The housing market is a prime example of poor management and a huge driver of Canadians’ inability to get rewarded for their work, he said.

Yan said in Canada, social mobility is becoming stagnant due to these factors, and that’s making the country a less desirable place to live.

Many experts agree, saying Canada is in a full-on housing affordability crisis. A recent Rental Housing Index report found that 18 per cent of renters in Vancouver and Toronto are spending at least half their income on rent and utilities, while about 40 per cent are spending more than 30 per cent of their income on it.

Canada has now surpassed the U.S. with higher levels of household debt to GDP, with the figures dropping south of the border over the last decade. But as housing unaffordability continues its march in Canada, and as the country already has the worst household debt load in the G7, such debt levels are expected to continue to climb further and income inequality to further increase.

I don't know about y'all, but I'll GLADLY say, "Yes in my backyard!" to high-speed rail

In 57 of 100 of the largest cities in America, the gross salary needed to comfortably (using 30% of salary) afford a studio apartment is higher than the national median wage.

And in many cities the gap to the local median wage is huge too. $140k to afford a studio in NYC!

This video by Oh the Urbanity! dives into the pro- and anti-housing arguments used by YIMBYs and NIMBYs across the political spectrum.

Non-paywalled link: https://archive.is/Mnsj4

The New York City suburb of Scarsdale, located in Westchester County, New York, is one of the country’s wealthiest communities, and its residents are reliably liberal. In 2020, three-quarters of Scarsdale voters cast ballots for Joe Biden over Donald Trump. One can safely presume that few Scarsdale residents are ardent backers of Trump’s wall on the Mexican border. But many of them support a less visible kind of wall, erected by zoning regulations that ban multifamily housing and keep non-wealthy people, many of them people of color, out of their community.

Across the country, a lot of good white liberals, people who purchase copies of White Fragility and decry the U.S. Supreme Court for ending affirmative action, sleep every night in exclusive suburbs that socially engineer economic (and thereby racial) segregation by government edict. The huge inequalities between upscale municipalities and their poorer neighbors didn’t just happen; they are in large measure the product of laws that are hard to square with the inclusive In This House, We Believe signs on lawns in many highly educated, deep-blue suburbs.

This video by CBC dives into "missing middle" housing, e.g., townhouses, plexes, etc.

This video details the archaic parking minimum laws in most US cities that mandate an overabundance of wasteful parking that could be used for housing, businesses, transit, green space, or basically anything else that isn't a sea of asphalt.

https://www.datalabto.ca/a-visual-guide-to-detached-houses-in-5-canadian-cities/ https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/18/upshot/cities-across-america-question-single-family-zoning.html

Non-paywalled link: https://archive.is/C7zW5

Atherton, with a population of 7,000 and a median home sale price of $7.5 million, tried to update its state-mandated housing plan. Until very recently, 100% of Atherton’s residentially zoned land allowed only single-family houses on large lots. When the City Council considered rezoning a handful of properties to allow townhouses, strenuous objections poured in from such notable local residents as basketball star Steph Curry and billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.

A council member argued that the town should “express and explain the specialness of Atherton … to succeed in reducing [the state’s] expectations of us.”

On first glance, these might seem like extreme cases of privilege, oddities from quirky California. But as our new book on the politics of housing shows, the ability of small suburban municipalities to limit multifamily housing is more the rule than the exception.

NIMBYism is a tool for the rich and privileged to maintain their wealth and status, and they will wield every tool in the book to block much-needed housing. When one imagines Silicon Valley, one might naïvely imagine a metropolis of futurism. What one finds instead is a sprawling den of NIMBYism completely at odds with affordability, density, and sustainability.

The maps show where it's literally illegal to build anything denser than a detached single-family house. The maps are a little outdated, as Minneapolis famously abolished detached single-family zoning a couple years back. However, it's still only legal to build up to triplexes on most of the land still there. Nonetheless, this has proven enough to stop rents from rising.

TL;DR: solving the housing crisis is one of the single-most important things to do to reduce inequality and increase prosperity

In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let's try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:

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