To me as a foreigner living here its glaringly obvious that the affordability problem is at least in great part due to SFH zoning. I think basically anyone not native to the US or Canada immediately understands this.
I'm glad to see this topic being increasingly discussed among locals instead of just the usual boogeymen (foreign investors is #1).
Years before governments come around.
Years more before they finish their endless studies and legislation and actually legalize housing.
Once housing starts getting built, it will be a knock-down battle to keep the changes. At the same time, we won't have the capacity built up yet to build it, so years more for new industrial capacity to come online - more companies, more trained personnel, more equipment.
And then even more years for the supply to finally catch up with the demand.
My oldest kid is 14 and he's either he's living in my basement until he's 40 or he's going to have to move to Texas.
Or replace it with 2-6 story mixed-use, with commercial space on the ground floor, and density goes way up and suddenly you can survive without a car.
Here is another example with calorie labels (Do calorie labels actually reduce calorie intake?): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4209007/
Contrasting calorie consumption with the housing market is just disingenuous. One is clearly not a market and the other one clearly is. People like you are just going to have to understand that as population in North America grows cities are going to have to get denser and your lifestyle is no longer a viable one because it comes at the cost of millions of peoples' lives.
Not arguing your point that this rezoning should take place, but just pointing out that housing development is a physical process and that even if Vancouver and British Columbia politicians do get their act together around land use policy, we're in a painful housing shortage hole that is going to take years to build our way out of.
All the more reason to act sooner than later!
But I’m not sure China is a good model for North America, they have a lot of density but an even worse property bubble, many bought apartments aren’t even renovated to be rented out (so actual density is much less than the capacity of these buildings). Such speculation was exported to Vancouver as well.