Quote:
Originally Posted by Drybrain
Council shouldn't be bowing and scraping to anyone. Waye is right--developers in every city everywhere in the world complain about the approvals process, just as residents in every neighbourhood in every city in the world can turn NIMBY in an instant when a project they don't like springs up on their block.
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Complaining usually isn't related to whether or not somebody's getting a "fair" deal (note that "fair" is inherently subjective anyway), it's related to whether or not they think they can get a
better deal, regardless of how good their current arrangement is. Private developers and NIMBYs will push until they get their way 100% of the time. San Francisco, NIMBY central, was down to a net increase of a couple hundred units in 2011 for a city with almost a million people.
The CRTC and cellular providers are a great example of the same phenomenon -- any attempt to reform the industry is met with opposition, even though it is much more heavily slanted against consumers in Canada than in other countries.
The gold standard when it comes to tracking the success of a development process is to look at how much construction is happening. Halifax has been seeing a lot of construction lately. The per capita value of building permits is actually in the same ballpark now as Vancouver, and this likely translates into a lot more building when you correct for the difference in housing prices.