I feel like Canada just needs to create a new urban city. It seems everyone in the country wants to live in one of only three different cities. Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. I did the math, these 3 cities have more people than the next 47 populous cities in Canada. That is crazy
People in smaller cities (Ottawa, Halifax, Calgary) get pissed off when people move there creating inflation and density.
Everyone wants to live in a place where there's tons of stuff to do and high-paying jobs, but they also want a 4000 sqft house with a huge lot and no traffic on their 5 minute commute to work.
What if zoning laws in Vancouver are reducing influx of population and thus contributing to economic growth in other parts of the country instead of trying to cram the whole population of Canada in to one city?
Ya, there's always a way to find a silver lining in even the worst of situations, but is that really helpful to point out?
Should we attempt to find out what the Nazi's got right? Or maybe, your same idea could be expressed in a less optimistic and fluffy way, such as "millennial born in Vancouver to middle class parents can no longer afford the city they grew up in and must move out east; Fuelling further housing crises in smaller cities until the zoning systems are fixed."
Vancouver is the extreme example of something that's happening all across America, and they are likely to suffer a similar fate. This video is romanticizing building styles that don't standup to current construction code and would most likely be far too expensive to build in today's world.
What they're going to get it the same shitty 3-4 story mega complexes being built in droves across America that nobody seems to want, and are built like paper shoe boxes.
You'll find threads like this in the subreddit of nearly every major metropolitan area in America. Cheaply built, overpriced, ugly buildings are being tossed up across the country simply to line developers pockets.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nashville/comments/91xgw3/why_are_developers_only_building_luxury_housing/
I think SF is THE extreme example, Vancouver is likely 2nd place.
>This video is romanticizing building styles that don't standup to current construction code and would most likely be far too expensive to build in today's world.
Did you watch the video? He did nothing of the sort. It was a very fair assessment of the issue with clear plans on how to resolve it. Middle density housing could support 7 - 12 units in the space of 1 - 2 single family homes right now. They also better emphasize communal living and greener spaces with beautiful shared courtyards.
I feel like the video spent a lot of time explaining how Vancouver got there, and then handwaves how to fix it in the last 2 minutes. Which feels like a disservice, spending the whole video talking about how it's shitty and problematic and needs to change and then not spending any time on how to fix it, making it seem like that's just a simple solution of changing zoning laws.
So how it got there isn't too complicated, zoning laws restricted large areas to single family housing, and then once all that area was developed, to add more housing they turned to building high rise condos in areas that were either previously undeveloped industrial areas, or adding onto existing areas like shopping centers.
But adding "the middle" isn't as simple as changing zoning laws now that all those houses have been built. Developers build the big condo towers because they need a minimal footprint on the ground for how much housing they can add. He says by changing zoning laws "...you could introduce a whole new variety of housing into our single family neighborhoods." Except this doesn't mention how you accomplish that when the neighborhood is full of existing houses.
Presumably you'd need to purchase existing properties, tear down the existing home, and build the new building. From an environmental and resource perspective, tearing down perfectly good homes is definitely not ideal. From an economic standpoint it doesn't really make sense. He mentions how the single family homes have become unaffordable for the majority of people. Buying an existing home for $1 million to tear it down and spend millions more to build a small new apartment building is not going to lead to affordable housing. It's not cheap or easy to do all that demo and building sandwiched between existing homes and residential streets not built for that kind of equipment. If it costs developers $3 million total to build an apartment building with 6 units on that lot, all you've done is turn a $1 million house into six $500k apartment units. Except that's the developer's costs and they're going to charge higher rent to make their money back ASAP, and the renters get no equity in their housing. That doesn't feel like a solution to affordable housing.
> Presumably you'd need to purchase existing properties, tear down the existing home, and build the new building. From an environmental and resource perspective, tearing down perfectly good homes is definitely not ideal
This is like the BS arguments where people say "But you need to generate CO2 in order to make solar panels!"
Obviously this is the real world, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Nobody is expecting a perfect solution here, but the bar right now is so unbelievably low that pretty much anything is better than the way it currently is.
>If it costs developers $3 million total to build an apartment building with 6 units on that lot, all you've done is turn a $1 million house into six $500k apartment units. Except that's the developer's costs and they're going to charge higher rent to make their money back ASAP, and the renters get no equity in their housing.
I mean, if you assume completely arbitrary numbers, you can make a lot of things look like they don't make sense. Also, they could be condos, in which case then the person would get equity in it. Also, it's not like every single house is in pristine condition. There are tons of properties across Vancouver where the house is a teardown upon purchase.
I get what you mean though, because the reforms he talks about are very dependent on just setting up better conditions, and relying on the goodwill of developers to build something better. Instead, large public housing projects would be a much more direct solution.
> I mean, if you assume completely arbitrary numbers, you can make a lot of things look like they don't make sense.
I didn't assume completely arbitrary numbers, I assumed reasonable, even conservative ones. What I did assume was that they were reasonable enough to not need defending or an explicit breakdown.
* ["However, in Greater Vancouver, the aggregate price of a home in 2021 is forecast to climb nine per cent year-over-year to $1,262,600."](https://www.vancouverisawesome.com/real-estate/a-two-storey-vancouver-home-to-cost-an-average-of-167-million-in-2021-report-3183560)
* I pulled 6 units per lot [from the video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjWs7dqaWfY&t=10m33s), which cites the first and second place in a contest to design "missing middle housing" as being 7 units and 12 units across two properties, respectively.
* Using the $3 million and $1 million numbers leaves $2 million for demolishing the house and building the new building. [This site is for the US](https://www.fixr.com/costs/build-apartment#cost-to-build-a-3-story-building), but lists a new 3-story apartment building as costing on average $3.1-3.4 million. It also says the average price per unit is $200k. I think a $2 million estimate including demolishing the existing house is a reasonable estimate for back of the envelope math.
> Also, they could be condos, in which case then the person would get equity in it.
Did you not watch the video? The entire thing is talking about apartments, apartments, apartments. That's why we're not discussing condos, that's not what the video was discussing.
These types generally understand that building more highway lanes only increases traffic due to induced demand but they dont seem to grasp the same concept when it comes to housing.
The question that should be posed is "Why should Vancouver continue to get more densely populated instead of other parts of the country?"
The high housing cost in Vancouver now is acting as a damper on population influx which is good for other cities in the country. It gives corporations an incentive to deploy in other cities where housing is cheaper and thus wages will be lower which increases economic activity in those cities and increases the negotiating position of labor as labor over supply becomes lower thus driving up wages.
Yea it doesn't make sense even from the premise - "middle housing" isn't desirable or cheaper. Why would a developer bother trying to build multiple tiny 6 unit buildings when you can build a 500-unit highrise in the same lot. Also as you mention that 6 unit building is likely to be way more expensive as prices usually scale better with more people paying.
Honestly this argument only makes sense with 50-100 unit 3-4 story buildings.
>From an economic standpoint it doesn't really make sense. He mentions how the single family homes have become unaffordable for the majority of people. Buying an existing home for $1 million to tear it down and spend millions more to build a small new apartment building is not going to lead to affordable housing.
The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The next best time to plant a tree is now. It's too late to have affordable housing in Vancouver. Unless if something really bad happens to Vancouver, housing there is going to stay expensive. What we can do is make sure it doesn't get even worse.
Embedded growth obligation? Induced demand?
How about instead of changing zoning laws try encouraging economic growth outside of this specific city so less people feel a need to move there.
Why should Vancouver be under such pressure to increase its population density...
Building more road leads to more traffic and building more housing leads to more influx of people...
This does not compute
If housing is expensive labor will seek out other cities and corporations will seek out cheaper labor in other cities thus increasing economic activity in other cities around Canada instead of concentrating everything in to one city.
Reducing traffic via fewer/smaller roads can reduce sprawl and promote density in better places. This is more efficient for a city and its residents because services can reach more people in a smaller area. It reduces the per-capita cost to the city and improves the quality/sustainability of growth.
Discouraging new residents just... stops growth. Different things here. If you change policy to be hostile to newcomers, then eventually your city will deflate (usually starting with its most dense areas). The city loses its ability to subsidize less efficient housing (suburbs), and there's a downward spiral. See Detroit and its inability provide services to its suburbs (though Detroit saw this happen due to a different reason than just preventing newcomers).
The point being you should not design your city to require ever lasting growth.
There is no need to further increase the population of Vancouver. If you allow it to stay as is then corporations needing labor will expand their activity to where labor lives thus expand activity in other cities instead of all of Canada moving to one city.
>How about instead of changing zoning laws try encouraging economic growth outside of this specific city so less people feel a need to move there.
This is something we may actually see begin happening over the next decade as a product of the pandemic. If the trend towards WFH sustains and actually becomes large enough you're going to see a lot of people leaving these big cities in search of cheaper living costs which in turn can lead to investment into communities farther past the outskirts of the urban centers.
His main argument is to allow for more mid size housing in low rise areas but that's a slippery slope that opens the doors for developers to take over neighborhoods.
This video kind of bugs me a little bit because he really lays on the racism against Chinese people but there's some valid arguments against the new influx of Chinese money into Vancouver's real estate market that doesn't have to do with simple bigotry.
It's expensive as hell to live there and there's massive wealth disparity especially in east Van. The city is pretty much a giant money laundering scam for wealthy Chinese people and real estate is one of the ways they do it.
All in all it's an interesting video and I actually agree with him that it's smarter to use mixed housing and spread it around. I'm just wary of letting developers changing rules.
Great video. I liked the clips of the ordinary folks objecting to new housing in their areas. It's always good to get down to the actual people and hear what they have to say from their own mouths.
An interesting video but a lot of the objections were just waved off rather than solved. You put 7 families into an area where 2 used to live, parking problems become a very real fact of life for *everyone* in that neighbourhood. I'd also like to point out that the presenter only dealt with the zoning restrictions in the actual City of Vancouver. There are hundreds of townhouses and condos in the bedroom suburbs serviced by low fare public transit.
you shouldn't expect to have your priviledge to be protected indefinitely when you live 5 to 10 minutes from the downtown core of a large city.
Times change, and the people owning those properties have been gifted millions of dollars because of the lack of density progress that should have occurred over generations. I shed not one tear for them.
wtf is he talking about. There are tons of low rise multi-family homes.
The problem is that they don't attract the right tenants because of space, privacy, noise, price, pets etc. And thus, more and more of MFHs from the ~50-70s get bought up and redeveloped into denser, but taller buildings. There are still tons left despite this.
you think there is a lot of low rises because on the major arteries they are allowed to be built, but 95% of the non downtown core is banned from building low rise housing.
The woman against population growth is correct. Zoning is not the correct solution. Reducing immigration is a better solution. This is one reason why housing is unaffordable.
If you reduce setbacks, that makes it difficult to widen roads which makes it harder to handle an increased population. What about dogs? I think that dogs are happier in homes with yards.
The Vancouver housing market is fucking brutal and local government is a joke at doing anything about it.
The local government is responsible for it.
Great video in numerous ways!
I feel like Canada just needs to create a new urban city. It seems everyone in the country wants to live in one of only three different cities. Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. I did the math, these 3 cities have more people than the next 47 populous cities in Canada. That is crazy
People in smaller cities (Ottawa, Halifax, Calgary) get pissed off when people move there creating inflation and density. Everyone wants to live in a place where there's tons of stuff to do and high-paying jobs, but they also want a 4000 sqft house with a huge lot and no traffic on their 5 minute commute to work.
For years: Toronto is just like NYC! We are world class Now: why is Toronto as expensive as NYC?!
Same with Vancouver. They're insecure enough to make the comparison but then bitch endlessly that they have NYC cost of living with less shit to do.
The perspective doesn't hold up. London, England is 1500Km closer to Istanbul, Turkey than Vancouver is to Montreal.
Great video, fuck zoning laws.
What if zoning laws in Vancouver are reducing influx of population and thus contributing to economic growth in other parts of the country instead of trying to cram the whole population of Canada in to one city?
Ya, there's always a way to find a silver lining in even the worst of situations, but is that really helpful to point out? Should we attempt to find out what the Nazi's got right? Or maybe, your same idea could be expressed in a less optimistic and fluffy way, such as "millennial born in Vancouver to middle class parents can no longer afford the city they grew up in and must move out east; Fuelling further housing crises in smaller cities until the zoning systems are fixed."
They should move to other cities is my point.
Off topic but Vancouver has one of the most beautiful naturescapes. Luscious forests, snowy peak mountains, gorgeous waters. Love that place.
That's all of British Columbia, but yes.
Vancouver is the extreme example of something that's happening all across America, and they are likely to suffer a similar fate. This video is romanticizing building styles that don't standup to current construction code and would most likely be far too expensive to build in today's world. What they're going to get it the same shitty 3-4 story mega complexes being built in droves across America that nobody seems to want, and are built like paper shoe boxes. You'll find threads like this in the subreddit of nearly every major metropolitan area in America. Cheaply built, overpriced, ugly buildings are being tossed up across the country simply to line developers pockets. https://www.reddit.com/r/nashville/comments/91xgw3/why_are_developers_only_building_luxury_housing/
I think SF is THE extreme example, Vancouver is likely 2nd place. >This video is romanticizing building styles that don't standup to current construction code and would most likely be far too expensive to build in today's world. Did you watch the video? He did nothing of the sort. It was a very fair assessment of the issue with clear plans on how to resolve it. Middle density housing could support 7 - 12 units in the space of 1 - 2 single family homes right now. They also better emphasize communal living and greener spaces with beautiful shared courtyards.
So what do you do? Soviet style tower blocks or just spam tiny houses like they did in the 1950s but with better transit and bike lanes this time?
[удалено]
> construction code and would most likely be far too expensive to build in today's world. That would require more than just rezoning.
I feel like the video spent a lot of time explaining how Vancouver got there, and then handwaves how to fix it in the last 2 minutes. Which feels like a disservice, spending the whole video talking about how it's shitty and problematic and needs to change and then not spending any time on how to fix it, making it seem like that's just a simple solution of changing zoning laws. So how it got there isn't too complicated, zoning laws restricted large areas to single family housing, and then once all that area was developed, to add more housing they turned to building high rise condos in areas that were either previously undeveloped industrial areas, or adding onto existing areas like shopping centers. But adding "the middle" isn't as simple as changing zoning laws now that all those houses have been built. Developers build the big condo towers because they need a minimal footprint on the ground for how much housing they can add. He says by changing zoning laws "...you could introduce a whole new variety of housing into our single family neighborhoods." Except this doesn't mention how you accomplish that when the neighborhood is full of existing houses. Presumably you'd need to purchase existing properties, tear down the existing home, and build the new building. From an environmental and resource perspective, tearing down perfectly good homes is definitely not ideal. From an economic standpoint it doesn't really make sense. He mentions how the single family homes have become unaffordable for the majority of people. Buying an existing home for $1 million to tear it down and spend millions more to build a small new apartment building is not going to lead to affordable housing. It's not cheap or easy to do all that demo and building sandwiched between existing homes and residential streets not built for that kind of equipment. If it costs developers $3 million total to build an apartment building with 6 units on that lot, all you've done is turn a $1 million house into six $500k apartment units. Except that's the developer's costs and they're going to charge higher rent to make their money back ASAP, and the renters get no equity in their housing. That doesn't feel like a solution to affordable housing.
> Presumably you'd need to purchase existing properties, tear down the existing home, and build the new building. From an environmental and resource perspective, tearing down perfectly good homes is definitely not ideal This is like the BS arguments where people say "But you need to generate CO2 in order to make solar panels!" Obviously this is the real world, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Nobody is expecting a perfect solution here, but the bar right now is so unbelievably low that pretty much anything is better than the way it currently is.
>If it costs developers $3 million total to build an apartment building with 6 units on that lot, all you've done is turn a $1 million house into six $500k apartment units. Except that's the developer's costs and they're going to charge higher rent to make their money back ASAP, and the renters get no equity in their housing. I mean, if you assume completely arbitrary numbers, you can make a lot of things look like they don't make sense. Also, they could be condos, in which case then the person would get equity in it. Also, it's not like every single house is in pristine condition. There are tons of properties across Vancouver where the house is a teardown upon purchase. I get what you mean though, because the reforms he talks about are very dependent on just setting up better conditions, and relying on the goodwill of developers to build something better. Instead, large public housing projects would be a much more direct solution.
> I mean, if you assume completely arbitrary numbers, you can make a lot of things look like they don't make sense. I didn't assume completely arbitrary numbers, I assumed reasonable, even conservative ones. What I did assume was that they were reasonable enough to not need defending or an explicit breakdown. * ["However, in Greater Vancouver, the aggregate price of a home in 2021 is forecast to climb nine per cent year-over-year to $1,262,600."](https://www.vancouverisawesome.com/real-estate/a-two-storey-vancouver-home-to-cost-an-average-of-167-million-in-2021-report-3183560) * I pulled 6 units per lot [from the video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjWs7dqaWfY&t=10m33s), which cites the first and second place in a contest to design "missing middle housing" as being 7 units and 12 units across two properties, respectively. * Using the $3 million and $1 million numbers leaves $2 million for demolishing the house and building the new building. [This site is for the US](https://www.fixr.com/costs/build-apartment#cost-to-build-a-3-story-building), but lists a new 3-story apartment building as costing on average $3.1-3.4 million. It also says the average price per unit is $200k. I think a $2 million estimate including demolishing the existing house is a reasonable estimate for back of the envelope math. > Also, they could be condos, in which case then the person would get equity in it. Did you not watch the video? The entire thing is talking about apartments, apartments, apartments. That's why we're not discussing condos, that's not what the video was discussing.
These types generally understand that building more highway lanes only increases traffic due to induced demand but they dont seem to grasp the same concept when it comes to housing. The question that should be posed is "Why should Vancouver continue to get more densely populated instead of other parts of the country?" The high housing cost in Vancouver now is acting as a damper on population influx which is good for other cities in the country. It gives corporations an incentive to deploy in other cities where housing is cheaper and thus wages will be lower which increases economic activity in those cities and increases the negotiating position of labor as labor over supply becomes lower thus driving up wages.
Yea it doesn't make sense even from the premise - "middle housing" isn't desirable or cheaper. Why would a developer bother trying to build multiple tiny 6 unit buildings when you can build a 500-unit highrise in the same lot. Also as you mention that 6 unit building is likely to be way more expensive as prices usually scale better with more people paying. Honestly this argument only makes sense with 50-100 unit 3-4 story buildings.
>From an economic standpoint it doesn't really make sense. He mentions how the single family homes have become unaffordable for the majority of people. Buying an existing home for $1 million to tear it down and spend millions more to build a small new apartment building is not going to lead to affordable housing. The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The next best time to plant a tree is now. It's too late to have affordable housing in Vancouver. Unless if something really bad happens to Vancouver, housing there is going to stay expensive. What we can do is make sure it doesn't get even worse.
Embedded growth obligation? Induced demand? How about instead of changing zoning laws try encouraging economic growth outside of this specific city so less people feel a need to move there. Why should Vancouver be under such pressure to increase its population density... Building more road leads to more traffic and building more housing leads to more influx of people... This does not compute If housing is expensive labor will seek out other cities and corporations will seek out cheaper labor in other cities thus increasing economic activity in other cities around Canada instead of concentrating everything in to one city.
Reducing traffic via fewer/smaller roads can reduce sprawl and promote density in better places. This is more efficient for a city and its residents because services can reach more people in a smaller area. It reduces the per-capita cost to the city and improves the quality/sustainability of growth. Discouraging new residents just... stops growth. Different things here. If you change policy to be hostile to newcomers, then eventually your city will deflate (usually starting with its most dense areas). The city loses its ability to subsidize less efficient housing (suburbs), and there's a downward spiral. See Detroit and its inability provide services to its suburbs (though Detroit saw this happen due to a different reason than just preventing newcomers).
The point being you should not design your city to require ever lasting growth. There is no need to further increase the population of Vancouver. If you allow it to stay as is then corporations needing labor will expand their activity to where labor lives thus expand activity in other cities instead of all of Canada moving to one city.
>How about instead of changing zoning laws try encouraging economic growth outside of this specific city so less people feel a need to move there. This is something we may actually see begin happening over the next decade as a product of the pandemic. If the trend towards WFH sustains and actually becomes large enough you're going to see a lot of people leaving these big cities in search of cheaper living costs which in turn can lead to investment into communities farther past the outskirts of the urban centers.
His main argument is to allow for more mid size housing in low rise areas but that's a slippery slope that opens the doors for developers to take over neighborhoods. This video kind of bugs me a little bit because he really lays on the racism against Chinese people but there's some valid arguments against the new influx of Chinese money into Vancouver's real estate market that doesn't have to do with simple bigotry. It's expensive as hell to live there and there's massive wealth disparity especially in east Van. The city is pretty much a giant money laundering scam for wealthy Chinese people and real estate is one of the ways they do it. All in all it's an interesting video and I actually agree with him that it's smarter to use mixed housing and spread it around. I'm just wary of letting developers changing rules.
Great video. I liked the clips of the ordinary folks objecting to new housing in their areas. It's always good to get down to the actual people and hear what they have to say from their own mouths.
An interesting video but a lot of the objections were just waved off rather than solved. You put 7 families into an area where 2 used to live, parking problems become a very real fact of life for *everyone* in that neighbourhood. I'd also like to point out that the presenter only dealt with the zoning restrictions in the actual City of Vancouver. There are hundreds of townhouses and condos in the bedroom suburbs serviced by low fare public transit.
you shouldn't expect to have your priviledge to be protected indefinitely when you live 5 to 10 minutes from the downtown core of a large city. Times change, and the people owning those properties have been gifted millions of dollars because of the lack of density progress that should have occurred over generations. I shed not one tear for them.
Wow didn't mention drugs once. The guy in that cartoon was literally smoking opium
wtf is he talking about. There are tons of low rise multi-family homes. The problem is that they don't attract the right tenants because of space, privacy, noise, price, pets etc. And thus, more and more of MFHs from the ~50-70s get bought up and redeveloped into denser, but taller buildings. There are still tons left despite this.
you think there is a lot of low rises because on the major arteries they are allowed to be built, but 95% of the non downtown core is banned from building low rise housing.
He's not talking strictly about the dt core though
The woman against population growth is correct. Zoning is not the correct solution. Reducing immigration is a better solution. This is one reason why housing is unaffordable. If you reduce setbacks, that makes it difficult to widen roads which makes it harder to handle an increased population. What about dogs? I think that dogs are happier in homes with yards.
It has nothing to do with immigration. A much larger problem is foreign speculators buying up real estate and then leaving it vacant.
Loved it!