Quote:
Originally Posted by powderjunkie
Is the goal to simply build more housing --> affordability, or is it to make living more affordable overall with more sustainably designed cities?
What's more affordable:
A. $650k SFH in Seton requiring 2 cars (each using a full tank of gas each week)
B. $700k rowhouse in Killarney that facilitates a 1 car household
No value judgments either way, people can live where/how they can to live, but there's more to affordability than the cost of your mortgage/lease. And we know Option B is better from a city services/budget standpoint.
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You're redefining housing affordability by relying on lifestyle assumptions that only work for a narrow slice of the population. If someone works downtown, doesn't have kids in activities across the city, owns one cheap car, and never needs more space, then yeah, sure... the $700k rowhouse might do it for them. For everyone else, it's just a smaller, more expensive house.
Let's not pretend a $700k house of any sort is
affordable anyway, it's simply cheaper than the seven-figure properties down the street. Relative affordability for high earners is not the same thing as affordability for the people who are being priced out altogether.