2y ago

How Vancouver made affordability illegal

www.straight.com

When it comes to addressing the housing crisis, few people think about zoning. The correlation isn’t easily apparent, despite this being the most powerful tool cities have.

8 comments

More than one word: zoning was used as a weapon of class warfare a long time ago and needs updating.
Also: cheap clickbait title to a news page littered with notification/subscription spam. Archive.is is needed.
- zoning was used as a weapon of class warfare a long time ago and needs updating.
  Is it not working as a weapon anymore?
  
  Only in the deep recesses of the minds of people who will only ever see themselves as victims.
Helen Lui has been hitting it out of the park with her recent articles. She is a good one to follow on Twitter for this type of stuff, too.
few people think about zoning.
Huh? In my experience, that's the first thing people think about.
Hell, a significant number of housing-related articles posted here are about suggesting alternative affordability solutions to remind us that there are other approaches we can try when trying to fix zoning has been unsuccessful.
- I think it's easy to forget communities like this one, twitter, or even city-related subreddits are still very, very small fractions of the general population. People I talk to outside these bubbles are shocked to learn it's practically illegal to build an apartment in 80% of the land in Vancouver and Toronto, or the further implications on affordability.

8 comments