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Tom Monto

Edmonton's affordable housing problem

Timn Cartmell in the Edmonton Journal of says the housing prices are increasing so much because of our high poluation growth.

He looks at Canda overall and observes that Canada is facing what he calls high population growth because it grew 15 percent in 20 years.


But this is less than one percent increase per year.


Two percent growth (doubling each 35 years) is normal.


One percent growth means doubling each 72 years, hardly a rapid rate.


Affordability issue is caused by mis-use of the city's land area and the size of the houses that are being built, that is, houses sized to be affordable are not being built.


Mis-use of our land is of two types:

much land even within a couple blocks of Jasper Avenue and Whyte Avenue are not being used but are sitting empty. These houselots onece held houses, often houses that were perfectly habitable, but they were demolished in preparation for construction that never took place or just to reduce value of the land to avoid prperty tax.

This land is situated along paved roads on fully-serviced lots but is not being used for housing, or any other purpose except speculation. (Instead the city grows out on to farmland with cost incurred by the cityto build new roads and provide new services.)

As well many buildings that once contained living quarters are now being used as business offices, becasue the return on investment (rent) for such is larger


Secondly, building of new houses is being done by taking down old houses, admittedly usually of cheap value, and building more expensive homes that even though larger than their predecessors, like their predecessors each holds only one family.


Small houses of 800-1200 square feet in size and of just one or two stories are not being built even thogh they are much cheaper to build than huge three-story McMansions and thus when sold are less affordable than their predecessors.


So we don't need lots of new houses as if Edmonton is experiencing runaway growth, but we do need many affordable houses.


Either private developers shoud build small houses or the government will have to do it itself.


The city does have money -- it spends hundreds of millions of dollars on highway exchanges these days for example, but it is not building affordable houses or seeing that private developers are doing so in sufficient numbers.


Chanign zoning to allow and make more eaiy for private developers to take down old houses and put up McMansions is not the answer.

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