The federal leader of the NDP used the example of a 24-year-old student featured in a recent CBC Windsor story to call on the federal government for more affordable housing for students.
I feel the entire housing industry needs investment and modernization.
More people being born, input costs will keep going up.
We should reconsider certain requirements such as outlets on outward facing walls.
Copper is expensive, and if we want to better insulate our houses it would be easier if there wasn’t wiring on the outside walls contributing to leakage.
Adopting the widest stud distance when framing, again less heat loss through the studs and less lumber.
We need to stop with the detached homes and instead build up. Taxes drop when more people are sharing the burden. Less asphalt, less high voltage lines, less sewers, more efficient bus routes, and better thermally insulated as there’s more shared walls.
We need to see heat pumps installed by default in new units.
We need rental terms to prevent renovictions, but at the same time help the home owners losing money because if higher mortgage rates. Maybe subsidize mortgage rates in exchange for 5 year rental terms. The thinking here is people raising a family can feel stable renting.
We need enough investment into mass transit that people feel confident in ditching automobiles if they can. Cars can easily account for 33% of a person’s income.
Some of those things are decent ideas, others more questionable. The bit about no exterior plugs is, I think, completely wrong.
With regards to insulation, an interior plug removes just as much insulation as an exterior plug, because they take up about the same amount of space inside the walls. One more won’t make a difference. I think you’re probably thinking about airflow. We’ve known for decades how to deal with that, so that shouldn’t be an issue, either.
More importantly, most of us need some kind of car and in Canada, even internal combustion engines need to be plugged in (block heaters).
We’re also moving fairly quickly to an all-electric life. Realistically, we’re likely to need more exterior outlets, not fewer.
An EV charger is mounted to the outside of the house. An electrical cable specifically for that charger is then ran to the breaker.
As for interior/exterior being equal, they are not.
There’s usually only 2-3 exterior outlets contributing to heat loss, where a house may have 10-20x the amount of outlets on the interior side of outside facing walls.
You forgot about the costs of running copper to every corner of the house. A ton of copper and costs associated with housing can be avoided if we reconsider the building codes.
Keep ones intended for safety, reconsider the ones intended for convenience?
You make some good points. But I wasn’t clear in my point about interior vs exterior outlets. If they are done correctly, each outdoor outlet has very nearly the same impact as each interior outlet installed inside an exterior wall. Given the number of interior outlets installed like that, 2-4 exterior outlets has minimal impact, maybe not even enough to reliably measure.
As for costs, yes, the cost of copper definitely adds up (I just installed power in my shop). Even so, it will be little more than a rounding error on construction costs. And smarter deployment would save copper. Yes, the outlet used for block heaters should be on their own circuit or shared with a traditional AC. My outlets are each on their own circuit. Other than the one intended for block heaters, they could have easily been incorporated into the circuits of the adjoining rooms, both of which are bedrooms.
Jagmeet Singh is a very active and good leader who strives to address all the issues.
