Carney's Promise

Mark Carney has raised people's expectations of what is possible when it comes to nation-building. One of his preeminent promises is the rapid building of much-needed housing. Possibilities abound, and the following brief video from Portland, Oregon, suggests densification and building duplexes, triplexes and quadplexes on land formerly zoned for single family dwellings can form part of the answer.

While there is no suggestion of nimbyism in the report, it can be a formidable challenge to rapidly increasing housing stock. Ontario premier Doug Ford refuses to force municipalities to allow fourplexes. Not using provincial power to change the housing dynamics has wide ranging implications, not the least of which is local opposition to anything that changes the landscape of residential neighbourhoods, opposition that feckless municipal politicians often succumb to.

Edward Keenan writes:

On Thursday, as the press and some assembled politicians looked on, construction cranes lifted a rectangular box into the Willowdale air and manoeuvred it into place on the ground at a lot on Cummer Avenue. It was among the first pieces of what will become, by early next year, a rent-geared-to-income housing development for formerly homeless senior citizens. Construction is underway.

The key here is modular construction, with the parts being made in a factory and then assembled Lego-like at the building site.

 It’s a method that allows for faster and cheaper mass production of homes — a success story in countries such as Sweden and Japan — and combined with using government-owned land and having the government oversee the project, it promises a way through part of the logjam that constricts our housing supply.

 

The problem, however, is that the above is a project much delayed by local opposition, delayed so long that the original costs rose dramatically.

It wasn’t any problem with the construction method that caused the problems. It was politics. Local luxury home developers and NIMBY neighbours banded together to oppose the project. Cynically spineless local and provincial politicians joined them. Together they used the SNAFU of regulatory and appeals processes to keep pushing construction further and further down the line. 

And while they did that, the already-completed pieces of that project sat rotting, first on a holding lot and then in a warehouse, causing the cost to go from $14.6 million to $36.3 million.

One can see that the challenges Carney faces are formidable ones. And while I understand how hard it must be for some to see the nature and character of their neighbourhoods altered, there seems to be no alternative if we are truly intent on addressing one of our most pressing national crises.