The hidden cost driving up housing in Canada

Posted by vanchinawhite

3 Comments

  1. Why would cities increase the fee if they need dense housing units at a good clearing price

    Do they not know how tax incidence works

  2. Still better and less hidden than a lot of anti-affordabilty urban planning. It’s very easy to pull up this graph and say “really… you’re charging over $100,000 just to build an apartment? What a regressive city. I will vote for better politicians than those assholes.” With a fee you make people stick to an ugly truth. 

    You can achieve the exact same results with: environmental restrictions, union construction requirements, non-scalable infrastructure, “inclusionary zoning,” height maximums, etc. These things are much less obviously destructive and some people don’t even see that they can hurt the poor and marginalized. Indirect tools are much harder for democracy to parse and organize against.

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