Experts say Ottawa is playing more of a role in housing, which is mostly a provincial and territorial responsibility, but federal involvement hasn’t brought much relief amid rising home prices.

  • fresh@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    25
    ·
    1 year ago

    Historically, past housing crises have been resolved with massive input from the federal government. I hope this government acts with urgency, people are suffering out there, but given that the last housing minister was literally a housing investor I’m not very hopeful. I think only the NDP has the right alignment of interest and values.

    • Nouveau_Burnswick@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      12
      ·
      1 year ago

      By building medium density, transit oriented, neighborhoods; the feds can get after housing, environmental, and cost of living issues at the same time. Get three birds stoned at one.

      If provinces fight it, give the housing to another province.

      • oʍʇǝuoǝnu@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        1 year ago

        God I wish this would happen. The BCNDP are actually making substantial changes to our legislation but its not enough without major investments into transit infrastructure. Rail corridors need to be reopened/established and active transit projects need to be heavily subsidized.

        • Nouveau_Burnswick@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          Heavily subsidized?

          It obviously varies wildly, but a road can cost $1,500k per lane km (NS highway planning figure). A multiuse path costs $10k per km (City of Toronto). That’s 150:1 ratio.

          And that’s just construction, path maintenance is basically just snow clearance, roads are expensive; though maintenance data varies incredibly wildly based on how it’s annualized and traffic volume.

          Make every lane km of road built require the construction of 0.5km of path. Sure, construction costs increase 0.3%, but I’d wager the reduction in car use would see that recovered in maintenance costs (personal guess, not data driven).

      • Cyborganism@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        But that’s all municipal and to some degree, provincial.

        What the feds need to do is curb immigration for a while until we figure this out and also create legislation for the realtor business/profession or just make it obsolete. Why the fuck do we need these dweebs when we can just simplify the process instead. There would be no more incentive from those bastards to blow up prices and give bad advice to people for a bigger commission.

        • Kichae@kbin.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          1 year ago

          Immigration isn’t driving the housing crisis, though. Real estate speculation and short-term rentals are.

          Massively tax short-term rentals and non-primary-resident housing and watch the problem go away

        • Nouveau_Burnswick@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          1 year ago

          It’s all within the mandate of CMHC, they have used the tools to achieve this before.

          Housing plans. Municipal planning. Housing construction. Planned, self-contained, communities. Housing quality improvement. Urban renewal. Density enforcement. Non-profit low income housing.

          These are all things CMHC has done in the past, and can do again in the future.

          Curbing immigration may help housing, but I don’t know what the impacts to that on the labour for are. We’re already in a labour crunch and using foreign workers.

          Realtors are one I hadn’t thought of. They should go the way of travel agencies, or be replaced by non-profits of there is something about them I’m missing.

          • PaganDude@lemmy.ca
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            I keep hearing about this labour crunch, and yet as someone who builds houses as a job (carpenter) this is the slowest summer since 2020 for building houses in Alberta. The builders only seem to want to build pre-purchashed houses and have limited the “spec” houses they build and sell later. It’s the same for a lot of friends we have in the industry, people are scrambling to find work, not workers.

            And I’ve been putting out resumes to nearby industries & not getting much attention. So really, how much is there a real labour shortage, and where? Because the 4th & 5th biggest cities in the country aren’t doing so well.

            • Nouveau_Burnswick@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              1 year ago

              Industries 62, 72, and 81 are all above 6% vacancy.

              Construction had 64k vacancies last quarter, 12k of those in Alberta.

              I get it, it sucks when the jobs aren’t where you want to live, I’ve moved my family 6 times (in 15 years) for work, it’s harder every time.