot of people who would move into these units live in 2 and 3 bedroom units with roommates. That would free those larger units up for couples and families.
Don’t take this the wrong way, but that reminds me of the adage of loosening laws to get companies to build condos and houses, even if most development consists of luxury housing units because somehow there is more on the market, ergo more supply. I am not sure how far either calculi hold true.
A) most development marketed as “luxury” are not actually luxury in any sort of way. It’s just a marketing tactic.
B) I wouldn’t expect this to be built by for profit developers. The government should be the one building it.
“Luxury” means “market value”, i.e., will be rented/sold for maximum profit margin.
B) I wouldn’t expect this to be built by for profit developers. The government should be the one building it.
I think this is a wholly sensible wish. The thing is however that the governments are building nothing in this political climate and would rather wait for people to die off to make room.
Why shouldn’t families be able to live close to transit?
They should, how does what I suggested prevent that?
I understood your text as saying that we should flood the areas close to transit with studio apartments. If that’s the type of accomodation that’s mostly available close to transit that would make it so that families (who tend to need multiple bedroom apartments) would not have enough options close to transit.
There’s a ton of space next to transit, adding even hundreds of these buildings across a city wouldn’t limit regular apartments in the same areas at all.
We also don’t tend to tear down apartment buildings that already exist very often.
In Canada, we have loads of housing with few rooms. That’s part of the whole fucking problem, that housing that does get built is not designed to serve people’s needs but to be an asset whose value will appreciate the most over time. So you get entire towers of 1 bedroom apartments that then can’t be sold because people need space to leave and aren’t willing to pay “asset” prices.
The most important thing we can do to address the housing crisis is to break the back of the insane system that financializes housing. And yes, that includes building, and building a lot, but not little “asset” shoeboxes in the sky, but non-market apartments where people can live and have families.
I think we agree on 99% of the issue; we do need non-market housing and we need a diverse range of sizes; we do need to reduce the attractiveness of housing as an investment class.
But I disagree that we have excess 1bd units directly because of housing is seen as an investment. Small time investors bought these like hot cake because those investors, in large part having no idea about what they’re doing, were hyped about just getting into the market purely due to speculation, and of course the lowest entry into the market is the smallest unit possible. Pre-sale marketing treated these people like a Ponzi scheme: let’s sell as many as possible while it’s still profitable, these suckers will eat the price drop when it inevitably lands.
The reason why I’m nitpicking the root cause is that the main problem is not the investing, but that this investment is a badly regulated market, with a lot of silly myths going around (housing will never be a bad investment, rent is throwing money away etc). Basically Millennial’s covered call ETFs but for boomers. Or Gen Z’s shitcoints, but for boomers. A properly regulated market should mandate diversity of unit sizes, land use, non-market housing etc. Even if we spend zero energy on de-incentivizing buying homes for investment, at least a regulated market would prevent a bunch of idiots betting their retirement on “housing only go up” to cause the market to get distorted. Of course I do also agree we should work to not treat housing as investment, count me in for a 5000% increase on property taxes for non-primary residences.
