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.
> 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_.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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. :-)
CBC has had a few articles related to art and artists recently, I noticed something about cross border tariffs affecting art shows and exhibits.
But I don't understand how art and art galleries aren't just the perfect vehicle for money laundering in certain cases?
I also have a hard time with it, surely a portion of artists are in the trust fund class, I get the vibe that the really successful ones have massive amounts of connections with wealthy groups and can afford to fail. It's hard to relate to some complaints coming from the artist quarter, ie my gallery is getting shut down, my exhibits are getting held at the border.
Surely, there is still the true starving artist. But if you were true low income, lower class, you wouldn't have gone through art school, you'd be trying to survive and working.
Money laundering. It's perfect, anonymous buyer, all of a sudden you have a bunch of money/assets that can get funneled to whoever at your leisure. And famous high status artists are also high status, highly trusted members of society with important connections. I don't have any proof. Does this ever happen?
On the other hand, the news coverage by the CBC is hampering efforts by the Murdoch empire and Post Media to align Canadian sentiments with MAGA, and that is obviously unacceptable.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Urbanism
[2] https://youtu.be/MWsGBRdK2N0?si=Xw_E04B5q7HjpV7p
That's quite the popular and facile argument.
great analysis! thank you
> 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.
> It is illegal to build such a neighborhood in 99% of Canada.
And that is good. It's making Canada liveable and keeps the prices from skyrocketing EVEN HIGHER.
The claim that increasing housing supply would increase prices probably requires some argument.
As long as foreign wealth can continue to buy up properties as they are built, the actual housing supply doesn't really increase
That's a pretty large part of the problem
The actual housing supply also doesn't increase if you prevent building houses...
It can increase more rapidly if you prevent increasing _density_.
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_.
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.
It’s still a housing shortage problem if what houses there are, are situated where people don’t want to live.
That's just another way to say what I'm saying: people are being forced into ever-denser cities, into ever-more-miserable living conditions.
Density isn’t necessarily misery. I live in a dense city in Europe and would pick it over American/canadian shithole sprawl any day of the week.
Also, no, we definitely aren’t saying the same thing you and I.
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.
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.
> 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.
What are you talking about, there is no housing crisis in Canada?
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. :-)
Yes there is a crisis. Not sure that it is merely housing.
"Canada has one of the highest immigration rates per capita in the world."
https://www.statista.com/statistics/443063/number-of-immigra...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy70y75v5l7o
It's a shortage of 3.8 million homes in a country of 15.6 million households.
Great that this is a trend. Its also a long tradition in contemporary art. I had my staircase and hallway as a gallery for a couple if years.
CBC has had a few articles related to art and artists recently, I noticed something about cross border tariffs affecting art shows and exhibits.
But I don't understand how art and art galleries aren't just the perfect vehicle for money laundering in certain cases?
I also have a hard time with it, surely a portion of artists are in the trust fund class, I get the vibe that the really successful ones have massive amounts of connections with wealthy groups and can afford to fail. It's hard to relate to some complaints coming from the artist quarter, ie my gallery is getting shut down, my exhibits are getting held at the border.
Surely, there is still the true starving artist. But if you were true low income, lower class, you wouldn't have gone through art school, you'd be trying to survive and working.
Money laundering. It's perfect, anonymous buyer, all of a sudden you have a bunch of money/assets that can get funneled to whoever at your leisure. And famous high status artists are also high status, highly trusted members of society with important connections. I don't have any proof. Does this ever happen?
Please donate to https://savethecbc2025.ca/ we need your money Americans to support our amazing Olympics coverage thanks!
On the other hand, the news coverage by the CBC is hampering efforts by the Murdoch empire and Post Media to align Canadian sentiments with MAGA, and that is obviously unacceptable.
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