Quote:
Originally Posted by Changing City
I wouldn't necessarily characterize it as silly. The Minister, and the Housing Accelerator Fund, are transient. The defecit in infrastructure, and the need for additional sewer and water treatment and other Metro expenditure will still exist into the tenure of many more governments. In part, the need to upgrade the existing infrastructure is related to the billions of funds already committed by this federal government in loan guarantees to developers providing new rental housing. Housing starts are up in Greater Vancouver, and a year's delay in implementing the higher DCCs (which is what the minister requested) wouldn't help get the necessary infrastructure program built. Maybe if he had offered to contribute the money through federal funding, the Metro Board would have voted differently, but that wasn't the case.
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There are other ways to fund infrastructure. As noted above, this increase to development fees was specifically to avoid raising property taxes - in what is already one of the lowest property tax regions in North America; thereby, once again, preferencing existing (mostly wealthier) homeowners by having future (mostly poorer) buyers & renters subsidize their artificially low property tax rates.
In semi-related news, the BC government is also proposing to make all new housing even
more expensive by requiring 100% of new units to be built to accessible standards:
https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/bc-b...using-proposal
Quote:
Originally Posted by dleung
Tiny homes are retarded. Anywhere homeless people need to live to be near social services and community amenities, the land will be far more valuable than the little structures that sit on it. If it's not 6-storey wood-frame construction, it's not optimal-value housing
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Homeless people of 2023 are not the homeless people of yesteryear. Many are just working, lower income people who can no longer afford market rate rents anymore - they aren't necessarily all in need of social services.
But also, the benefit of these sorts of tiny home communities is the low start-up cost, the speed at which they can be delivered, and the low overhead in running them. It allows smaller charities & non-profits to provide housing without having to raise capital and go through the whole development process - and to deliver it immediately.
It's no substitute for larger, government-funded developments (eg. those optimized, 6-storey wood-framed apartments), but there's room for both - clearly, we aren't getting enough of either at the moment.