Faced with increasing pressure to respond to widespread concerns about the cost of living and questions about his leadership, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a series of new measures Thursday meant to deal with rising housing and grocery prices.
The GST part is to incentivize new construction, and you are right it will increase profits but without increasing prices for the end consumer, on the contrary if more builders see this as an attractive opportunity, there will be more units built which increases the offer and when the offer goes up, the prices goes down.
Hopefully it somehow managed to avoid the trend of only building higher end housing to increase those profit margins.
That one is caused by zoning.
If I can make a low-rise building and sell 12 units for $250k on the same property that I can build two detached houses to sell for a $million, I’ll do the former, right?
But city hall is going to make me drag out the approval process for the low-rise for 3 years and grind me down to 6 units. I’ll just save the ball-ache and build the mcmansions.
Zoning laws are definitely a big (probably the largest) part of it, but it’s not the only issue. Even when buildings with a higher number of units is approved, they tend to be more upscale. There’s not a lot of lower end housing being built in any capacity.
