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You really don't have that much construction in Vancouver. There's a ton downtown, and in spots here and there, but most of Vancouver proper is single-family dwellings. You complain about condos, but houses with yards are incompatible with dense cities and low housing prices. Just the cost of land for a house is over a million, there's no point building a middle-class house on it--they couldn't afford it anyway. So you build condos, apartments, or a luxury home.

And renter protections and limitations on rent increases are fairly strict in BC, which discourages the building of apartments. If you dropped the rent control, developers would be more likely to build apartments, with the possible result that rent might go down.

And having said that, rents are actually pretty low in Vancouver. When I moved down to Seattle from there, my rent went way up, in spite of the fact that housing was way more expensive in Vancouver at the time (2011). Last time I checked, that remained true: rent for a fancy downtown 2-br apartment in Vancouver was about $2k Canadian, equivalent in Seattle was over $2.5k USD.

Look to Tokyo for a city that eliminated zoning and rent controls, and is surprisingly affordable for a huge international city. You'll never see it on a cost-of-living list with Vancouver, New York, Paris, Sydney, etc.

> houses with yards are incompatible with dense cities and low housing prices

Ever been out east? Row housing is dense, but has a yard and is suitable for families in a way that a condo can never be.

> If you dropped the rent control, developers would be more likely to build apartments, with the possible result that rent might go down.

We're BARELY rent controlled. Kick your tenant out and find a new one, boom you can double the rent. Technically illegal, but done constantly. If you really want to make it legit you can do a minor reno.

> rents are actually pretty low in Vancouver

Unfortunately I can't live in Seattle, and that seems like a disingenuous apples-to-oranges comparison. Because of the border/citizenship issue, those are separate markets. https://bc.ctvnews.ca/vancouver-s-rental-rates-are-the-highe...

Yes, town houses aka row houses are much better than traditional picket-fence houses. Also, though, cities in the east have far better public transit systems. Vancouver does well for the west coast, but it's system is dwarfed by those in New York or Chicago. And North Americans have firmly decided against public transit.

My understanding is that it's fantastically hard to evict a tenant in BC. I've heard stories of landlords taking a year to evict a tenant who wasn't even paying his rent anymore, and destroying the apartment in the process. Though I guess most people will leave when asked. And from what I remember, annual rent increases are capped at 4% or something? The first 3 years I lived in Seattle, my rent went up 50%.

Basically, though, rents aren't bad in Vancouver, and that's the most critical aspect of housing. People can afford to live there. The situation could be easily improved, especially regarding housing ownership...by encouraging more building.

If we’re doing anecdotes, I had a neighbor evicted about six years ago. He was carving things into the walls. I can't recall an exact timeline but i think it took under two months to evict him. I’d be worried if it took less time.

> Basically, though, rents aren't bad in Vancouver

Your argument seems to be “it’s worse elsewhere so quit complaining. I’ll remind you, this is the least affordable rental city in canada.

As I pointed out elsewhere in the thread, you have a vacancy rate in Vancouver of 2.6%, which is considered a deep housing supply crisis.

Row homes aren’t very land efficient and there aren’t any cities in the US or Canada where it would be financially feasible for governments to buy up enough land around cities to build enough row homes to meet demand. People who propose things like this never seem to remember that western governments can’t just take land from people who own it.

> western governments can’t just take land from people who own it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain

> Row homes aren’t very land efficient

But a lot more so than single-family homes.

Eminent domain requires reimbursement, and is horrendously unpopular. Trying to scoop up land from middle class people around cities in the West isn’t politically feasible. Those people vote.

There’s no politically realistic future where governments could build enough row homes to house the poor in places where there is economic opportunity. The land is too expensive, and trying to wrench it away by force of law would die in the courts or the ballot booth. This is a hopelessly utopian idea.

Markets are great at producing lots of cheap stuff, we could let housing work the same way.

> There’s no politically realistic future where governments could build enough row homes to house the poor in places where there is economic opportunity

Some politically realistic futures where this kind of thing had widespread support:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Communist_Revolution

> This is a hopelessly utopian idea

I'd argue that "let's keep doing markets despite the suffering we see around us" is a hopelessly dystopian idea, but...

I wouldn’t say the Cuban or Chinese revolutions have provided great housing solutions. Not to mention the wanton slaughter of the Russian and Chinese civil wars which killed millions of innocent people.

No one is saying let’s keep doing markets”. The article and many posts like mine are arguing that building new and more dense housing has been illegal in most of the US for decades, which has lead to a housing shortage. We should make it legal to build more housing, so that the market can build more housing.

I’m not wholly opposed to some public housing, but it needs to be carefully financed and well maintained.

My point was that the political will to make large swaths of land public has existed in the past, and if people keep getting more and more desperate it'll happen again, hopefully not violently.

But ok back to your point: so market capitalism works - but in housing we haven't had markets because of gov interference. So what's an area where we have a free unconstrained market for a basic human necessity, that doesn't cause deep deep suffering?

Food, water, housing, heathcare, safety - these are things that when solved by "the market" necessarily exclude a small but significant portion of people. Market capitalism is the wrong tool for basic needs. Prove me wrong ;)

We reached max depth. But with respect to food and water, no one in any market economy dies down f hunger or thirst. During the last century every famine was in a war zone or command economy. We produce so much food now that we’re making ourselves sick from eating too much.

There are certainly issues in places with access to fresh food and we need to better maintain plumbing in some cities. Those are more complicated issues though and involve culture and government.

We don't have a free market for food in the US or Canada. Very few people outright starve here, but that's largely due to food banks, food stamps, other government or charitably funded non-market forces that prevent starvation.

> 45 million Americans rely on stipends from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to buy food each month

Yes, we have a lot of food here, but in a pure market, without money you don't get any of it.

Water is almost 100% public.

Yeah It’s clearly more complicated than just a textbook market.

Haven't built enough. You need to build so much that developers are going bankrupt because they can't sell their homes. That's the point where prices come down.

I think most people in the "we built, but prices didn't come down" underestimate the scale of the problem. The (Canadian) population of peak homebuying age (20-40) exceeds the population of peak die-off age (65-85) by about 6 million. If people are still coupling up (not a guarantee these days of later marriage), that's about 3 million homes needed. Vancouver is about 5% of the population of Canada, so assuming no migration to the cities (also not true), that's about 150,000 new housing units. How many were actually built in 2020? 8000.

The city basically needs to get bigger by about 50%, and this needs to be repeated across most of the hot cities in the developed world. What would that even look like? Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, and the Bay Area are basically land-constrained; for them to grow 50% bigger over a decade, you either need a lot of highrises, or every SFH needs to be converted to a duplex.

BC has added three times as many people as housing units in the last decade. So there definitely has not been plenty of new housing built.

> Where I live, Vancouver, we have plenty of new construction - and have been pretty developer friendly for decades now.

Developer friendly maybe by comparisons to other place. But probably enormous by absolut value anyway. As an anecdote, I just googled custruction regulation in BC. So to just get access the build code, it costs 140$ dollars :).

I'm tempted to believe as in most western countries, there is an enormous amount of regulation permiating ever tiny aspect of construction process: from zoning, labor regulations, to enviromental restriction etc.. Not saying this is not needed, just pointing out that for many it might be a blind spot since all this regulation is taken foregranted...

Why do you think it does not work? And what would you do instead?

End real estate purchased for investment, rather than housing. Socialized row housing.

This is essentially an argument that well-educated professional class "socialists" use to justify the protection of their own home values while paying lip service to a housing fix that clearly will not happen. It envisions two kinds of residents: those who will compete up the the cost of houses, and those who will be placed in state-run housing.

If state run housing was available I'd love to live there. Yes, it's possible that one implementation of this would be a two-tier housing market - that would be bad. But since I generally think that housing, being a basic human necessity, should be available to everyone - and there is no part of capitalism that protects people from homelessness in fact it's baked into the system, I think some socialism would be useful here.

It's easy to say you'd be happy to live in a housing project when there is no prospect of you living in a housing project. Meanwhile, the home values of the people advocating for "socialized row housing" continues to appreciate as they advocate against the building of new mixed-income market housing. Pretty convenient.

There is only so much land in the lower mainland, and a huge influx of new residents every year. Whatever is going on in the Vancouver metro area is not laissez-faire capitalism. For examples of that, look to the major metros in Texas where zoning is lightly regulated and prices are comparatively lower than elsewhere.

FWIW, I find the zoning argument to be the most persuasive if your goal is to make housing more affordable. If you have other goals, including a transit-friendly city, bike-friendly city, "green" city, etc then it will definitely not be optimal.