Elanor Boekholt-O’Sullivan plans to simplify the housebuilding process to tackle shortage of 400,000 homes

It’s interesting to perspectives from elsewhere. The Netherlands is also facing a housing crisis, and they’re also talking about significant increases in construction. Part of that will be to limit local control.

Interestingly, they’re also talking about changing the type of construction: fewer rooms.

There isn’t quite enough context to explain why that would help, but it’s something I haven’t really heard politicians saying here in Canada.

What changes would you make to speed up housing growth here?

  • Victor Villas
    1·
    19 hours ago

    I think this is known everywhere, except that

    1. selling land brings politicians short term gains;
    2. high density is unpopular with large swaths of constituents;

    So 3 and 4 is what we’re getting in practice, but for 1 and 2 we need a proper government running by decent people, which has been hard to come by. We can’t even do the bare minimum of 1 and 2 to build supportive housing for the homeless…