Canada is not building enough Single Family Homes
I know that this is going to be heresy to many of the "just increase density" crowd, but lately I have been alarmed by the level of villainization against any Canadian who aspires to live in a Single Family Home. There seems to be an orchestrated push among multiple levels of our government and amongst our media, political, and corporate elite to discourage the construction of middle-class SFHs, ostensibly to meet GHG emissions reduction goals.
On social media, people like me who want to live in modest SFHs are called entitled, wasteful, disgusting, and privileged. All for wanting a standard of living that was readily obtainable by our parents' generation, our grandparents' generation, our great grandparents' generation and beyond. In fact, Canada has been a mostly home-owning nation since its founding through to the present day. And yet somehow anyone who desires the opportunity to live at the same standard of living as past generations is now worthy of public scorn.
This push to eliminate the middle-class SFH is most apparent when we look at their relative share of housing stock and housing completions. Since 2000, the share of new construction consisting of SFHs has halved, from 62% to 31%. If this trend continues, Canada will increasingly become a nation of high-rise dwelling renters, as the proportion of SFH stock continues to fall. Only the rich will be able to enjoy the previous middle-class standard.
This push is occurring even though Canadians still by-and-large prefer SFHs. When the pandemic gave many Canadians the freedom to relocate to their preferred housing type, rather than flock to high-density towers in city centres, Canadians overwhelmingly chose to move out of cities and into SFHs in the suburbs and beyond.
This failure to build SFHs is the major supply-side component of housing crisis.
Canada is now at an existential crisis. We have to decide whether we are going to maintain the standard of living that Canadians have enjoyed for over a century as a nation of home owners, or whether we are going to allow our political 'betters' to push the middle-class into tiny rental boxes. So far, the policies and propaganda to push Canadians into those rental boxes have been wildly successful.
Posted Apr 26, 2022, 1:32 AM UTC · edited
I live in a house and I never want to live in a condo or apartment ever again. Getting a bunch of groceries in the front door is so much easier with a house. You don't share a wall with neighbors. There is no elevator to break down. I can open all my windows and smell the fresh air. You can't necessarily do that in a condo unless you have a balcony. I love having the option to have a garden that is not just in flowerpots.
I think those people who push hard for density, they... I don't know. They are edgy teens? They are developers?
We don't need to build that many single family homes. We need seniors to downsize. My neighbor has got to be around 75. She lives alone, in a 3 bedroom house. These are the older Baby Boomers. So there's a larger proportion of them than Gen X, Millenials etc