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Femtosecond posted:From a BC POV, the whole "Food security" thing should not be a possible argument at all considering that all that agricultural land is protected anyway. I mean yeah folks are constantly trying to erode it, but it's for industrial development and huge amazon warehouses, not fourplexes. When people in BC suburbs a pseudo-rural areas talk about "food security" it comes from either a deluded or disingenuous assertion that people need to be able to grow food on their own property for when society collapses and we can't depend on imported food. We'll all just convert our lawns to organic produce gardens and live off the land. Can't do that in a condo!!! Can't even do that in a townhouse, the yard isn't big enough. I was at a public hearing for a modest apartment building in the urban core and had some loving nimby hippies saying the shadows cast by the building onto neighbouring land will hurt our local food supply because it makes their property less agriculturally productive.
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Dec 19, 2023 23:43
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Cold on a Cob posted:
How hard could subsistence farming really be??? I imagine it would be fun and only take up a little bit of my free time.
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Dec 20, 2023 00:12
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A lot of people really complain about how many 1br or even bachelor units we're building. Yeah, we need more family sized units for sure, but all those small units are absolutely getting snapped up and serving a market as thirsty for housing as any other. Culture has changed, household formation has changed, people are staying single way longer and not everyone is rushing into marriage. Its another small ingredient in the housing shortage where comparing housing units vs raw population doesn't give the full picture. Households are getting smaller and have for a long time, which means a need for more per-capita units. A 2-person household can easily live in a 1br, but a 1 person household needs close to the same amount of space. Larger households tend to be more housing efficient as you've got like mom dad and 2 kids sharing a single kitchen and so on. So with falling household sizes, there's a need for even more housing than the raw population numbers would tell you.
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Dec 22, 2023 22:59
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Airbnb is getting cracked down so hard in BC. It's opening up a few units, it's creating a class of insanely funny airbnb owner non-stop trying to fight the new laws and write sob story letters to the editor daily. Its also possibly brought down rents for smaller units. It's good.
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Dec 23, 2023 04:23
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Victoria down on average but I'm up 70k. Taxes will be fun
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Jan 2, 2024 03:41
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single-condo landlords are the worst landlords in the universe. The most entitled idiots who have no clue how anything works but feel 100% entitled to not just generate tons of equity but make a monthly profit via rent. My friend rented from a guy just like this. Every interaction with him had him just whining and whining about how hard done by he is. How her rent only just barely covered the mortgage but didn't cover all the strata fees which he had to "pay each month out of pocket" and remember last year when the sink broke?? Yeah, HE had to pay for them out of pocket!! Can you believe it, the tenant doesn't have to pay for that?? How's a landlord expected to make any money in this society??? His condo doubled in value over 5 years of course. But those were "paper gains" he couldn't spend until he cashed out so don't bring them up. He of course did cash out, she was immediately booted out by the new landlord who said they were going to live there but the unit was put back on the market at about 75% higher rent like a month later. These people write letters to the editor about how landlords have no rights and no ability to turn a profit so society should thank them for providing rentals at a loss, have little ametuer landlord facebook groups where they complain endlessly about tenants and exchange hustle culture tips, and provide the least stable rentals because they usually always sell after a 4-5 year cycle.
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Jan 9, 2024 19:25
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A huge reason why you get so many big corporate "criminal developers" that rely on outright corruption to get anything built is that we've designed an insane system of zoning and regulations that essentially forces that sort of behavior and filters out any other developers not big and corrupt enough to navigate the system. Like wondering why so many criminals were involved in alcohol during prohibition. it's why the huge corporate developers are pretty silent or even slightly against a lot of this "yimby" movement poo poo. They don't want the competition. They thrive in this regulatory environment.
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Jan 17, 2024 19:33
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In Victoria the vast majority of our rental stock wasn't build by a handful of huge developers, it was built by individuals or small groups of friends. 3 dentists could get together, buy a couple old houses, and put up a cheap simple 4 story apartment building with fairly off the shelf plans. The approval process was quick and easy, the plans and construction was practically standardized mass housing, and the tax structure made it attractive. It was so attractive that so many "small groups of dentists" build so much housing that by the late 70's landlords and single family home owners were screaming at the city to downzone because we had too much cheap rental housing and it was hard to rent it all out. If your city doesn't make it easy for a few local dentists to pool their money together, easily navigate the approvals system, and successfully put up an apartment building, you got a broken housing system.
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Jan 17, 2024 20:10
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Femtosecond posted:This had been sitting in a browser tab for a few weeks. Might as well post due to slow news doldrums. Yeah study after study keeps showing this, it also seems so intuitively obvious as well. And for many years if you read the internal reports from any landlord or housing speculation group they consistently say the biggest threats to their profits is supply, and restrictive zoning and powerful nimbies make them rich. But it won't ever stop the left-nimby arguments against housing because they exist in a fact-free reality based on vibes and the insane opinions of landscape architects. "actually, thinking more supply helps is trickle down!!!!" absolute loving idiots responsible for so much our our mass homelessness. I respect the honest nimby who will outright state they want to keep their wealthy SFH neighbourhood exclusive and unchanging, I sort of respect the game when these same people try to dress up their classist selfish nimbyism with progressive buzzwords, but the actual honest to god left-nimbies who sincerely believe they're fighting for justice and speaking truth to power when they manage to help kill market and affordable housing? Those guys can seriously go gently caress themselves and should be reminded until the end of time the important part they played as useful idiots to enrich landlords and speculators while helping create the absolute misery that is our housing crisis.
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Jan 29, 2024 20:49
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I wish more people understood our economy is essentially a bidding system. Those with the most money get their needs met first and will always outbid those with less. When you artificially restrict the supply of anything, the supply that does exist will cater to those top bidders first. If we only allowed 10,000 cars a year to be sold in Canada, its not going to be a mix of car types. And it's going to see even lovely rusty garbage old used cars skyrocket in value. If you suddenly allow way more cars you'll start to get cheaper models produced once the "luxury" market is soaked, plus used cars will start to come down in price. This is all super well studied stuff but there's been this whole cult-like movement that would create insane mental gymnastics and pseudo-economics as to why it doesn't apply for housing.
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Feb 2, 2024 01:50
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I'm trying to make 6 story 3.0 FSR apartments legal by right as a minimum in the entire city of Victoria because missing middle is useless. It sounds insane but politically it's actually almost possible right now.
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Feb 5, 2024 17:04
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qhat posted:It’s funny that this comes up because recently I finally got my friend to put the 250k life savings which he was constantly moving was just sitting there uninvested in his chequing account into an an actual equity fund and some GICs. I was mildly proud because he’s not really literate with this stuff. Spoke too soon though because 2 weeks later though he’s pulled the entire liquid portion out to buy a brand new Ford Bronco, guy doesn’t even go off-roading. My friend has a neighbour across the street from him with 2 near identical giant huge luxury 5-seat trucks. One was about 80k the other 70k. He makes decent money. But he rents his house for like $3k a month, and has a huge chip on their shoulder about it. He knows his mortgage would actually be smaller than 3k a month but "could never save up a downpayment due to the cost of living (thanks biden!). He bought a huge power boat and his front yard is just the boat and 2 trucks. He has 280k of toys sitting on his front lawn yet cries and whines about how he's forced to rent due to his financial situation. Also this is florida so the houses are like 300-400k. Oh he also bought the 2nd truck and boat cash because of an inheritance of about 150k. He's still paying the loan on the first truck and still crying about how he'll be stuck renting all his life because he just can't get ahead financially. I could kinda understand having a big luxury ego truck and then like a little sports car or something. But two near identical trucks just with different trim/luxury packages? Why? There's no wife who needs a 2nd vehicle. There's no different-use cases of "I need the truck for hauling my boat and my sports car for zipping around town".
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Feb 5, 2024 17:56
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Femtosecond posted:By right everywhere might be a stretch, but it is feeling like this is and more possible in more and more places. I think people have finally sort come around to like a feeling of "sure, fine, let's do something, anything." Right now the writing on the wall that planning might even recommend 4-6 story everywhere but only 1.5 FSR which is just a uselessly low density, like "nothing will pencil" density. There's factions within planning and like the pro-housing groups are having good recommendations but then the nimby faction comes in to try to add little poison pills like insanely low FSR limits or impossible affordability requirements or parking requirements and so on. The political will is actually there on council for something this bold! When I met with half of council to talk about this I actually found out that our ultra-yimby group's big policy doc we were going to publish as our official housing recommendations were actually less bold than what the yimby faction on council wants to push for, this is why we're bumping our own group's aim. Even if we shoot for 6 story 3 fsr and only get 4 story 2.5, that's better than shooting for 4/2.5 and ending up with a totally useless reform that won't actually pencil any housing. Another thing I'm trying to bully Ravi into doing provincially is close some loopholes on leases. My friend rented a cheap 2br apartment for like 10 years with his girlfriend at the time. They broke up and he moved out while my friend stayed behind because this 2br was still way cheaper than being a fresh tenant at any victoria 1br. landlord though could technically evict my friend because apparently if 1 person on the lease leaves, it voids the lease and it's up to the landlord to renegotiate and thus bump up the rent to current market rates (would double his rent). So now, because they're still on good terms, his ex will come by now and again to make a show to the landlord and pretend they're both still living there. This seems like an absolutely insane loophole. If someone on the lease leaves and the remaining person can still pay, landlord should not have any special avenues to evict or change rent. Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 18:48 on Feb 5, 2024 |
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Feb 5, 2024 18:32
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We're currently quibbling over our housing targets as to which growth rate we should consider asking cities to upzone enough capacity to handle. Various sources say anywhere between 1 and 2%. So we should simply plan for 2% so we're fully covered right? Like if not enough people move here, that's fine developers will just build less housing. Nope. We need to target exactly 1.5% as a compromise. Compromise with what? Numbers. Big number bad, scary. Too much housing. Housing bad.
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Feb 6, 2024 08:15
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It would be nice if the government was able to supply low-interest money for housing construction.
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Feb 26, 2024 04:59
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I was reading something years ago about the whole "renters treated like 2nd class citizens or worse" in condo buildings. So many owners interviewed would of course go on about how renters don't seem to care about the building, can be louder and don't seem to value harmony with neighbours, don't maintain their units well enough and so on. Then they interviewed the renters and pretty much all of them initially made an effort to be good neighbours but were treated like such unwanted scum by the owners that they just stopped giving a gently caress. When you know you're hated either way simply for renting, why bother trying?
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Mar 7, 2024 17:53
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Scorchy posted:I'm 2 blocks from Sen̓áḵw, I welcome the density but uh the surrounding infrastructure and routed traffic and lack of parking are going to be an absolute shitshow yikes The city isn't proactive enough to make transit better in the area, hopefully they'll be forced into it after the fact. But chasing more parking is a dead end, the city doesn't really have the capacity for more cars. More and more projects should be providing low or nearly no parking.
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Mar 18, 2024 22:58
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I mean that's certainly an opinion, but no-parking or low-parking developments exist all over the world just fine. People adapt, norms change.
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Mar 23, 2024 02:57
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Some local developers have been listing around 60-100k per spot now. Costs are way way up, and it depends on the site too. It also depends on the depth. So like the nearly at-grade "underground" parking you're putting into your sloped-lot might end up being 50k a spot, but the level below might be 75k, and the level below that 90k and so on. It also really depends on how much blasting you have to do and a million other factors. Also underground parking is an upkeep nightmare, very expensive. Leaks, cracks, you name it. It's a huge problem for stratas realizing just how expensive it really is when they suddenly need to drop 2 million to fix some cracking foundation wall and water issue on level P3. There's a massive market for low or no parking buildings. Don't force people to pay like an extra 80k on their unit if they don't need it. In places where parking minimums are eliminated, parking still gets built because builders know their customers and what they're willing to pay for. It's actually funny this thread reminds me of a lot of the boomers who come out to some public hearings for projects with low parking. You'll have a line of like 50 people waiting to speak to council, person after person saying how they don't have a car and would love to live here, how they could actually afford to buy a unit in this building due to not being forced to pay for the parking they don't need, how their family is already entirely bike based and love the project's bike room, how they already only drive a few times a month and use a car-share subscription and having 3 car share parking spots in the building will be great. Folks with disabilities excited about saving some money since they medically can't drive. Dozens of people like that getting up and speaking in support, then some random rear end boomer who's never exited outside of their tiny little suburban cultural bubble gets up to the podium and speaks with absolute authority that "There's absolutely no one that would benefit from a building with low parking, everyone needs a car, everyone drives, and this is just going to clog up the public street parking that I emotionally feel I own" Oh also when you don't force underground parking, quite often the building doesn't need to dig down at all. There's like a big 20ish story apartment tower going up in Victoria right now with no parking. There's no basement at all, the ground/lobby floor is the lowest. The whole thing is on piles. If you don't absolutely need a basement it's a huge huge savings to avoid it. Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 16:55 on Mar 25, 2024 |
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Mar 25, 2024 16:52
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yeah japan has the right idea: -Can't own a car without proof of parking* -little to no free street parking -very simple national zoning system that allows people to easily build and adapt. You just bought a little 50x50' lot with an old house on it, you don't own a car and don't want one. You tear down the old house, which had a bit of a paved front yard area with a carport, and replace it with a house that mostly fills the lot because you also personally don't value having a back yard or anything. You do this easily by-right without needing 5 years of re-zoning hearings. Years later you decide to start a neighborhood small business so you just add a floor to your existing house or replace the whole thing and build a 3 story building with a shop on the bottom. Again, no re-zoning needed because this sort of retail/business space is simply allowed just about anywhere. Neighbours don't scream about character or shadows because everyone is used to neighborhoods changing and adapting and besides its not like there's a process that gives their nimby opinions any sort of legal power to block or delay your construction. You don't provide any parking for customers because that's up to you too. The neighbors don't complain about you creating traffic or stealing their street parking because street parking doesn't exist on your narrow 20' residential street. Most everyone just walks to your shop, because there's enough density in a walking or transit distance to give you the customer base for your business to succeed. You have cheap housing, cheap retail space, and your weird marginal business can succeed and support you because your costs are so low. *the proof of parking is also based on the specific vehicle. So if you buy a tiny little car you only need to waste a tiny bit of land on your lot for parking, which is another huge incentive to not buy a stupidly bloated over-sized vehicle. Also when you have to give up a chunk of your own limited land or pay market prices for parking, just not owning a car at all starts to make way more sense to most people. People can have personal vehicles, just price everything fairly. Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 22:46 on Mar 26, 2024 |
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Mar 26, 2024 22:35
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Here's the thing, tons of investment in housing is good. The problem is how that money is being spent. For most of human history when housing is in shortage, the massive investments in housing are to build more housing. But in our insane nimby-captured cities, the money goes mainly towards just bidding up the existing housing stock. People then see this and think "gosh, if only we could get all this drat investor money out of the housing market there wouldn't be a problem!" but the problem isn't the money, it's the lack of new housing.
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Mar 29, 2024 20:01
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Guys there's only 1,000 cans of corn but 1,200 people are hungry for corn! Bidding wars are making canned corn extremely expensive!! How can we fix this? Ideas: -Government program to give all bidders an extra $100 each to help afford these high corn prices. -30 year corn mortgages. -Government program to, after 8 years of vicious debate with locals who think we actually have too much corn, create 1 subsidized low-income corn can. -Create a new tax that doesn't apply to luxury corn, only to the very cheapest style of canned corn that results in the cheapest market corn becoming more expensive, all to subsidize the creation of a couple slightly cheaper cans of corn. -Other massive fees and sin-taxes again the production of new corn. Absolutely unacceptable solutions: -Allow the market to simply produce as many cans of corn as there is demand and plugging the small lowest end with subsidized corn cans.
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Apr 12, 2024 22:30
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Also don't loving tell me more corn will bring down the price of corn. In my city we're allowed 500 cans a month for a demand of 600 buyers and corn is $89 a can. In Vancouver they have the HIGHEST DENSITY OF CANNED CORN IN CANADA and they allow 900 cans a month (for a demand of 1400) and corn is $150 a can!! If more corn brought down prices, why is vancouver so expensive? Checkmate.
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Apr 12, 2024 22:39
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I know it would never happen but I'd love to see tenants rights strengthened in respect to owners changing. Once a unit is rented it should be treated as essentially being owned by that tenant so long as they are paying rent. It should not matter who they are paying rent to. Legally there should be absolutely no change in their tenancy and general security within their unit if the owners change, even if it's a bank foreclosing or the government seizing the building. That's all just poo poo going on in the background and the law should ensure smooth continuous secure occupancy of one's home. -New owner buys a house with a suite in the basement but doesn't want to have a tenant? Sorry, you shouldn't have bought a house with a renter in it, tough poo poo. Either bribe them to leave, wait it out, or buy a different house. -Landlord's daughter is coming back to town after university so they want her to live in their suite instead of their tenant? That's totally fine, you can sell your house and buy a new one with an empty suite in it for her. No you don't get to kick a human from their home because of bloodlines. -Landlords turns out to be a drug lord who has also been cheating on their taxes and the whole building is being taken as proceeds of crime? No change for the tenants, just let them know who to send rent to. -Landlord wants tenants out because they want to tear down their little 4-plex and build something bigger? More density is great, more housing is great! Hope you're able to negotiate terms for them to leave, otherwise you're out of luck because there's no mechanism to force them out. The only actual ways to remove a tenant: -They haven't paid rent in X months. -The tenant is abusive/violent or extremely disruptive and a hazard to other people in the building.
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Apr 15, 2024 17:48
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Muscle Tracer posted:Ahhh "innovation." I wonder if those guys realize that there are, in fact, a lot of challenges that don't need any "innovation" to solve. Like, the reason we don't have houses and jobs is not that we haven't innovated enough, it's that we used to build houses and have labor unions. But what if quantum computing, blockchain, and 3d printing could solve our housing crisis?!?
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Apr 17, 2024 19:15
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The reason units are too small is because cities have decided floor space is a bad thing that has to be restricted, taxed, controlled, and minimized. Our entire zoning and approvals ideology is based on the idea that the biggest threat to a neighbourhood is floor space, so strict rules have to be in place to control and absolutely minimize the amount that is allowed to be created. Bedrooms are the cheapest room to create, kitchens and bathrooms the most expensive. Two 500sqft 1br units costs way more to build than one 1000sqft 3br unit. But because it costs more, it also means it can be sold for more. So if the city says your new building can only have 10,000sqft of space, you're throwing money away by building fewer bigger units rather than as many tiny units as you can fit. They sell for more per sqft. And again it comes back to the floor space restrictions, becaue cities also like to make sure to limit how much floor space people can build to make sure builders aren't making too much profit, which is bad. It's always a negotiation where the city says you can only build 5,000 sqft, the builder says they want 10,000 sqft for their project. The city then spends a year looking into it at great expenses and planning comes back with a report saying that given current market conditions and construction costs, technically a developer might be able to barely eke out a profit with a 8,000 sqft project, so that will be the maximum they allow. Then they spend another year doing more red tape, during which time construction costs and interest rates go up and now the project doesn't pencil anymore and doesn't get built. But, the community was saved from the horrors of floor space. If we want bigger units we need to stop treating floor space and housing like pollution to be minimized. A great strategy would be to let extra bedrooms ignore floor space restrictions. So a project that would cap out at 200 1br units can suddenly build 200 2br units, because that extra 120sqft per unit is "free" when it comes to the maximum floor space. The other reason we get so many tiny 1br units is something a lot of boomers and trad folks refuse to accept: society has changed. We have more 1 person households than any time in history. There is a massive demand for these sized units because there's a massive amount of 1 or 2 person households where a single bedroom is fine for them. And when the 1br unit is 500k and the 2br unit is 700k, it doesn't really matter what people *want* its what people can afford. So again there's a massive demand for tiny cramped lovely units because it's all a ton of people can afford. None of it is down to "greedy developers" unless thinking developers should build at a loss makes them greedy. A great project where everything goes perfectly is lucky to earn back a 15-20% markup. Banks won't even finance them if their project doesn't at least pencil at 20%. Jamming a ton of tiny units into the cheapest possibly built building is the only way to scape that possible 15-20% margin. If we want market housing to get cheaper and units bigger, that's nothing we can just mandate because the projects won't pencil.
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Apr 25, 2024 18:20
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RBC posted:That makes no sense, developers will always build to maximize profit. In your fictional scenario if they just let them build the maximum building size possible they'll still build them in the most profitable way possible, which according to you is 1 bedroom units. Because I live in reality where numbers and actual policy results are more important than vibes. Because I want people to be housed more than I want to stick it to developers.
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Apr 25, 2024 20:27
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