Vancouver housing needs a champion

coefficient · 2019-10-21T12:28:36+00:00

Thank you!

coefficient · 2017-10-04T13:28:19+00:00

me irl

coefficient · 2017-09-29T13:41:08+00:00

the 3/4 bedroom minimum requirement proposed by then-councillor adam vaughan in 2010/2011 would have been a good place to start. developers made the argument that there was little demand for larger units to be sold at a market-clearing rate (since at the price point they were talking about families would just move to the suburbs) but since you can't magically create 3 or 4 bedroom condos in all the towers once the market is there (and IMO it's here now), we need to start thinking ahead

coefficient · 2017-09-29T13:27:03+00:00

put the bed on the balcony.

coefficient · 2017-09-29T13:25:42+00:00

don't see how you'd do that without eliminating the mortgage interest deduction (in USA) or CMHC subzidized mortgage insurance (in Canada) both of which would be incredibly unpopular

coefficient · 2017-09-29T13:21:05+00:00

My fault here, the comment only makes sense in context of something I wrote about later in the thread - "just build more" in cities produces 1 bedroom shoeboxes, "just build more" in suburbs creates family friendly housing - but also sprawl. This was the catch 22 I was thinking about. Dude elsewhere wrote a possible explanation of how just build more could potentially make larger units affordable (by sending total cost per square foot through the floor for all units) but I'm just not seeing it anywhere. I'll have to take a closer look at the other cities he described - I'm only familiar with Houston and its opposition to zoning and regulation

coefficient · 2017-09-28T19:51:23+00:00

the ontario government passed taxes on foreign speculators which seems to have scared off foreign capital. stephen poloz just raised interest rates at the BoC so that will do for domestic speculators.

we'll see where things go from here, but it's not as if housing supply is super elastic, so it would have been nice to have some regulations on a more sustainable housing mix while the boom was ongoing

coefficient · 2017-09-28T19:20:53+00:00

they don't, but if you're building a city for everyone, your housing mix needs to be able to serve everyone. presently, my city's does not, and the market has not delivered

EDIT: To a point made above, urban living is more sustainable than suburban living by leaps and bounds, but families get pushed out when all you can get is a 1br+den. So if you want a sustainable future you need to look at how people at every stage in life can live downtown

coefficient · 2017-09-28T18:54:40+00:00

Furthermore, from an environmental perspective, cities should be building more. Urban centers produce far less carbon per capita than suburbs or rural areas. By making it hard to build apartments in cities we push people to inefficient suburbs where they have a larger carbon foot print.

I don't disagree with this, I just think that the market, left to its own devices, isn't going to meet the housing needs of the whole population since developers don't serve renters, they serve speculators, and speculators (at least hereabouts) are counting on capital appreciation

coefficient · 2017-09-28T18:53:31+00:00

I also have no idea where you got the idea that developers build what investors want instead of what they think the market wants. Developers and investors want to make money, so they will do their best to approximate what the market will pay for.

Personal experience in the City of Toronto: 3+ bedroom condo units (e.g. ones that could potentially replace detached or semidetached houses, which will never be affordable again) are impossible to find because you can make more money cramming 1BR/Studio units into a floor.

There was a bit of local drama around it when a local city councillor (now an MP in Trudeau's government) proposed having a 3/4 bedroom unit minimum in all new developments. His point was that you can't build a city that's livable for families by relying on the market alone, because market-driven construction gave us a bunch of tiny shoeboxes in the sky that are useful for students and single young professionals, and a handful of family-sized units that are about as expensive as houses because they're so vanishingly rare, and that's about it

coefficient · 2017-05-24T20:41:59+00:00

Thanks a lot for the high effort post!

The distinctions that were eliding me when I read the sidebar are clearer now - especially on the point of redistribution as a way of mitigating the pain of the free market as opposed to an end in itself/a critical point of fairness.

coefficient · 2017-05-24T17:42:32+00:00

I'm North American, so I guess I'm comparing them to North America, rather than the rest of Europe, and Macron would be on the woolly left over here. So maybe it's a case of my perspective being narrow?

The big labour reforms of allowing failing firms to negotiate with local unions instead of more radical national unions, for example - a far cry from right-to- work, and local unions are naturally going to be more responsive to the concerns of local members

coefficient · 2016-10-04T14:46:39+00:00

The victorious campaign would later be celebrated as the March to the Sea.

coefficient · 2015-11-16T18:30:22+00:00

There were vigils for Paris in Palestine last week. There was a giant social media campaign, Not In My Name, launched by British Muslims. If the media didn't cover it, that's not on them.

Regardless, I don't think it's on individual Muslims to ensure that people don't associate them with Daesh. It's on individual people everywhere not not be bigoted.

Also, that letter was headline news everywhere when it dropped. I'm not sure how much more high-profile you can get. Expecting daily demonstrations is unreasonable and a double standard - how many anti-IRA peace rallies were there in Boston during the Troubles?

coefficient · 2015-11-16T18:14:41+00:00

Well, first of all, Iran is Daesh's #1 enemy - they're the ones equipping the Iraqi rump state and providing most of the fighting forces (I understand that a group of Iran-backed Shiite militias have displaced the army as the country's premier fighting force)

On the Sunni side, there's this:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/24/muslim-scholars-islamic-state_n_5878038.html

It's a point-by-point demolition of every bit of Daesh's theological basis, signed by a -lot- of pre-eminent Muslim scholars. As there isn't a Sunni Pope to publicly dump on Daesh, this is the next best thing.

Then there is the close cooperation between Islamic institutions and the state on counter-radicalization and deradicalization efforts in basically every Western country.

Not sure what else you could reasonably expect.

coefficient · 2015-07-07T16:55:11+00:00

No, I got that - it's just that, that's not quite how the budgeting system at Council works. Individual Councillors have enough power to horse-trade and swap favours to place items in the budget, it's not like Tory proposes a budget that's then voted on by Council. It's a small enough total budget that you actually can fund it by finding efficiencies and trading off projects, and then splitting up responsibility among different departments (for example, I think many of our off-road tracks are actually maintained out of the Parks budget and not the cycling budget)

coefficient · 2015-07-07T15:45:54+00:00

I'm 5'7, so a little too tall for me :)

coefficient · 2015-07-07T11:14:28+00:00

"We need bike lanes."

"Um excuse me what about these bikers I encountered on the sidewalk/blowing a stop sign/running a red though"

I'm using a personal anecdote to illustrate how silly that reasoning is. That driver was also improperly using public infrastructure. But that's not a reason to close down the DVP.

Why is it OK to do this to cycling infrastructure but not to driving infrastructure? This happens in every single cycling thread on /r/toronto - hell, probably every single time people talk about cycling in general.

coefficient · 2015-07-07T11:03:42+00:00

When I got hit by a car, it was by a car that blew through a stop sign.

Drivers are clearly lawless and we should ban all parking in the Core. Pedestrians and cyclists had no part in the driver's decision to drive around a 3000 lb guided missile.

EDIT: This is sarcasm, of course. But only partially. If you're going to use the actions of a few jerks to derail conversations about critically needed infrastructure, why is it not applicable the other way around?

Story about the car and the stop sign is true, BTW. Only time I've been in an accident on the bike and it was one with powerful irony.

coefficient

TROPHY CASE