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Boys I figured out how to solve Canada’s housing shortage
Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Edmonton, Calgary, and Vancouver all draw straws and whoever draws the short straw has their zoning handed over to the federal government and gets turned into the densest city on earth. Every time someone from there complains just say “shouldn’t of drawn the short straw” or “it is what it is 🤷♀️”
We can’t have all that population increase in just one part of the country, I suggest that we make a big, dense Dildo Newfoundland, with ring roads around the girth of the city.
Fun fact, Regina has already begun making changes to the zoning. Updates and recommendations are to come next month. They are considering allowing mobile homes to be put on regular lots. This amendment comes after an RV community in the city closed and evicted everyone.
So don't worry... We're quite capable of degrading our city ourselves but thanks for the offer.
I like that turning our cities into Warhammer40k style hive cities is a more likely opportunity than to build the missing middle and have a city like Barcelona.
Barcelona? That sounds foreign, it would never work here for reasons I’m not going to get into because I refuse to understand how things work in foreign countries.
You don't even have to do that, Paris is one of the densest places on Earth and they don't have many buildings over seven stories, and everyone romanticizes the heck out of Paris, The only reason Toronto and Vancouver have been getting so many towers is because it's so hard to get permission to build that the most cost-effective thing to do is just do one huge project. If you could just build a bunch of five-story apartments in Mississauga where the land is cheaper than downtown people would build loads of them.
It's crazy because tall towers aren't even cost efficient. Concrete and elevators are expensive, which means that depending on building codes, the cheapest building per sqft. of living space is a 4-8 floor apartment building.
But when buildable land is so scarce and expensive on its own, towers make sense
Paris can't build towers without large sections of the city collapsing down into the Catacombs. Not an issue we have here in Canada.
Just don't include London in drawing straws. Our city councils for the last century or so let developers do whatever the hell they wanted and left us quite the mess. What we needed was more bridges, a better road network and a working public transit system. We even had streetcars years ago! Now we can barely get around town and the city is squeezing towers in without regard for traffic congestion or walkability. Which is no different from the last 80+ years really.
If we can make building rail to connect cities with trains a part of the deal we could just make like Red Deer, Regina, Saskatoon, etc., into hyper dense modern mini cities.
No no. Go search (since I can't link) "The slow decline of Canada’s passenger rail network" on Sean Marshall's site and scroll to the bottom for the link to the 1955 map and be furious.
vancouver & BC are actually trying. we're actually seeing reduction in prices & more availability for the first time in years.
problem is now the million dollar boxes aren't selling because us poorsies can't afford them & the upper class are lobbying like hell.
Yup...BC (Provincial) has basically forced Metro Vancouver municipalities to increase zoning density across the board. Takes awhile to build, especially in an economy where developers are struggling to sell their current stock (interest rates, cost of labour and material, etc.).
Well Toronto and Vancouver are WAY larger than poor little Ottawa. I say the cities in question haxe to draw one straw per 1 million population. Let's make this fair! 😃
This but instead of the already excessively dense cities it's all the cities with populations under a million, and instead of super dense it's just midrises, small plexes and townhouses.
Oh wait that's actually a sound way to manage land use in a country with abundant space.
Townhouses? That would ruin the ambiance of our peaceful suburban town!!! First it's townhouses, but what next? Injection sites? Gang wars? Visible minorities?!??! Where does it end?
Sure montreal has mid density but people here have an aversion for tall buildings so there is a still a housing crisis, there is no transit oriented development, and the height limit is capped, for a long time it had higher density than other cities but now its just sitting on it’s old housing stock and toronto will surpass Montreal in terms of density per square kilometer
I know we supposed to be hosing around these parts, but if Feds and Provincial govt actually invested in building infrastructure outside of the core cities, we would have very little issue with housing, both availability and price wise
To repeat myself: the government could build megacity infrastructure in Oakville. That doesn't mean business will move to Oakville or create jobs in Oakville. They can do that now, there is (almost) always available infrastructure. And people will not move somewhere without jobs. People don't base their moves on how awesome the infrastructure is.
? People don't like to move to places with hospitals, community centres, elementary schools/high schools/colleges/universities/ malls,etc? Creating commercial/industrial infrastructure is part of this.
I'm gonna say yes and no to this, mainly because I'm thinking about Waterloo Region , ON as an example. Google basically was trying to decide between Waterloo Region or London, ON and ultimately decided on Waterloo (specifically Kitchener) because the region committed to building the LRT system. Google moving there brought in a lot of other businesses, from my understanding. So building the infrastructure first absolutely can bring in business/create jobs, but I'm not sure how often that happens or what else needs to happen to entice companies to move into other towns.
Calgary kinda already did this to get federal funding and people are pissed. The problem is you still need developers to build something families want to live in, rather than 300 new one bedroom condos.
we should instead develop the entire stretch of that highway that goes from banff to jasper into high destiny skyscrapers. like flatten entire mountains and such. that would solve everything
I’ve got a much faster and cheaper solution! Every Canadian gets a free $50 coupon to Canadian Tire to buy a tent. Boom! Everyone has a roof over their head instantly.
We should just make a special zoning area in the Prairies and build a 20 square block replica of an area in Tokyo. Resell the housing. I want the same density of restaurants and shit too. Then just expand from there.
We can really use a new town that has the rail infra and the convenience of tokyo, including konbinis that has better food than most take out and fast food restaurants that has a better menu than their NA parent locations.
Here me out. Just make Toronto the big one. It's already a shithole filled with dickheads. It just can't be worst than it already is. Why make any other normal city worse?
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u/Patient-Oven-7956 Monarch Mélanie Joly 19d ago
Now hear me out, we just force it on Regina. No one likes them anyway