Carney lays out his plan to build a lot more affordable housing in Canada (www.sootoday.com)

submitted 1 week ago by Sunshine@piefed.social to c/canada@lemmy.ca

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[-] BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 week ago

It's not doubtful that condos are more expensive per square foot than detached houses. Google it, those numbers are widely available.

Condos do not house more people per square foot at this point, In Canada right now, most people in condos have 0 or 1 child. Total fertility per woman is like 1.2 at the moment, and lower than that average for people living in Condos. 800 square feet divided by 2 is 400 square feet each. Even if they had 1 child, it's still 266 square feet per person.

Those houses they built after the war were small, less than 1500 square feet, and houses after the World War had LOTS of children. That was literally how the baby boomer generation came into being. The total fertility per woman was something like 3.6-4 for the decade after the war ended. 1500 square feet divided by 6 is 250 square feet.

I did the math on a condo project in Vancouver (not even in downtown, just in the City across the bridge) the land cost for each unit they were building was $300,000. That number alone makes them unaffordable, before even talking about the construction costs. That doesn't include any interest cost on holding the property while under development.

Land costs are currently a prohibitive factor in literally everything at this point.

[-] MyBrainHurts@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 week ago

Think this through with your own numbers but without time swapping the fertility rates across generations. (Suddenly having a house means we're going to pump out 4 kids? Holy bold assumptions Batman!)

Say a condo at 800 feet, 800 / 3 = 266.

Even a small house, 1500 / 3 = 500.

Heck, even if we double the fertility rate for folks in a small detached home, you're still ahead:

1500 / 4 = 350.

I did the math on a condo project in Vancouver (not even in downtown, just in the City across the bridge) the land cost for each unit they were building was $300,000. That number alone makes them unaffordable, before even talking about the construction costs.

Yeah, so essentially some of the most expensive real estate in the country, no doubt it's going to be more expensive. That's why you have to build condos there not detached homes. Try putting a detached home there. Do that and the house is suddenly what, tens of millions?

In this case, you're effectively saying that because we build condos where it is too expensive to put detached homes, condos are more expensive? That's some pretty silly logic there.