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Canada’s Big Banks are a ‘culprit’ driving housing prices out of control (breachmedia.ca)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/canada@lemmy.ca
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Canada’s political and media class has spent years chasing convenient villains to blame for the housing crisis, pointing the finger at foreign buyers, immigrants, supply shortages, zoning rules, or an overheated market.

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[–] 5 points 11 months ago (8 children)

Government is a bigger player, they are expanding existing metropolises instead of building new metropolises.

Instead of providing incentives for housing in suburbs around Toronto and Ottawa they could increase taxes on those cities to build a new one halfway between them, connect it via high speed rail. Then use the increased taxes in the other cities to offset taxes in the new one.

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  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago (7 children)

    Nobody wants to live in Kingston, come on.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago* (5 children)

    That’s halfway by road not halfway.

    Also Belleville is closer to half on the 401 than Kingston.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    Even worse.

    To be serious, the new Alto high speed rail line will go through Peterborough. Could be that it helps spur some development there.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    The problem with Peterborough is kicking the people out to start building apartments and have no low density housing in the city.

    That’s why it must be in an undeveloped place.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    I really don't see why we can't infill Toronto and Ottawa. Make single-family home builds illegal, only triplexes or bigger. Kill off parking minimums. Expropriate demolition-by-neglect sites and abandoned commercial property. Same thing with Peterborough if we want that built up. Building a metropolis from scratch usually ends up awful anyway, see Brasilia as a notorious example (in James C Scott's Seeing Like a State.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago

    As someone who lives in Peterborough, and has to look at the burned-out husk of the Baskin Robbins Ice Cream building every day and wonders "Why the hell isn't this housing?", I can agree with all of this.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago

    As seen in China, it only makes sense to build the city and then move people in. Intermittent building causes inefficiency as you have to build around people and people have to work around building.

    Infilling keeps Canada separate and limited. As per the above we have to put the GTA people somewhere while we demo their homes.

    If we can string together cities across Canada with rail that has a 30 minute to 1 hour between stops then it makes Canada function much stronger logistically and muvh more defensible.

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