Montreal has a bylaw that came into effect on April 1, 2021 and that requires developers to contribute to the city’s supply of social, affordable, and family housing. (All three of these have their own definition.) Developers can meet this requirement in a number of… Read More
All posts tagged “inclusionary zoning”
What are the opportunity costs of not building new housing?
The stated policy goal of inclusionary zoning is to to produce more affordable housing. We can debate who ultimately pays for this below-market housing, and we have many times before on the blog, but for the purposes of this post let’s just focus on its… Read More
What would you do if you were Mayor?
Let’s assume that you’re Mayor of your city and that, for whatever reason, you have no need to pander to voters. You’re a benevolent dictator. You can do whatever you think is best overall for the city and it will just happen. What would you… Read More
Leadership is a great burden
I went to bed last night watching President Biden’s address to the Canadian Parliament (full transcript, here.). And I woke up this morning to this Globe and Mail article about Canadian competitiveness. In it, Tony Keller talks about some of the things that are broken… Read More
The inclusionary zoning paradox
What do you get when you have some of the most stringent affordable housing requirements in the United States? You might think that you get lots and lots of affordable housing, but that is not the case in San Francisco. Paradoxically, you still get some… Read More
No more foreign buyers
Here’s the thing about housing: The delegates insisted on one hand that “housing is for living not speculation”, but on the other, emphasised the critical importance of real estate to China’s economic growth. In other words, things are complicated. We want housing to be affordable… Read More
Housing supply in low-cost and high-cost municipalities
Here is a housing study that looked at housing supply — in the US from 2000 to 2020 — relative to median housing values. And here is the key takeaway: What this chart is saying is that new housing is rarely added in cities with… Read More
Q2-2022 land prices in the Greater Toronto Area
Bullpen Consulting just released its latest land insights reports for the Greater Toronto Area. For the period of Q2-2022, Ben Myers and the team identified 46 high-density residential land transactions with an average price of $95 per buildable square foot. This is down from $112… Read More
Artificially low property taxes
A blog reader responded to yesterday’s post about rent controls (and inclusionary zoning) with an excellent point: If you’re against rent controls, then you must also be against artificially low property taxes for homeowners. And I would agree with this. One of the points I… Read More
Rent control and inclusionary zoning
I received an email from a reader over the weekend saying that my comments around rent control have been too critical, and that they are not doing proper justice to the challenges that renters face in today’s cities. I thought this was a fair comment… Read More