What's stopping Canada from increasing its housing stock? Surely Canada has plenty of space for its 30M citizens, right? (Yes, I understand that much of the territory is uninhabitable, but even still...).
So the federal government refuses to address the demand side of the equation (very high immigration rate) while the the provinces and municipalities block increases in supply. The natural result? Runaway price increases, and the rest of Canada's economy becoming uncompetitive because employees can't find a house within a 2 hour commute for under $1MM in the GTA.
In my case it killed my agribusiness project because the amount of work, the delays and the risks where too much to bear.
We can no longer build what we used to build in the 60’s and 70’s because of the regulations in spite of the technology being much better.
But yeah, "cool spots". /s
I am originally from a rural area in the Midwest USA. I know a statistically significant number of people from high school and college who purposely moved to bigger cities because of “the culture” or “there’s so much more to do.” They are right. I live in a much bigger city now for those exact reasons, but the demand justifiably has resulted in wildly more expensive houses. I could buy a modest house in my hometown for $85k right now. That same house where I currently live would easily be selling for $300-350k. You make more money here, but not by much.
We need to work on improving our housing density issues, but there’s an undeniable element of “I don’t want to live there” going on.
One problem in Canadian provinces is your taxes remain the same regardless of where you live, but if you need access to healthcare or education, then you have to live near a major city. Particularly if you want quality healthcare.
In fact the cost of living goes up if you're a rural inhabitant in most of Ontario. Electricity is more expensive, heating is expensive, etc.
People want to live where the amenities are, and all other things being equal more population can support more diverse sets of amenities. E.g. you need enough gay people in a town to support a regularly open gay bar, and generally speaking people want to have a choice of bars for going out.
The worst part of this is that the town has the money in the bank to build the water and sewage system. There's upwards of $8 million earmarked for the project. However, each homeowner is going to be responsible for $30k in hookup costs, and the town will have to shell out $500,000 per year to operate the new water system. Since it's a low income area, the >50% property tax increase needed to run the system won't fly, and neither will the hook-up costs. Instead, all the new builds are focused in rural areas where there is no infrastructure needed or in the larger towns / cities where costs are significantly higher but deemed to be an acceptable risk by developers.
With that being said, naturally homes near economic activity should be more expensive. It's more expensive and always will be to live near Google's HQ in Mountain View than it will be to live in Grand Rapids, Michigan or Toledo, Ohio. That's just economic physics. It's ok, normal, natural, acceptable, and economically good. And these homes are only going to get more expensive over time as energy costs increase (EVs won't save us), road maintenance costs increase (already far out of control), and people move to live in more walkable areas. But as these costs increase, people who were expecting that it would be cheap to live in the suburbs are surprised because energy costs and moving far away just won't save them anymore like it did in the past (oh I'll live here and just have a 40 mile commute) - hence it appears that we have a housing shortage when in reality the costs are more reflective of economic reality and were artificially cheap. New housing won't help here because even if we could build more faster we'd still be building it in an economically handicapped way and rely on traveling far distances in cars and on highways, which just will not work when we can't pump cheap oil out of the ground.
You have two options. The first option is dense skyscrapers. But those aren't going to be efficient enough in places unconstrained by geography. They also have maintenance issues and it'll be too expensive to keep them going in the future with much higher energy costs. The second option is medium-density mixed-use development. Think the beautiful streets with brick single family homes next to townhouses and 2 story apartments with a cafe or an office at the bottom, bikes, walking, and street cars or other similar efficient transit. These you can repair yourself and the maintenance is much lower on the long-run and they don't rely on cheap oil to be livable.
But we'll keep building skyscrapers and suburbs (I didn't mention these as an option because they aren't) and the prices will just keep going up.
I don't really disagree with your larger point, but I can't help but explore this nit because it seems interesting. I don't think anyone is arguing that EVs will markedly reduce energy prices; however, there is an argument that renewables will decrease energy prices by virtue of being cheaper per unit power. Of course, it will take at least a decade before renewable energy isn't supply-constrained, so I don't think anyone is expecting this to happen soon, and moreover I've heard counter-arguments that the figures associated with renewable energy aren't including the storage costs which would be required to make renewable energy suitable for base load generation or the costs to decommission/recycle hazardous solar panels and fiberglass wind turbine blades--maybe there will be a ~10 year window during which the supply of renewable energy meets/exceeds demand but before the recycling/decommissioning costs kick in en force? :)
If I had to completely armchair it here, if you looked at total impact to society, the environment, car accidents, you name it something like a gallon of gas in the US should really be about $20-$30/gallon but it feels like it's expensive at $5 b/c we're so used to the low prices. We are probably experiencing these costs through inflation and things like housing prices.
Renewables (should) drop overall energy costs by virtue of capturing natural movements (I'd throw nuclear in renewable as well IMO but I understand why you wouldn't) but people are going to focus on kWh being expensive because they're used to extremely cheap gasoline. I guess in other words renewables on paper will be more expensive "at the pump" but externality cost to society will be lower. I wouldn't be surprised if in the future as more EVs come online that energy costs to charge even at home are approximate to gasoline.
Price per gallon is probably the wrong unit. You probably want $/mile. Car accidents get priced in via insurance. Environment isn't priced in at all in the US, though a carbon tax could change that if there was any political appetite for it. EVs already significantly reduce fuel and maintenance costs even though ICE cars enjoy a "carbon subsidy" (i.e., pollution isn't priced into the cost of gas).
> people are going to focus on kWh being expensive because they're used to extremely cheap gasoline
Electricity is already much less expensive than gasoline. The current US-average gas price is $4.10/gallon and a 30mpg car will cost over $0.13/mile. The current US-average electricity price is $0.14/kwh--with ballpark 85% charge efficiency (not all energy drawn from the grid makes it into the battery) and 300wh/mile, an EV will cost less than $0.05/mile. EV fuel costs are just over a third of those of ICE vehicles.
How I'd phrase that is: "Electricity is currently much less expensive than gasoline "at the pump". What I think is likely to occur is that as we switch over to EVs (I own one btw if that helps here) there will be continued pure electricity demand which is going to cause prices to go up and up. Everything runs on electricity, and soon cars will too. So I think the kWh price is going to go up, and be measured and scrutinized much more (you can make an app to calculate this, not so much with gasoline easily) and it'll be more measurable. But gasoline costs just aren't "counted" in the same way. So eventually it'll cost, idk, $20 to go 300 miles and people will think that it's expensive because you could do it with gas much cheaper in the past, but the problem with that comparison is you wouldn't have accounted for the externalities so you're not really getting true costs. I hope that makes sense where I was going with that.
I agree $/mile is the right unit, I was just thinking about how to isolate true gas cost versus true kWh rate in some way. I personally pay closer to the $.05 kWh rate at home, but I see peak rates in California hitting $.4/kWh and all I see is the writing on the wall for the rest of the country.
If I had to summarize:
We live in an era of extremely cheap energy. It may go on for another 50-100 years, who knows. Maybe it goes on forever. But it won't be from fossil fuels. And if energy becomes much more expensive and we haven't designed cities and transit for optimizing cheap/efficient energy costs we're beyond screwed. Relating it back to housing, I think it makes sense the housing is getting much more expensive and that this phenomenon is more than just "living somewhere cool" and part of the reason that people want to live in these "cool" places is exactly because the implicit energy costs are less. You don't have to drive to a coffee shop. You walk.
I guess one good thing about America is we have all of these navigable waterways so we won't have big food shortages as distribution costs can remain reasonable, at least in the mid west and the east.
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One startup idea I have is a way to truly measure your total energy expenditure. Right now I just get a bill in the mail and figure that it makes sense because it's sooooo cheap to run all of this stuff. What happens once energy becomes 5x more expensive? Well, I want to know how much it really costs me to run dual monitors. Maybe it's an extra $50/year I don't want to spend (just a contrived example).
It’s still not quite so cheap that recycling it makes no economic sense, so if it is possible a way will be figured out sooner or later. (Metal is recyclable because recycling it requires so much less energy than producing it; plastic is super cheap and so is basically never recycled.)
Since agriculture industrialized, rural Canada has no work.
We're friends with the people that bought it from us and on the same street in that same small town in Ontario, houses are going for $1M+ now. This is not entitled millenials wanting to live in Vancouver. This is the place where things are supposed to be affordable. This is exactly the sort of place where Boomers love to tell us to go live if we can't afford the city.
Housing is cheaper if you are willing to relocate to e.g. Swift Current, Saskatchewan where a 2-bedroom home with 900 square feet will cost you $175000, but of course there are very few jobs in a small town of 15000 people that's 3 hours away from the nearest big city and the unemployment rate is among the highest in the province.
Not as bad as other parts of Canada to be sure, but most people living here have manufacturing jobs or are in the military. I don't see how this is sustainable, since there's nothing for rich people to do here.
Between them and the banks that own all of those 30 year mortgages, that's all the political pressure you need.
I don't think this is strictly true. I don't like the model, but big box stores seem pretty sustainable (everyone drives to a distribution center for their goods). An actual last mile distribution system (a la Amazon) also appears to work pretty well. Neither of these are exclusively available to the economic elite.
> The road network alone is a funding quagmire, to say nothing of hiding the infrastructure burdens of servicing sprawl into the eldritch horror that is the municipal bond market.
I don't doubt that infrastructure costs decrease with density, but density doesn't keep urban municipalities from building infrastructure that they can't afford to maintain any more than other places. Quality of governance and density are almost certainly independent variables.
No, the lowest traffic solution is having the smallest number of trucks that are needed to serve local markets that a relatively high volume of people can access via walking, biking or mass transit. All that walking, very healthy.
Further, why should city dwellers subsidize this expansion? Surely these far flung communities won't have sufficient revenue to support the infrastructure needed to make all that work.
City dwellers already subsidize rural living through taxes. On the federal level, more rural states are subsidized by more urban ones, paying more per capita and receiving less per capita. Similar things happen at the state level, but the numbers are a bit harder to track down.
Suburbs are also the source of majority of tax revenue.
Suburbs may be the majority (I have no idea if thats true), but that doesn’t make them self-sustaining. They only exist because cities paid for highways, water, and power infrastructure to make it all possible (and continue to fund their maintenance) - exponentially moreso the further west you go.