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Originally Posted by chowhou
Minor disagreement there; If New York and Hong Kong can continue to build taller and taller buildings in Manhattan and Central, then I think every Canadian city has a long long way to go before there's any restriction on the amount of space.
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New York and Hong Kong are actually great examples of how construction
isn't something that's easily scalable in a practical way. As space is taken up, land values rise, and the only way for a development to justify the cost of the land is to build very tall and/or very high-end. Unfortunately, supertalls (especially ones in crowded urban settings) require complex engineering & logistics, and are just about the most costly form of construction on a PSF basis - and so the units are priced accordingly. As density increases, therefore so too must prices. This isn't necessarily a bad thing when it happens in limited high-demand geographies, but it certainly shouldn't be the
goal of our housing policy.
New York also has a lot more heritage protections and other regulations, and builds proportionately less than we do. I'm not sure where this idea of Canadian cities not building anything or being anti-development came from, when in reality Canada is probably the most development-friendly country in the western world. We have some bad zoning rules and the approvals process can take too long in many cities, but the construction industry is still firing on all cylinders and delivering hundreds of thousands of new units every year (again, proportionately much more than the US and likely most other western countries).
Quote:
Originally Posted by chowhou
Also, AirBnBs, just like investor-owned rentals, are not an inefficient allocation of resources. They're productive in the economy in their own way since if they're lucrative for those investing in them then they're clearly economically viable, so I wouldn't just casually throw them away as an inefficient allocation of resources. Is building a hotel instead of a condo building inefficient? I think it's probably better for the economy if housing units had more usage flexibility so instead of only allowing a building to be a hotel or a condo building let it potentially be both!
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Good lord, where do I even begin with this one. Real estate is the
worst allocation of capital. Speculation is an inherently predatory practice (as it necessitates reducing the buying power of others by bidding up the cost of their basic necessity of shelter to profit), but is also the least efficient way to optimize economic efficiency & innovation, as it grows debt, diverts spending away from other sectors, and investment dollars away from more innovative businesses. It enriches a few, at the expense of everyone else. There's a reason why Canada's is the worst-performing economy in the OECD and it's because real estate is such a big part of our economy:
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/busi...mong-advanced/