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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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