"Cities and neighborhoods are deeply attached to their reasons for resisting various densification projects, and breaking through arbitrary red tape here is an immense and intractably expensive undertaking."
The large-scale tolerance of this is basically permanently resigning Canada to degrowth. So no, lets not accept this. It is what most cities are facing and the provincial governments need to put an end to it.
What we need is massive training/re-training + labor importation program for the construction industry (and probably also healthcare, but I digress), and WW2 level mobilization in construction, anything short of that and I'm betting the economic and entrepreneurial problems get entrenched for a century.
I agree with this notion politically, it would be a huge benefit if the federal government:
#1 - took in a bigger slice of taxes
#2 - redistributed them to municipalities
#3 - made this redistribution contingent on densification.
What we have now is some tragedy of the commons crap where everybody wants to address the housing prices, but if you call to densify any neighbourhood the local busybodies will cry bloody murder. Yet everybody wants the government to do something about housing, just not in their backyard. The only way for densification to be fair, and not result in one municipality seeing a sharper decline in housing prices than another, is for EVERYBODY to be compelled to change and have each municipality work out the finer details.
Alas, I am deeply pessimistic about change, in no small part because elected politicians are far more likely to be landlords than the general population putting them in a huge conflict of interest.
The WW2 level mobilization idea seems on point to me, but most Canadians I know seem totally oblivious to the fundamental decline of our economic and infrastructural capacities. I think we’ve lived too long in easy mode, benefitted a lot in many ways from our neighbour to the south, and let things slide too much for a generation or two.
I hesitate to say that in a sense because frankly, I don’t fully understand it. I do however understand that we’re languishing in many ways, and we don’t appear prepared to address this in a meaningful way.
It feels a bit like watching someone play a real time strategy game and noticing things are easy for them because external elements are removing difficulty from the game, so they focus their resources on a lot of the wrong stuff. Then when hard times come, they’re brutally unprepared and get wrecked while they try to ramp up to deal with whatever came for them. It feels like Canada is at the stage where the first taste of bad stuff has arrived, and we’re still fumbling with deciding what/if/how to address this bad thing. And we’d really like to continue playing the game as we were up until that point.
Maybe a terrible analogy. I’m the epitome of a layperson. All of this is opinion that should be taken with teaspoons of salt.
This is my own opinion too: I feel that as Canadians we are generally coasting on our past accomplishments/echoes of past economic activity. This blinds is to upcoming challenges and existing problems.
For example: we're ignoring the fact that our economy is heavily skewed towards "fake productive" activities like selling the same house back-and-forth to each other, and the Finance industry (an accountant friend tells me that even in Oil & Gas a lot of the "growth" happens through trading unproductive land stakes). The other heavyweight driver of activity is Government, but that can't be sustained if you're not generating value through other industries...
I also think that Canadians have a complacent attitude to daily corruption ("it couldn't happen here - that only happens in those funny tropical countries!"). This means that corruption flourishes just under the surface in many places.
The large-scale tolerance of this is basically permanently resigning Canada to degrowth. So no, lets not accept this. It is what most cities are facing and the provincial governments need to put an end to it.
What we need is massive training/re-training + labor importation program for the construction industry (and probably also healthcare, but I digress), and WW2 level mobilization in construction, anything short of that and I'm betting the economic and entrepreneurial problems get entrenched for a century.