Quote:
Originally Posted by Drybrain
I'd like to see what the actual demand for rental housing is, whether there's a serious shortage, if prices are prohibitive, what the market actually needs.
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This doesn't seem more than tangentially relevant to the planning question of whether or not the building is appropriate (maybe you could argue a bit more public "sacrifice" is in order for developments with greater social value). To look at this another way, it seems unlikely that city planners and the various commentators who become involved in these proposals will be able to do any better at controlling the housing supply than the housing market itself would. Developers who build housing for which there is no demand don't tend to stay in business very long. And other people generally have a huge conflict of interest; homeowners want the highest housing prices possible, even if newcomers get locked out of the market, and renters want the lowest prices possible, even if prices go so low that they are uneconomical and developers no longer want to build anything new (again this locks new people out of the market but current tenants are happy).
"Targeted" development planning, where specific segments of the market are identified (e.g. low cost) and then promoted doesn't work all that well either since at the end of the day the question is about supply and since the market value of housing is so dynamic. I don't think there are a lot of truly affordable (for all local residents and a reasonable stream of newcomers) housing markets out there with restricted, government-controlled supply coupled with price controls. A lot of those cities are way more expensive than Halifax, and prices started to shoot up soon after market controls (or supposedly compensatory tax breaks, like locked-in assessments) were put in place.