Canada

No, it's messaging. They've been implementing housing policy steadily since they were elected, much of the policy was passed well before the pandemic, and due to the long development lag on new housing starts, and the catastrophic jolts from covid19, we are only starting to see the effect. This is not a problem that will be fixed fast or with one piece of legislation.

In 2018/2019 we got the national cohousing investment fund, the rental construction financing initiative, the rapid housing initiative, the first time home buyer incentive, the canada housing benefit agreement.

You agree with these, you don't agree, you didn't find them effective, you would have picked something else, fine, that's fine, people always disagree, but "ignored" housing is honestly just a meme people repeat that weirdo policy wonks like me roll their eyes at.

When they had a “housing crisis”, the USSR built a shitload of prefab concrete housing, the famous “commieblock” buildings. They were imposing, ugly, and made out of load bearing asbestos, but they succeeded in their goal of transforming an impoverished rural serf society into an urbanized industrial powerhouse. While you can and should criticize the Soviet Union, their housing project of the early/mid 20th century was the singular most successful social project in history.

I’m not saying we need “commieblocks”, but we definitely need high quality mass produced social housing in this country. We will simply never be able to solve the problem by building endless suburbs of timber and rockwoll shacks. It won’t “destroy the real estate market” because loads of people will still want their own homes eventually, but for everybody else it will be a great improvement over what we have now.

The article says this

The modern-day version of the catalogue will instead focus on low-rise builds, such as small multiplexes, student housing and seniors' residences, then explore a potential catalogue for higher-density construction.

So it sounds like that's sorta the plan

I'm not so eager to trust developers. Many of them only care about profits and less about build quality or functionality of a residence. I'm certain many of them would start using lead and asbestos again if it were legal and they could save a few bucks.

They are not reading, just whinging online because it is easier than actually trying.

Thankfully there are modern building codes?

Had you actually read the article you would have seen that they are not simply dusting off the old plan book but creating a whole new one. With modern applicable designs and up to modern codes.

Oh nice, I read another article that didn’t mention have as much detail than CBC’s. but that’s still low rise builds, and “potentially” explore higher density…that’s a big if

The article specifically says will “explore” higher density in the future, which is a vague promise at best. Other local articles I’ve read also paint a picture of mostly SFH designs or at best some other kind of low density design. They’ve had 7 years to address this issue, “explore” is hardly promising.

I thought we moved past this unconstructive, passive aggressive behaviour on Lemmy when we left Reddit? Other posters here have been a lot more constructive, like Cygnus and LostWon, for example.