Quote:
Originally Posted by Fuzz
In fairness, he does have a plan:
1 Require municipal governments of “severely unaffordable” big cities to increase homebuilding by 15% annually or have a portion of their federal funding withheld (municipalities with less than 500,000 people will be completely exempt) and bring in penalties for big city governments—those with over a half-million people—for egregious cases of NIMBYism and gatekeeping
2 Grant municipalities $10,000 per home on all growth in their home building, paid out only after the units are built and occupied.
3 Require municipalities seeking federal funds for major transit projects to pre-approve building permits for high-density housing and employment on all available land around stations.
4 Sell sell off 15% of the federal government’s 37,000 buildings with covenants requiring they become affordable housing.
5 Prevent the federal government from creating cash to fund government deficits. That will end the inflationary bubbles that the central bank has helped to create in the housing market.
https://www.pierre4pm.ca/poilievre_w...nd_build_homes |
I wanted to reply to this one somply because the CPC throwing
something out there is more an acknoledgement of the housing file than the Liberals have been dealing with it, but I also hate it because it's a complex issue that needs more than vague, surface level plans.
1 - What defines "severely unaffordable" and what are 'egregious cases of NIMBYism and gatekeeping'? NIMBYism is absolutely a problem in cities, but how would you define it? And what kind of penalties? Withholding gas tax transfers? I suspect this would be a threat without a lot of teeth. This is something that does identify a problem with housing availability, but offers nothing of substance in actually dealing with it. The vagueness of "severely unaffordable big cities" also makes it so potentially narrow in scope to be ultimately useless on any effective level. To deal with the housing supply issue it's a national issue across lots of cities, not just Toronto and Vancouver. This could be a good approach so long as it becomes broader to more cities, and we know what NIMBYism they're talking about and the penalties are actually, you know, penal.
This is also an example of major federal overreach into provincial jusrisdiction, but I only bring that up because the main base of CPC support seems to think provincial jurisdiction is a big deal. Go after the provinces that allow bad management of their portfolios instead of trying to focs on individual cities.
2- Okay, great. Calgary typically has ~10,000 housing starts a year. So a nice $100M+ from the federal government each year. Toronto would get a nice $360M. Does it apply to all units? Get $10K for a secondary suite perhaps? I say go even more direct and give $1M for each building with a parking maximum to encourage more affordable higher-density developments. Doesn't seem to go along with the whole 'cut inflationary spending' bit but money talks I would love to see the transfer of billions from the feds to municipalities. Where's the money for this going to come from?
3 - This does at least acknowledge an issue, but also misses the mark. Also another example of federal overreach into provincial jurisdiction, but again, whatever. How does one pre-approve a building permit? How is it a smart idea to pre-approve something when you don't even know what it is? How is 'pre-approval of a building provided it meets code' functionally different than 'approving a building that meets code'? It tackles the delays in the wrong spots.
But it also comes up short by being tied to "major transit projects" and gives the impression that cities aren't really trying to push TODs in the first place. And it isn't like the 'unaffordable cities' can't build TODs enough. Vancouver is struggling because the development around Cnaada Line stops has pushed the line to capacity. Land in the GTA is selling for hundreds of millions and billions of dollars in anticipation of transit projects. This isn't where the problems lie. In Calgary it's not so much the desire, but the demand. Transit isn't flexible enough to make a transit-based lifestyle appealing for enough people outside of the inner city. Living a car-free life in the Beltline or Sunnyside is pretty easy. But becomes very restrictive if I wanted to move into an Anderson Station or Westbrook TOD because it effectively ties me to less than ideal transit options beyond one LRT line. How about more transit funding in general so that more broad development options become available? Something stable and predictable that cities can use for long term planning. $10,000 per home is fine and dandy, but a per capita federal transfer tied to mass and active transit funding would go a tremendous way to encoruage more general transit use which would help make TODs around major transit hubs much more attractive for major development in the first place. Toronto and Calgary can do some big things with transit if they knew they had a consistent stream of $360M and $100M respectively for transit projects.
4 - An idea that probably sounds good (big number of government buildings, that's a lot of bloat!) but really doesn't hold up with even a curosry look. When a federal building consitutes everything from Parliament to the shack at a national park entrance, the idea of what 15% of the buildings are becomes less hopeful at being a real thing to actually increase housing supply. For $36K you can buy a federal government property in Rankin Inlet for example. There is a building in Red Deer currently for sale that would be better to demolish and have a much bigger mixed-use building built on it than tying the sale to any sort of conversion which is expensive. So much so even old once considered prime commercial space isn't economically feasible for residential coversion, much less an old federal building.
5 - So make less money available, which would include money available for major high-density building projects and home builds? I don't get this one beyond the crypto-bro dog whistling.
Ultimately what the federal government is best in a position to do is provide the money to build a lot of housing in a short amount of time. Doing that without contributing to 'inflationary spending' is the tricky bit, but leaving this in the hands of private developers will only lead to smaller, incremental growth because there's only so much exposure developers can have in the market while also being wary of the effect they can have on the inflationary construciton spending as well.