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Vancouver about to eliminate its single-family residential zoning rules
(www.theglobeandmail.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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It's another sad half-measure.
Cramming more matchstick shoeboxes into the backyard isn't going to make enough of a dent: instead of putting 4 more miniature townhouses back there, bulldoze the lot until it's contiguous and put up another tower.
Bungalows are ancient history; a fad from a by-gone picket-fence boomer era. We need the parkland back and we need the housing; and the only way we'll get both is by ensuring all housing is dense a-f so we can reserve for shared green-space.
Let's stop messing around.
Cramming more people here is not the solution. Making it more appealing to live elsewhere in lower density and lower cost regions of our vast country is.
Consider the following: a government incentive to business to subsidize or lower taxation for people who can work remotely.
If I’m a web designer or IT expert have the government subsidize my employment or lower my taxation for living outside of a major metropolis. Work out of the interior somewhere in a town of <50,000 people. But to get the subsidy the employer must commit to maintain the hire for a minimum of 5 years.
Yeah no, we need density.
You know what those small towns you're thinking of are? Urban sprawl. The entire town is urban sprawl. No towers. Single family detached homes everywhere. No good public transit because there's not enough density to support it. Rentals are 80% basements.
Moving more people into those towns without pushing for densification is going to lead too ... You guessed it, even more urban sprawl!
Is that really the path you think we should be going down?
To add to this, that sprawl relies on heavily subsidiaries to exist. Tax wise they collect a fraction of the taxes needed to maintain their infrastructure (depending on where suburban areas collect ½ to ⅒ of the cost needed to sustain themselves). So they are rely on subsidies from high density areas and deficit spending to exist.
As a society, spending so much to subsidize low density developments is why we have a housing crisis. It is an economically unsustainable way to build housing, and that is coming back to bite us now. We cannot afford to keep building like this.
The idea of further subsidizing people to live in already subsidized areas is terrible economic policy. It is paying someone to waste your money.
If people want to choose to live in low density areas, that is fine by me, but they need to actually pay for it themselves. We need to end the subsidies that exist now, not add new ones.