New report says urban land policies and rules making homes unaffordable.

[Towered]

http://ca.news.finance.yahoo.com/s/...rt-says-urban-land-policies-rules-making.html

Mon Jan 25, 3:44 PM
The Canadian Press



By The Canadian Press

A report says urban land use policies are making homes almost unaffordable in markets around the world including Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal.

The Demographia International report looked at 272 metropolitan markets in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Australia, New Zealand and Ireland.

The report says Vancouver is the most unaffordable market in the world when median housing sale values are compared to median household incomes.

It says Toronto is in the severely unaffordable category and Montreal is classified as being seriously unaffordable because of contraints on land use.

Wendell Cox, one of the authors, blames urban consolidation policies that restrict the development of suburban residential neighbourhoods for high housing prices.

Cox says governments should allow more housing to be built on the fringes of urban areas to help keep costs down.

 

[ponyboy]

why did this story get so much press? I saw it in several media outlets, but most reputable housing scholars would disagree with their core claim.

these guys are full of it. they have causal relations all wrong. Desirable places to live, because they wish to stay that way, implement smart growth policies that tend to add denser housing in built-up areas, but this housing is not necessarily more expensive. Prices are high in part because of the desirability of places (for economic opportunties, etc), but also because the real estate market is distorted right now by very low (short-term) borrowing costs and the incessant cheerleading of several industries (and complicit media) that make money off of real estate transactions. The ownership society myth, and the insatiable urge to own among most citizens, is added to create the recipe for boom-bust housing bubbles.

 

[scarberiankhatru]

We don't need to subdivide the rest of Caledon and fill it up with Rambling Brook Trails and Mewling Minnow Crescents and 11 new 400-series highways. Costs can be kept down by not pushing >3000 square foot houses (of which >1500 square feet is a circular staircase + grand foyer combo that people don't even throw parties in because everyone's down in the finished basement rec room next to the second kitchen) as the standard desired model, or by developers not trying to redefine luxury with every fixture and finish, or by building townhouses and apartments, or by offering government-sponsored marriage counselling to keep household sizes plump and healthy, or by building useful transit so that not every house needs 2 or more car garages (which require wider lots, which requires more streets, which eats land, etc.), etc. Yes, some of this is impossible because it requires developers to take a proactive anti-sprawl stance, but still, why place all the blame and all the pressure to change things on governments when they're clearly not the only parties responsible for current conditions?

 

[SunriseChampion]

This Cox character is right, by Jove! Farm land is for sissies that need food to survive.