Think this through with your own numbers but without time swapping the fertility rates across generations. (Suddenly having a house means we’re going to pump out 4 kids? Holy bold assumptions Batman!)

Say a condo at 800 feet, 800 / 3 = 266.

Even a small house, 1500 / 3 = 500.

Heck, even if we double the fertility rate for folks in a small detached home, you’re still ahead:

1500 / 4 = 350.

I did the math on a condo project in Vancouver (not even in downtown, just in the City across the bridge) the land cost for each unit they were building was $300,000. That number alone makes them unaffordable, before even talking about the construction costs.

Yeah, so essentially some of the most expensive real estate in the country, no doubt it’s going to be more expensive. That’s why you have to build condos there not detached homes. Try putting a detached home there. Do that and the house is suddenly what, tens of millions?

In this case, you’re effectively saying that because we build condos where it is too expensive to put detached homes, condos are more expensive? That’s some pretty silly logic there.

but that type of development isn’t possible anymore.

There simply isn’t the available land

You should read about that history again. Land costs weren’t the prohibitive factor, it was that there just wasn’t enough housing being built.

Not to mention building condos cost a lot more per square foot than detached houses.

This one is A) doubtful but B) more than a little misleading, condos are much smaller than detached homes, so the people per square foot works out cheaper.

But yeah, this won’t get everyone detached homes in the middle of a big city like Vancouver, like I already said. What it does do is allow us to do is build more multi unit places (hardly a factor in the post war efforts) as well as more detached homes in less populated areas (in BC, my goodness, we have some dirt cheap land a few hours away from Vancouver.)

I dunno, you’ve just made a lot of assertions about what will happen but none of it seemed particularly based on facts. I’m not going to say I’m confident in the government but I certainly like our odds more than I did a year ago.

Unfortunately, people like you keep getting their hopes up on policies that have no historical record of working.

Feel free to share an example of a country with a similarly ambitious housing plan in the last 20 years.

Canada certainly hasn’t had one.

I fins the notion of “well, we tried something about a third as comprehensive and it didn’t work” to be pretty silly. It’s like folks who go to the gym a few times over a month, don’t see results and decide they’ll never be in shape. Some things require a significant effort.

I’m not saying there’s a guarantee housing prices will drop but to declare they can’t because “a government said they’d try, they didn’t do much and nothing happened so nothing will ever happen” is nonsense.

that have no historical record of working. Building more homes has never dropped prices anywhere in the world.

Edit:

that have no historical record of working. Building more homes has never dropped prices anywhere in the world.

Like an ignorant goof, I forgot to mention, that it has worked, in Canada! In fact, parts of the current government’s approach (pre approved design, emphasis on modular fabrication etc) are taken straight of the playbook from the last time we did this, after the second world war. For you to believe the statement above means that you probably don’t know about this neat period of history, you can learn about it here!

Hey fellow oldie!

I feel, the song is similar but much louder and more coherent this time. Harper really had nothing besides some mucking about at the margins, Trudeau tried a bit but like a lot of things he tried, didn’t get all that much done. This one at least feels like a fairly coherent, federal through to municipal approach on the government side, with a bunch of private sector ideas.

That being said, I think the key is what you mean by affordable. I am hopeful they can lay the foundations to get housing back to something like just pre-pandemic (and hopefully just keep going!), which still wasn’t great for many people. I’m lucky enough that I think I’d be okay to buy something I want in that scenario.

But overall, yeah I think housing standards are just going to be different for us than our parents and similarly, between us and the youngings coming up now. I live in Vancouver, it’s almost doubled in size since 1990! The single detached houses a 10 minute bike ride from downtown that a middle class couple could easily afford? Probably not happening again.

Nope. Why do you ask?

Housing productivity hasn’t improved at all over the last 50 years, in fact it’s gone down

Yeah, that’s why it takes something bold like putting together a new agency tasked with fostering innovative new companies. Those are the folks currently contracted to build the 4,000 affordable homes in the first wave.

Voters would actually be quite unhappy with a 20% drop in prices that occurs too quickly and doesn’t have an external event to blame.

Remember, the time scale is 2035, which should have two elections beforehand.

A chunk of voters would be happy, another would be unhappy.

The Conservatives would eat his breakfast in the next election if he dropped the value of homes by 10% before then.

That’s a fight almost any politician would love to have. “We’re here making things affordable for the middle class and our children and you’re complaining that they can finally buy homes?”

the liberals launched a “National Housing Strategy in 2015”… it’s 10 years later and things are just significantly worse.

I don’t find this argument particularly persuasive. Many governments have tried many things, that doesn’t mean nothing can work. This is a significantly larger. more concerted push at the problem than anything that came before. (And y’know, presumably won’t get interrupted by a pandemic.)

Most rural houses are effectively worthless and practically ghost towns

This happens everywhere, not unique to Japan or even demographic decline.