It's not really the planners given that planners have no real power and just do what they're told. The problem is that the elected decision makers are beaten down by established rich homeowners and shy away from and all conflict. So we have a cascade of shy conflict aversion as lazy and uninterested elected officials defer endlessly to planners, and planners who don't want to cause drama for their elected bosses and get themselves fired capitulate and do the safe thing that the wealthy established homeowner class pushes for.
Vancouver did a study of how people arrived to their shopping destination and found that a small minority drove to their destination. This was in opposition to the assertions of the business owners that claimed drivers were remarkably more dominant and parking critical.
Speaking of the benefits of someone to "talk to", programmers have long known the benefits of rubber duck debugging, in speaking aloud the problem (to an inanimate object) to help align their thinking.
Perhaps we all could benefit from some knitted Coding Support Chickens?
It's a meme, alright. It's simple and very funny, obvious enough that everyone "gets it" when they hear it. However, I don't believe anyone actually does that? I mean, why would you need a rubber duck to talk to, in particular one rocking back and forth to nod its head with agreement? Can't you just talk with yourself?
> new games increasingly incorporate planned obsolescence as a business strategy
It's not this. It's simply that the level of quality and features and competition in modern games is so insanely high that developer time is devoted to other things and custom servers and modding is relatively niche and doesn't move the quality needle enough.
Time is limited and focusing on custom servers means less time spent elsewhere.
All this means is that the average income of citizens in Alberta is dramatically higher than other provinces and so Alberta pays more in the federal taxes that are applied uniformly to everyone.
I'm sure the other provinces also wish they had such high paying jobs and contributed more in taxes!
Yeah, this whole "Alberta gives Quebec money" complaint is in fact just how federal income, in the form of income tax, is distributed and is like getting upset that your provincial taxes are paying for something in Red Deer when you live in Calgary.
Alberta on as its own independent state would be net worse off in that they'd be a landlocked state and this would not at all directly advance their goals of getting more of their oil product to tidewater, one of their main political grievances. British Columbia would still oppose further oil pipelines to its coast for the same reasons it has always opposed them and in fact it would become politically easier for Canada to deny such access.
So the only viable outcome really is American annexation. (Additionally not advancing the Albertan grievance of only selling oil to one customer...)
Quebec also would have been worse off as an independent state, but threatening sovereignty gave (and continues to give) them important bargaining leverage. Additionally, Alberta has long-standing grievances, and ignoring those in favor of a strictly economic analysis is quite... limiting. Albertan sovereignty advocates might also argue that Canada has more to lose in Alberta than it ever did in the case of Quebec.
Quebec would be worse off independent of Canada absolutely, but having access to the ocean not landlocked and remarkably more viable as an independent state.
There are other landlocked countries throughout the world so it's not like it's impossible, but Alberta would be creating an uphill to climb.
Bottom line is that none of Alberta's longstanding limited market oil pipeline grievances are solved by becoming a landlocked independent state.
Everyone might not agree but it wouldn't be true. Quebec shot itself in the foot just threatening separatism. Separating would be like Brexit but worse. A smaller, less powerful nation would need to make a bunch of trade deals and companies would likely be even less inclined to enter QC.
no, they are solved by becoming an American state , or by taking BC with us (close enough to zero chance to just say zero chance) or taking Saskatchewan and Manitoba (not zero chance but pretty darn close). Becoming an American state is the least unlikely of several extremely unlikely outcomes. My personal preference would be for Alberta to stay in Canada and Canada to stop pretending it doesn't need natural resource extraction as a leading part of creating a strong middle class (along with being a cheaper second option for multinational tech company/medical research/etc satellite offices). instead of the current idiotic crushing of natural resources and trying to pick and grow winners in high tech, medical,etc. which is impossible to turn into a pipeline of companies/jobs here (you can get lucky and have one offs that eventually get eaten like RIM and salesforce but that's not an economy.) There is not enough rich people here (and taxes are too high to make enough rich people even if our population was equal to the USA instead of a tenth of its size) to drive the whole finance ecosystem necessary to create an innovation company pipeline. It's all just wasted federal money, most of it was financed by money transferred out of Alberta at the margin.
There are different degrees of "worse off", however. Quebec is a major port city, while Alberta is sandwiched between BC, Saskatchewan, Montana, and the North West Territories.
Ottawa has supported the keystone XL pipeline south. I don’t see what changes there. The democrats in the U.S. are the blocker for god knows what actual reason.
Oil companies have proven time and time again when their pipelines leak or their ships sink or their fracking liquid gets into the groundwater, they’re not liable for it. Payouts have historically been a tiny, minuscule fraction of damage done. And that’s when there was an EPA attempting to regulate them; that’s not going to happen moving forward.
So why should I trust one to build in my backyard?
If the shutoffs dont close maybe but that is not likely But if the train derails and every tanker can on the train is going over and trains are reaching over a mile in length, it will probably be bigger
There is a lot of global warming money fighting pipelines.
An example, tangent logic of this is the common trend to prevent roads from being built. There is a belief that this will result in fewer cars.
Instead, it results in cars sitting and idling, and cars accelerating then stopping.
Another example is a carpool lane. In many (not all!) cases, carpool lane are almost empty. Meanwhile, traffic stops and starts, or idles beside it.
The most polluting a car does, is during acceleration. The most efficiency is driving a constant speed.
So by trying to reduce car usage the wrong way, the result is as if 2x the number of cars are on the road.
Better to focus on excellent public transit with hyper efficient ride times, than stop new roads.
The same is with pipelines. Prevent anything that has to do with delivery, especially if it is safer and cheaper. After all, if it is safer there will be fewer oil spills, and the public won't mind this aspect of oil extraction. If it is cheaper, oil prices will fall, also bad for global warming.
You’ve recast my argument, which was about a specific lack of legal culpability, as one about climate change and conspiracies: “global warming money,” if it does exist, has not paid me any.
Pipelines could very well be safer, I don’t have the data in front of me. But that’s irrelevant if when they fail their operators refuse to make the ones whose lives they’ve ruined, whole. East Palestine, Ohio is as good an example as the North Dakota border as far as I’m concerned.
But your response is a bit weird to me. You say it is irrelevant if it is safer? Ok, so there are 4 equal spills vs 2.
Regardless of being made whole, if there's 1/2 the spills, and therefore 1/2 the people not harmed, you think that's not better?? Or worth pursuing?
This is sort of what I'm talking about. Any improvement is good. But you're saying "screw all those extra people being hurt, and that damage, because it's not perfect in this way".
Probably because you want to discuss politics and climate change conspiracies instead of corporate capture.
> You say it is irrelevant if it is safer?
Not what I said at all. I said that, pipeline, ship, or truck, no matter which transport method fails, the operator bears in practice very little legal liability.
> But you're saying "screw all those extra people being hurt, and that damage, because it's not perfect in this way".
"Pipelines could very well be safer, I don’t have the data in front of me. But that’s irrelevant if when they fail"
You said safety was irrelevant.
I get you didn't mean that, but that's how the words are written. It's an if... then... logical statement.
And if pipelines are safer, you should immediately support them regardless of legal liability shortcomings. Why?
Well you say these shortcomings exist regardless of the method. So if you shift transport to a safer method, you now improve safety and there are fewer accidents.
How is this not a positive?
Do you believe it is better that more people are hurt?
Is there some payoff or benefit to having more accidents?
You can likely tell I'm baffled. You must view it as a plus, but I dont grok why.
Before being neutered, was the EPA so powerful that it could regulate what happened in the great white north? While I get your sentiments about bigOil getting way with poisoning the land/seas, we can at least keep the government agencies from one country straight.
The topic was "The democrats in the U.S. are the blocker for god knows what actual reason", so it makes sense that they were talking about a US agency to me
"In a new bid to stop the Keystone XL pipeline, two Native American communities are suing the Trump administration, saying it failed to adhere to historical treaty boundaries and circumvented environmental impact analysis. As a result, they are asking a federal judge in Montana to rescind the 2017 permit and block any further construction or use of the controversial pipeline.
The Fort Belknap Indian Community of Montana and the Rosebud Sioux Tribe of South Dakota contend there was no effort to study how the 1,200-mile pipeline project through their respective territories would affect their water systems and sacred lands."
> The democrats in the U.S. are the blocker for god knows what actual reason.
It's not just God. I also know!
The Democrats believe climate change is real, the externalities of fossil fuel extraction, processing, and consumption are real, the injured parties in pipeline construction are their constituents, and the fossil fuel companies fund Republicans and Republican-aligned organizations.
It's a really deep mystery, but I've sussed it out. Me and God.
The oil doesn’t stay in the ground, it gets shipped via diesel trains without the pipeline.
I’m guessing climate change is the reason, but it’s hard to see how the current state of affairs is better for the environment. Diesel trains are a lot less carbon friendly than pipelines.
Here's another observation (not a thought experiment): To figure out which scenario pollutes more, one could add up the various inputs and outputs. A producer is limited by the volume and cost of different means of transportation. It isn't apodictically true that the same volume of tar is delivered regardless of the means, so preventing a pipeline from being built does not necessarily increase net pollution. That being nebulous, the Democrats' motivations are less nebulous.
I find it hard not to imagine a scenario in which the USA would strangle an independent Alberta economically with designs to, at the minimum get oil for bottom dollar, or maximally to absorb it as a territory. It's what they're doing to Canada right now. We have a fighting chance, I don't imagine Alberta (or any other province) alone does.
So you believe threatening to separate is a strategy and that they get more by making threats.
Alberta has oil majority of it foreign owed and wants free pipelines paid by the rest of Canada as subsidy and they got one for free and they believe they get more for free...
Except of course the elephant in the room for why that is. You know, an entire population at odds with the Canadian government for trying to do to quebec and their culture what the American government successfully did to native americans and their culture. You don’t really have that unified us vs them mentality in english speaking canada.
One chapter in a long history of anti Quebecois sentiment from the national government in desire of homogeny. There is a reason why the present autonomy was insisted upon.
Total nonsense. Political separation doesn't undue physical oil infrastructure. Crude would continue to flow as is, and trade deals would immediately be struck. Meanwhile, incremental pipeline capacity south would be rapidly approved while existing East/West expansion is hopeless under a Liberal government.
I am a physical oil trader and I buy 200,000 barrels of oil a day to supply refineries in Canada. I have also worked on financing for Energy East, Keystone XL, Northern Gateway, TMX and the Line 9 reversal in my career. Trust me when I say the Canadian government is the problem and Alberta would be MUCH better off from an oil perspective split off of Canada.
Your trade deals are a flash in history. Native Aboriginal Canadians do not owe anything to oil traders south of the border. You can't force them join your ghettos.
What nonsense are you on about? My company works in partnership with aboriginals. They are supportive of oil broadly speaking. It is one of the largest revenue sources for them.
What is the nonsense part? What advantages does Alberta gain from separation vis a vis pipelines? They’re never going to get more oil to the pacific in either case. Separating weakens their hand in negotiating gas pipelines to the pacific. No one currently cares if Alberta builds more pipelines to the USA. There is no hindrance here. So what does Alberta gain?
Not to mention all the other things Alberta loses. BC the popular vacation and retirement spot, and like Spain to the British would be closed off to Albertans with their holiday homes now under foreign buyer and speculation taxation.
All of Alberta was ceded to the crown through the numbered treaties prior to the establishment of the province. Are you implying that there’s something about treaty 8 that makes it different from treaty 4, 6, 7, and 10?
It’s all ceded territory, and assuming an independent Alberta retains the crown why would it present any issue?
> Indians DO HEREBY CEDE, RELEASE, SURRENDER AND YIELD UP to the Government of the Dominion of Canada, for Her Majesty the Queen and Her successors for ever, all their rights, titles and privileges whatsoever, to the lands included within the following limits, that is to say:
Even if Alberta became a republic or joined the US, its secession after all, a moment when old agreements which by their original text promising a fresh suit of clothes to each chief every 3 years and $5 per year to every band member are up for even more re-evaluation than they have already been subject to.
Trace this separatism bullshit back, and you'll find the fingers of the American right fully entwined in all this.
What all the separatists fail to be aware of is that 98% of Alberta is treaty land. It can't secede as a land-locked province, it could only secede as a bunch of fragmented municipalities surrounded by First Nations.
The only actual way towards it would be invasion and annexation by the United States. I hope that anyone looking forward to that timeline is also looking forward to IEDs.
The issue is not selling more oil but where the profit goes. I work for the Alberta Government, I know a person who works for the Ministry of Energy and Minerals who processes land use rights applications for oil and gas activities. Most of the profit obtained from selling the aforementioned rights goes to the federal government (about 85%), and only about 15% gets reinvested into the provincial department
Given that existing pipelines are already overcommitted or at capacity and carry not much more than a tenth, and given that America is mostly the only option for refining the heavy sour tarry crap they pull out of the athabasca sands, this doesn't matter much. This is what came up during trump's threats about tariffing oil. They basically would have had to eat the cost unlike most of the other tariffs trump has proposed.
Regardless, let's say two places have very different values and ideas about how they want to live and what goals to pursue. What the hell gives one place the right, particularly when it consistently votes down the desired values of the other, to prevent it from leaving and going its own way? Self-determination as a principle isn't magically restricted to national borders only. That would be a ridiculous assertion.
> What the hell gives one place the right, particularly when it consistently votes down the desired values of the other, to prevent it from leaving and going its own way? Self-determination as a principle isn't magically restricted to national borders only. That would be a ridiculous assertion.
How granular does this asserted right go? Should Edmonton be able to secede from Alberta? Can I run outside and put up a flag on my front lawn?
Well-put thank you. I think the end state that makes this not a slippery slope is that there are certain practicalities that make some responsibilities impractical beyond a certain scale. Where it is correct in its maximalist form though is that we should relegate the most possible freedom to the individual.
I hope more people can embrace this way of thinking. It's not really partisan. If anything it lets people operate more democratically where voices and engagement mean more. It lets people live how they want in communities with shared values. It lets us run many different policy experiments across many different places to develop better policies.
It goes pretty granular. I don't really like secession in concept, in this case it's a manifestation that governments like to steal more power than they absolutely must hold at that level instead of leaving it at lower ones. This gives someone in BC a hell of a lot too much influence on how someone in Alberta lives and vice-versa when really not much besides border, military, and treaties/diplomacy needs to be handled nationally. Things should be made as local as possible. I would prefer municipal or neighborhood-level decision making for a lot of things because it's actually really hard to scale democracy well and because the losing minority grows as you make decisions at higher levels.
There are practical limits to this principle, very hard for a landlocked city to secede, but at least in principle it seems morally correct if not practically possible. But I struggle to see how someone can conceivably oppose colonialism and also oppose secession.
Is it actually morally correct? Philosophically, this ends up with the ideal government being every single person determining their own rules, doesn't it? The ideal state of things would be to reject democracy and move to libertarianism? I'd argue that such a society does not function, and having a functional society is also a moral good.
On a more practical note, the Alberta government is currently actively meddling in municipal politics and policies, so in the currently discussed application it seems more of a "I want to have a government that's as large as possible that I can still have power over".
No, it's fine for governments to fix externalities. I just believe they should do it at low levels.
I don't support Alberta meddling in local politics. I don't support the US federal or state governments doing this. If cities or neighborhoods want to come together and say "we want a blue community in this red state" or vice versa that's a just form of self-governance.
I actually believe this is how we make democracy work better. It has scale problems but remains the least-bad form of government so we should work to design systems that make it function well.
Letting people self-assort to live with others with their values under rules that reflect those within reason is good.
How do you address issues where tragedy of the commons comes into play? Every individual neighbourhood/smallest unit of government would (rightly) pick the best option for themselves.
Having a large representative base is the easiest way to prevent that.
I am perfectly fine with something like the clean air and water acts (in principle if not implementation). Obviously people in an upstream town aren't allowed to dump pollution in the river to save money.
But why would the upstream town be interested in governing what they dump?
Clearly someone/something has to assert the value that downstream towns have the right to unpolluted water. And won't that be the higher level government preventing the upstream town from asserting their rules and values?
Yes actually. I'm not opposed to any government above a highly-local level. The point of government is basically to fix externalities and run defense/diplomacy. For rivers we do in fact need co-ordinated governance to prevent people from polluting others' water downstream.
On the second point it should be noted that the awful FPTP system creates the regional distortions that make it appear that the regions are more divided than they really are. One looks on the map and it seems like Alberta is near uniform blue but that's because of FPTP. The reality is that ~64% voted one way and a sizeable amount of Alberta voted in opposition.
If we fixed our voting system to be more truly representative I think some of these divisions would go away.
When Quebec held a referendum in 1995 on separation (not secession), the Cree nation in northern Quebec held its own referendum on what to do if Quebec separates, and voted 96% to separate from Quebec and remain in Canada. The Parti Québécois, the provincial gov't of Quebec at the time, sputtered "Quebec is not divisible!" which created a lot of awkwardness around the whole question of Quebec leaving Canada.
Actually Trump wanting to absorb Canada puts Alberta in a great position.
Canadians like to argue that no province can secede from Canada because it would be illegal but the reality is that if a referendum showed 50%+ of people in Alberta supported independence then the US would support Alberta and that’s the only thing that matters. A lot of Canadian press is wilfully ignorant of that fact.
I don't think the "legality" of separation is a real blocker here, are you insinuating that if the Quebec referendum on its sovereignty would have succeeded that it would have remained a province because it was "illegal"?
I agree with you, but that is what the Canadian press is saying. Just look at the Andrew Coyne articles, among many others, that make this precise argument about legality of separation. And yes they also suggest that Quebec separation would’ve been illegal and not happened too.
I would not support it. I'm skeptical that many Americans would either. Would be clearly illegal and might encourage separatism in other places like the US
I don't think anyone who's paying attention is worried about some thread of absorption. Trump was making fun of Trudeau when he was saying Canada wouldn't survive without the US's help.
Time and time again throughout history, bold-face, clear-as-day threats of invasion are followed by disbelief, are ignored by folks, followed by the promised invasion. Just ask France in WWII or Ukraine most recently.
I don't make a habit of ignoring major world powers when they threaten annexation, and many others who are "paying attention" don't either.
Trudeau is no longer here, those threats continue to be made, even in the _presence_ of the current leader of Canada. I don't understand how one could not take these threats seriously.
Anyone who is actually paying attention is worried. Not because it's likely, it would be absolutely rediculous. But then again many things Trump has done are obviously stupid and absolutely rediculous. Like the tarrifs. Or threatening to annex Canada. That's no laughing matter.
Please don't do regional flamewar on HN. Like national flamewar and religious flamewar, it's a circle of hell we want to avoid here. You can make your substantive points without it, so please do that instead.
It wouldn't be accurate at all to paint the BC Liberals as a reform party splinter group. While the party was half taken over by conservatives, rats fleeing their own sinking ship, the reality is that the party up until the last leader Falcon was always lead by individuals with strong Federal Liberal party ties. It's always been a right of centre Liberal party and was clearly even more right wing given its big tent coalition status with Fed Conservatives but labelling it as some sort of Reform Party western grievance party is absolutely a step too far.
The boring reality is that the BC NDP occupied all the space on the left and so the only viable space for the Liberals was more right of centre. Should be noted, not at all an unusual space for a Liberal to be. When the conservative Social Credit party imploded the BC Liberals took them on and it became a defacto two party system with the BC Liberals on the right.
The previous leader Clark kicked the can on a Fed Liberal leadership and we can see already from the actions of Carney that the right of centre Fed Liberals are alive and well.
Alberta's lands are part of a treaties that First Nations have with Canada. The literal reserve lands themselves are less relevant than the vast traditional territories that Alberta First Nations are sharing with Canada under some treaty obligation.
I'm not terribly familiar with the minute details of the numbered treaties that cover the area of Alberta, but I am aware from recent reporting that the local First Nations do not see Alberta as having any right to separate and take FN lands with them.
Alberta would need the consent of the councils for Treaty 4, 6, 7 and 8 in order to take their land with them. The treaties are between various First Nations and the Crown of Canada and are not transferable to an independent Alberta without consent.
Some provinces have non-treaty land, acquired through land purchases or conquest. Quebec, for example, had the right to take roughly the southern third of its territory when it discussed separatism. But that's not the case with Alberta — it is entirely composed of treaty land.
This means that Canada cannot grant them independence, even if it were to accept the results of a referendum that meets Clarity Act requirements. That alone makes Alberta separatism a non-starter. There's no legal route for Alberta to separate from Canada without negotiating new treaties with the treaty councils in order to get their consent, and they've already signalled they are not willing to do so.
I genuinely wonder if and how that would hold though, you need the buck to stop somewhere, if Alberta were to vote to leave Canada you may call it illegal as you want to they won't just say "this is treaty land" and cancel their own referendum.
Say they separate politically and renege on the treaty, the first nations will go to the ICC? Or ask Canada to invade its own province? What support if any would the later have with the Canadian elector, sending the army to fight against other Canadians?
It's very similar to the old constitutional argument that separatism needs a "clear majority" which sparked questions that following a "yes" in Quebec the supreme court would have to statute on whether 51% is a "clear majority". Would Quebec actually have just accepted a ruling against them from a institution that is not really theirs?
My point is that legally the First Nations have the right to not consent to the separation of provinces from the country. Of course, it's always possible for parties to act illegally...
If Alberta did unilaterally declare independence (which would be illegal according to Reference Re Secession of Quebec [1998]), the First Nations have the right to call upon Canada to defend their treaty rights under the "peace and good order" terms of the treaties.
If Canada did grant Alberta independence without First Nations consent, or Canada refuses to defend their treaty rights, they would have a claim that Canada had violated their rights to self-determination under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) which Canada ratified in 2021. But UNDRIP is a non-binding resolution, so I don't think they'd have a case with the ICC or ICJ (even assuming it had jurisdiction).
The dominant media in the west, the Postmedia Network, is owned by foreign and conservative interests so there's certainly potential for outside influence.
If one took Trump at his word that he'd like to annex Canada this is absolutely a strategy to take. Help along a flimsy and non-viable break away movement, then justify the need to rescue and liberate the repressed minority break away group as casus belli to invade an annex the entire country. This was the Putin playbook with Ukraine.
The article vaguely alludes to why this trend could appear but unfortunate it couldn't devote at least a paragraph to it. It's such an important issue, but given that this the industry impacted is considered small and niche it's so under discussed.
Decades of political opposition toward any and all redevelopment of existing low density single family dominated residentially zoned areas has meant that practically all creation of new housing in the major cities of Canada has meant greenfield sprawl or for urban areas, creeping into brownfield redevelopment, rezoning old industrial areas into new condo developments.
The problem with this is that the arts and gallery system has long relied on repurposing old and affordable industrial space into arts production space gallery and performance space. So what we've been seeing as the housing crisis has become more severe, is an increasing amount of destruction and rezoning of irreplaceable industrial land, aiding a shortage of industrial space, badly wanted by the Amazon's of the world too.
So artists are being squeezed on both ends. The shortage of affordable housing is especially severe for low income working artists, and the political solution for solving this problem is to destroy the artist spaces which makes things more expensive for artists too.
This could all be better fixed if we simply left industrial as industrial and actually allowed people to more intensively develop residential homes to meet our housing goals, and add more arts uses into residential areas (because let's be clear, everything mentioned in this article is likely on the down low, breaking municipal bylaws and Provincial liquor laws), but people have been incredibly resistant to this, no matter how much they claim to love the arts etc etc.
Seems like another symptom of the age demographic imbalance. Old people have taken over the political power and have seized all the land exclusively for themselves.
It’s a symptom of endless government regulation, bureaucratic overreach, and NIMBYism.
One of the worst developments in the history of government is this incessant creep of regulations and codes that specify, in excruciating detail, how residential land must be developed. How wide the streets are, how many lanes of traffic there are, how far the sidewalks are from the road, how far the front door is from the sidewalk, how much of the back yard is visible from the sidewalk, how houses must be arranged, how wide a house must be relative to the property width, how short/tall a house must be, how many separate entrances are allowed, … and on and on and on the regulations go. This has the effect of making old style neighbourhoods (with real character) impossible to build in the modern day. It also highly restricts the usage of the land and the number of structures in a way that make it impossible to have multi-family dwellings, studio apartments above houses, artists’ cottages in the back yard, coach houses, small used book stores or cafes in residential neighbourhoods, etc.
The new urbanist movement [1] talks a lot about this. They’ve argued for the return of streetcar suburbs [2] and I agree with them. These places are extremely beautiful to live in. They foster a far deeper sense of community than modern suburbia. They are wonderful spaces for humans to live in rather than places for urban planners who want to play SimCity in real life.
I don’t blame old people or any other particular group though. This is a widespread phenomenon of cultural and regulatory evolution by people who did not anticipate the final result. Now we’re stuck with this morass and the political will to fix it is still in its infancy. There’s also simply the hard problem that we can’t just bulldoze whole neighbourhoods to rebuild them the old way.
This doesn’t really make sense as a counter argument.
I’m pretty sure none of these came about by random happenstance, they all had either specific reasons behind them or specific lobbying groups pushing for them, or both.
Of course there’s no guarantee that the whole amalgamation was reasonable or even coherent… but that applies to everything ever that involved millions of people and interests.
Is there a specific reason why your “fix” wouldn’t just make it even more incoherent, given real world constraints like limited will, political influence, credibility, etc…?
Oh absolutely all these rules came about by explicit lobbying from special interest groups. As much as it is the "government regulations" that is to blame, the government is us lol, elected by the people and servants of the people.
The root cause of these problems has been classism and racism and people trying to gate off their communities from "undesirable" people, via the zoning code.
Defacto banning apartments for example is a very effective way to eliminate everyone who can't afford a single family home from your neighbourhood. etc
As much as I love to kick sand at the boomers, I'm sad to say that I've seen the exact same sort of behaviours from my millennial cohort that have been lucky enough to get their foothold on the housing ladder.
All of this sort of NIMBYism stems from a deep core problem of exclusivity seeking behaviours, classism and even racism.
Canada has one of the worst housing crises of the whole developed world. Housing crisis isn't just a lack of homes, it's a lack of desirable and affordable homes. Many places in world have an abundance of unused homes while also having a severe lack of homes people both can and want to buy. Most people don't want to live in the middle of nowhere where there are no infra, no services and no one else around.
I wonder if this idea could help overturn the negative incentives behind NIMBYism:
1. Homeowners in functional local democracies block new construction because it reduces the prices of their homes in exchange for no benefit to them, but...
2. When new, higher-density homes are constructed the total value of all houses increases much more than the total decline in the price of all old houses. This implies...
3. There is enough money available in the overall venture of new construction to compensate previous owners for the decline in prices, and although there could be many ways to accomplish it,
4. A tax on changes in assessed value that can go negative if the change is below a threshold, where the threshold is set so that the city collects net-zero revenue from this tax, would result in lump sum payments from developers (who dramatically increase assessed value) to people for whom the growth in their home prices had been depressed below the city's average by a nearby supply increase (whose assessed value would increase the least in that year if there was any truth to their objections).
For those motivated purely by fear of their home no longer increasing in value, faster than inflation, a scheme like this might help soften their opposition.
Unfortunately, the coalition of people who oppose housing is not purely financially motivated.
There our groups of people for whom low density living is all about status and excluding others, and there is no amount of money that would compensate them for loss of status and exclusion.
There are others for whom the argument is purely aesthetic or sentimental - they legit cannot imagine any type of nice neighbourhood composed the buildings that are single-family homes with triangle roofs.
Some have never lived in anything other than a single-family home, and their understanding of multifamily buildings comes from news media and cultural stereotypes. They believe that as soon as you have a multi family structure, it’s automatically a ghetto of some sort, while simultaneously being luxury housing.
Many fear increased traffic, but will also oppose any effort to limit cars.
Others just fear change of any kind.
I have been to more housing hearings than I can count, and the reasons people oppose housing are myriad. I don’t think there’s any sort of silver bullet to lessen opposition, and I suspect people have been opposing housing for as long as housing has existed.
What I think went wrong is that we gave people an unusually powerful set of tools in the 20th century to really lock down the aggregate total of floor space that it’s possible to build in a given region, so there’s almost no wiggle room. We made the default that building is unusual and bad, and put the onus on builders to justify construction, rather than forcing opponents to justify using government power to ban construction.
To get out of it, we either need to abolish this set of tools, or at least raise the default so significantly that it is higher than any foreseeable demand. Not only does this accomplish the goal of simply allowing housing to be built, but by ensuring that the amount that can be built is much higher than any amount anyone would ever want to build, it removes the leverage of landholders. No particular plot is more special than any other simply because the government said so.
> Some have never lived in anything other than a single-family home, and their understanding of multifamily buildings comes from news media and cultural stereotypes. They believe that as soon as you have a multi family structure, it’s automatically a ghetto of some sort
I grew up in single family homes and when I moved out on my own I lived in apartments
Hearing my neighbours screaming through the walls and floors did a lot to convince me that multi-family housing only works when either the homes are very soundproofed, or the culture is a lot more respectful of shared space
I bought a detached home as soon as I could and got the hell out of dense housing, it sucks to live like that
There’s a lot of romanticism or just preference for dense city living—especially at certain stages of life. But there are significant tradeoffs that many people just aren’t willing to make however hard as it is for others to understand.
I do like cities but, at this point, I can just travel to for trips and that makes more sense.
Has anyone ever tried answering the objections you listed with some form of compensation? My understanding of human nature is that people don't like to trust strangers and take what are for them risks if there's nothing to be gained from it and some (even if unlikely) potential loss.
Just imagine going to one of those meetings and asking everyone in the room to do a trust fall exercise. Even if the thought that you wouldn't catch them is totally unfounded, I bet you wouldn't be able to get a plurality. :-)
> The shortage of affordable housing is especially severe for low income working artists
Once again, there is NO SHORTAGE of affordable housing either in the US or in Canada.
None. Nada. Zilch. Ноль. 零
And that's important. A simple "not enough housing" problem is easily solved with "just build more".
Instead, there is a shortage of housing _near_ _large_ _cities_. And it can't be solved. Simply "building more" housing in dense cities makes it _worse_.
The issue with this is most parts of large cities are substantially less dense than incredibly livible neighborhoods such as the plateau area of Montreal.
It is illegal to build such a neighborhood in 99% of Canada. People love it here, people start families here, tourists visit, it's quite, lots of parks and shops.
And it's 3-4 as dense as most areas of most major cities. But we've made it illegal to build. For zoning, double stairway rules, minimum parking rules, setback rules, strict permitting requirements, and thousands of other things.
Preventing increase in _density_ leads to better outcomes long-term.
It sounds crazy, right? Supply/demand, and all of that.
But it's an example of one of the things in economics where the effects end up being different because of collective actions. As a result, no large growing city within the US within the last 30 years managed to lower down housing prices by increasing density. I checked that using the Census statistics database.
And no, Austin (TX) doesn't count. It decreased prices by decreasing the _population_.
Isn't 80% or some other ridiculous percentage of population of Canada in large cities? If a large portion of your population is living in large cities and large cities are experiencing a housing shortage then it makes sense to me to say there is a housing shortage in Canada.
> Isn't 80% or some other ridiculous percentage of population of Canada in large cities?
Only 59% (and shrinking!) of the population live in places with more than 100,000 people. You are correct that ~80% of the population live in urban areas, but Canada's definition for urban includes places with 1,000 people.
It's important because there's no way to make dense urban housing cheaper. Nobody has managed to lower down housing prices by increasing density (no, Austin in Texas doesn't count, guess why?).
The solution is not to build ever denser communities, but to make it so that people don't _have_ to move into a large city from an ever-shrinking list.
Canada's housing crisis goes well beyond just the large cities. It extends into small towns as far as the Yukon. It may be a somewhat different situation compared with the US.
Smaller town in Canada don't really have skyrocketing prices.
For example, in Whitehorse in Yukon the average house was $420k (or $550k inflation adjusted to 2024) in 2015, and $660k in 2024. So less than 20% growth after inflation within the last decade.
During that time, Vancouver BC went from $640k ($820k after inflation) to $1300k.
The average square footage also went down in BC, but stayed stable in YK.
> For example, in Whitehorse in Yukon the average house was $420k (or $550k inflation adjusted to 2024) in 2015, and $660k in 2024. So less than 20% growth after inflation within the last decade.
These are already insanely high prices for such small, remote, and undesirable cities
Whitehorse is not undesirable, it's located in a beautiful valley and has a fairly mild climate. And I specifically took the worst case of price growth in YK. If you look at Watson Lake, the price there has not grown at all.
My point is that smaller cities in Canada are not experiencing runaway price growth.
This should make it clear that it's not a housing shortage problem. Otherwise, it'd be experienced equally across the board.
Vancouver has more houses per capita than Whitehorse does. It is where the houses are, both in relative and overwhelmingly absolute terms.
The only problem is that they are more expensive than people wish they were. But that high price condition comes as a result of people wanting to live there. The way to undo high prices is to see people no longer want to live there (or, at least want to live elsewhere just as much).
New houses generally cost more than used houses. If people already think a used house is more than they can afford, who is going to pay even more to build a new house?
If you truly believe you can build new houses in Vancouver for less than the cost of its used houses, you've found one amazing arbitrage opportunity. You should be asking yourself why investors aren't lined up at your door.
Building new houses reduces the cost of used houses!
Coincidentally, the price of used cars went way up during the pandemic, right when the supply of new cars was bottlenecked by industry shutdowns and a global semiconductor shortage. Even though new cars generally cost more than used cars. Strange but true!
> Building new houses reduces the cost of used houses!
You're not wrong if you live in a house inside a vacuum, but, again, in the real world, if people are already struggling with the used price, who is going to pay even more to build new?
As surprising as it may be, houses won't magically materialize on the back of hopes and dreams. They require intense amounts of real labour to build and labour isn't going to show up if you aren't throwing copious amounts of money constantly in their face. If nobody wants to pay that labour the unfathomable amounts of money they require, a house is not getting built.
> Strange but true!
Not particularly strange, but cars are now stuck in the same situation, with the price of new cars having become prohibitively expensive and used cars are failing to come back down even as supply chains are no longer bottlenecked. In fact, the assembly plant near me just closed citing weak demand, so it seems there is even excess capacity. Much like houses, cars don't magically materialize either. They need willing buyers. But if you have no willing buyers...
> Once again, there is NO SHORTAGE of affordable housing either in the US or in Canada.
> None. Nada. Zilch. Ноль. 零
Interesting. 零 means zero. But my (non-native!) instinct says that it's impossible to use it this way. I feel like you'd need 没有.
Classical Chinese has a negative universal quantifier 莫 (though in a technical sense it's an adverb and doesn't modify or stand in for nouns), but I don't think I've ever seen anything similar in modern Mandarin. I feel like I'd have to use a positive quantifier and a negative claim.
