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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   29676 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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Vancouver's housing could be made cheaper by allowing single-family houses to be built in the empty "Green Zone" (1 2).

The idea that Vancouver-area residents should suffer the least affordable housing in Canada in order to preserve rural open space in a province that has millions of hectares of open space and some of the lowest population densities in the world would be comical if its results were not so tragic.

rural open space

AKA 'food producing areas' -- the Fraser River delta is fantastically fertile, it would make way more sense to plop the immigrants up in Prince George or somewhere (Rupert if they just like rainy ports I guess) and plough the condos under to grow veggies.

Worth noting that this is true for every city and town in the province: the ALR is an absolutely crooked law and it applies almost everywhere. Sure, 50 years ago it might not have been as big a deal to permanently ban all development in cities that hadn't yet grown to need that land, but they do now, and I don't think that unless the province undergoes a dramatic political shakeup it's going anywhere fast, much like California's Prop 13 (for the same reasons).

Fun quote from a Supreme Court opinion refusing to overturn Prop. 13:

Petitioner and amici argue with some appeal that Article XIIIA frustrates the "American dream" of home ownership for many younger and poorer California families. They argue that Article XIIIA places start up businesses that depend on ownership of property at a severe disadvantage in competing with established businesses. They argue that Article XIIIA dampens demand for and construction of new housing and buildings. And they argue that Article XIIIA constricts local tax revenues at the expense of public education and vital services.

Time and again, however, this Court has made clear in the rational basis context that the "Constitution presumes that, absent some reason to infer antipathy, even improvident decisions will eventually be rectified by the democratic process and that judicial intervention is generally unwarranted no matter how unwisely we may think a political branch has acted". Certainly, California's grand experiment appears to vest benefits in a broad, powerful, and entrenched segment of society, and, as the Court of Appeal surmised, ordinary democratic processes may be unlikely to prompt its reconsideration or repeal. Yet many wise and well intentioned laws suffer from the same malady. Article XIIIA is not palpably arbitrary, and we must decline petitioner's request to upset the will of the people of California.

My impression has always been that Vancouver home prices are kept high by investment from China and other countries (which is basically infinite and totally inelastic). Granted, there is also a lot of green space that could be turned into housing, and a lot of room to build up. (I suspect strongly that Portland and Seattle will go the same way.)

Anything else? Granted we could probably fit a million or more people into Vancouver, but that's only one small part of Canada.

The investment may be virtually infinite but it's very elastic--they are investing because it seems like a good investment. They'll invest elsewhere if the quality of that investment declines (perhaps due to increased housing supply)

The last time I looked into it, many years ago, Canadian real estate was a prime investment for Chinese elites looking to sock money away outside China. Perhaps the calculus haa changed, but it would take a lot of new housing stock to sate this demand.

It appears that similar land-wasting efforts are active in the Toronto area.

Created by legislation passed by the Government of Ontario in 2005, the Greenbelt is considered a prevention of urban development and sprawl on environmentally sensitive land in the province. According to the Greenbelt Foundation, the Greenbelt includes 2,000,000 acres (810,000 ha) of land. That includes 721,000 acres (292,000 ha) of protected wetlands, grasslands, and forests.

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