Quote:
Originally Posted by bizaro86
I mean, the cost of a housing unit is comprised of land and building. Adding a bunch of new land would definitely lower the cost of land. It wouldn't directly change the cost of building on the land.
If we started building way more maybe the demand for construction labour would push up wages until the savings on land was eaten up by excess wages, but that would take a lot of additional construction. So if we had more jobs with higher wages, higher housing supply, while keeping the cost of that new supply the same I think we'd be better off.
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To some extent, but it can take several years to get from purchasing land to selling a finished unit. I doubt developers will be clamouring to pay today's prices for land that might be worth less several years from now. It's basically just an indisputable historical fact that when property prices are declining (or even stagnant), there's less investment activity in building new units.
Maybe over a long enough period of time those kinds of things might have a positive effect. But based on the CMHC data, the scale of construction required to achieve significant effect in the near-to-mid-term isn't viable. There's much lower hanging fruit IMO.