Ontario government unveils plans to fix soaring housing prices

[mhays]

Development might increase desirability and prices in the NEIGHBORHOOD.

But CITY-WIDE, it's all about the supply/demand equation. If supply gets ahead of demand, prices will moderate and possibly fall.

[llamaorama]

You aren’t wrong, but if the region wide pace is too slow it obviously isn’t making a dent meanwhile the geographic arrangement of rich vs poor neighborhoods changes at the expense of the poor who lose out on being in spots that have lots of transit, parks, etc and get kicked into low end suburbs that are economic and civic deserts, worst of all worlds. I think it’s self evident that it’s all or nothing. Either be so NIMBY the uncommitted bug off, or be a badass metropolis of all walks of life.

I’m basing my argument on real world observation here. All the west coast cities are headed to crisis mode even if they have admirable urban infill efforts. The only places that aren’t screwed either don’t grow or grow a lot where a 10,000 home new suburb is a common thing and there’s no friction to crank out apartments.

[Nouvellecosse]

The issue is that while it seems like there's a huge amount of construction due to the high visibility of construction when it occurs in prominent location like downtown, It isn't actually that much given the rate of population growth. With the greenbelt basically stopping greenfield sprawl and the average GTA growth of about 144k per year, if we assume the average household has two people (a mix of singles, couples, and families with children) that would be a need for 72k units per year. A 40 story condo tower with 10 units per floor would have 400 units, so there would need to be the equivalent of 180 such buildings completed per year.

Currently there's "only" about 172 building u/c with not all being residential and the average height being smaller (you drop below 40 floors somewhere around 57th tallest). Yet in order to have 180 completed per year, there would need to be far more than that u/c at any given time. Obviously there is some construction too short for the highrise list but not a big enough volume to make a major difference. The current construction boom isn't actually a lot. It just seems like a lot because we've never had a fairly large NA city grow predominantly through infill before. You either had places growth mostly through suburban sprawl in the postwar era, or mostly through urban (as opposed to suburban) greenfield sprawl prior to that. Things like streetcar suburbs and dense rowhouse neighbourhoods. So we don't really know what "a lot" for such a context looks like when we see it.

[llamaorama]

That’s a good point. I wonder if any cities worldwide have ever grown chiefly through infill, and the ones that have I wonder how much strife they went through.

Asian cities have dense sprawl. Poor countries like Mexico and South Africa let connected people take over land and grid it out and people build houses and tenements or shacks or whatever.

[mhays]

Some might grow primarily through infill, but not the ones growing 2% per year.

[biguc]

Originally Posted by llamaorama

That’s a good point. I wonder if any cities worldwide have ever grown chiefly through infill, and the ones that have I wonder how much strife they went through.

Asian cities have dense sprawl. Poor countries like Mexico and South Africa let connected people take over land and grid it out and people build houses and tenements or shacks or whatever.

Worldwide, cities hemming in their growth with endless low-density sprawl, making dense sprawl impossible, is unusual. SFH districts beyond the reach of quality infrastructure is typical, but entrenching this built form in zoning isn't. The upshot is, cities grow through both infill and sprawl.

Here's an example. Make sure you're looking at satellite view with transit.

https://www.google.com/maps/@52.5748...m1!1e3!5m1!1e2

You can see how denser development tracks the tram line. There are small apartment buildings mixed in with the SFHs off the high street. Beyond the end of the line, development quickly drops off into SFHs and even garden colonies. As far as I know, there's nothing stopping any of these SFHs being redeveloped as apartments. There'd probably be more resistance to redeveloping the gardens on account of them being run by clubs and occupied by pissy old people who want to spend their retirements drunk and naked in their own patches of paradise.

If you look to the south east, you'll see a similar pattern at the end of another tram line.

There's a plan to extend both tram lines. The first will run out to the patch of empty fields to the north east, where dense sprawl can happen. But I'd also expect a lot of strifeless infill to follow both extensions.


With this example in mind, to answer your question directly, since 1989 Berlin has grown chiefly through infill. But it's still not as populous as it was in 1939. There was a lot of strife between those years. Just not of the NIMBY/development-pressure variety.

[biguc]

Originally Posted by niwell

^I can't stand that kind of hyperbole particularly because I do agree that plopping down a bunch of 40-80 storey towers geared towards investors isn't the best idea. Even from an economic perspective it doesn't really make a lot of sense in the context of housing affordability. Not that anyone in the government (not limited to the current one) is particularly interested in that to a meaningful extent.

Yeah I agree. I'm generally skeptical of the market's ability to fix the affordability problem, in this case, simply because the market has happily soaked up price increases thus far. Developers building more units at these prices, alone, won't make housing more affordable, just developers richer. Short of a painful market correction brought on by a drop in demand, or massive intervention in the market (building transit like crazy, upzoning everything, buildings lots of socialized housing, expropriating and redeveloping vast tracts of SFH, building China-style edge cities) I don't see anything changing Toronto's housing affordability issues.

[dc_denizen]

Worthwhile Canadian initiative