affordability
(Joint with Nathan Lauster and cross-posted at HomeFreeSociology)
Say you want to construct some multi-family housing in Vancouver. How long will it take? The answer is simple: it depends. There are many factors upon which it depends. Here we want to highlight one in particular: when you started.
As it turns out, it used to take a lot less time to build multi-family housing. There is reason to believe we could reduce that time again, but getting there involves gathering a better understanding of our current development regime, and placing it in historical perspective.
(Joint with Nathan Lauster and cross-posted at HomeFreeSociology)
In this post, we take a moment to appreciate the first housing policy announcements from BC’s new Premier, offered up just days into his term. David Eby comes to the post fresh from his joint roles as Attorney General and Minister Responsible for Housing. In these roles, he was central to fashioning the teeth behind BC’s housing policy. Initially these teeth were directed at the private sector, with a special focus on rooting out the “toxic demand” thought to be leaving too many dwellings empty.
(Joint with Nathan Lauster and cross-posted at HomeFreeSociology)
In May we estimated suppressed household formation across Canada using what we called the Montréal Method, finding strong evidence for suppression across many parts of Canada. As a reminder, we designed the Montréal Method to estimate housing shortfalls related to constraints upon current residents who might wish to form independent households but are forced to share by local housing markets. Now that we’ve got 2021 Census data out, it’s time to update our estimates.
(Joint with Nathan Lauster and cross-posted at HomeFreeSociology)
It can be really useful to count things, but sometimes numbers end up causing confusion and misunderstanding rather than helping. Often this has to do with how the number is presented and attached to claims. Other times it has to do with problematic procedures used to obtain the number. Here we want to explore these problems more in detail concerning a claim that “Canada lost 322,000 affordable homes” between 2011 and 2016.
(Joint with Nathan Lauster and cross-posted at HomeFreeSociology)
Every now and then the topic of the GDP share of the “Real Estate Industry” comes up, often linked to the suggestion that an economy has become too dependent upon real estate. But this usually involves a fundamental misreading of the data. As people who pay attention know, the NAICS sector [53] “Real Estate Industry” of the expenditure based GDP produced by StatCan is mostly just rent and imputed rent.
