‘Luxury takes time. We don’t have time’: The former top military officer on a mission to fix the Dutch housing crisis (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 19 hours ago by sbv@sh.itjust.works to c/canada@lemmy.ca

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It's interesting to perspectives from elsewhere. The Netherlands is also facing a housing crisis, and they're also talking about significant increases in construction. Part of that will be to limit local control.

Interestingly, they're also talking about changing the type of construction: fewer rooms.

There isn't quite enough context to explain why that would help, but it's something I haven't really heard politicians saying here in Canada.

What changes would you make to speed up housing growth here?

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[-] VibeSurgeon@piefed.social 8 points 17 hours ago

The playbook for building massive amounts of housing at affordable prices exists already, you can copy basically everything Sweden did in their project Miljonprogrammet.

The government funds construction of the housing. Large buyer = big leverage to get costs down in contract negotiations
Build apartment buildings. Sharing walls with neighbours = lower cost per unit of housing
Standardize the building designs. Less customization = lower costs
Pre-build modules and assemble on-site. Factory construction = lower costs

With the density afforded by this construction pattern it also makes lots of sense to build great transit in connection with the area, and some retail nearby/in the same building. This further improves the overall efficiency of the area

[-] ZC3rr0r@piefed.ca 6 points 16 hours ago

Sadly, it appears the lessons from the Miljonprogrammet have been lost in Sweden too. Last I checked housing in Göteborg and Stockholm (and to a lesser extent Malmö and Uppsala) has also become unaffordable to purchase for folks, with privat sector rents going through the roof and social housing programs struggling to keep up with the increasing demand.

[-] VibeSurgeon@piefed.social 5 points 16 hours ago

Oh yeah, they have definitely been forgotten here.

[-] sbv@sh.itjust.works 2 points 16 hours ago

From what I understand, 3 and 4 are the current plan from the feds. 1 and 2 would be cool too.

[-] BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 3 points 17 hours ago

This is how Japan has "affordable" housing. 300 square foot per person or less on average. Bedrooms get reused during the day by putting the bed away.

Laundry is in the kitchen or bathroom, no dedicated space. No utility closets.

No yards, no property setbacks, and for a lot of apartments no parking at all or only single stalls for some people.

You can see all of this in the way they name their rental/sales listings.

1DK means 1 bedroom, with a dining room and a kitchen. Dining room meaning that the kitchen is large enough for a table, not a separate room.

1LDK adds a living room. That's still likely under 400 square feet.

1K also exists. It's literally 100-200 square feet and a kitchen in the main area, and a bathroom. The bathroom has a clothes washer, but no dryer. Most people hang dry in their room or balcony.

We honestly should build entire towers with a hundred 1K units here within 1 block of transit hubs and no parking.

Even our micro housing is not usually this small and most zoning bylaws dont allow for anything like that.

Giving people an absolute minimum option relieves stress on the other larger units which brings overall prices down. Such buildings would be much cheaper because they use less land and as the original post mentions they have zero luxuries. It's copy paste of the simplest possible housing unit and your only customization is wall paint colour.

[-] sbv@sh.itjust.works 4 points 16 hours ago

Those sound like rooms in a boarding house. That would be way better for some people than larger units, or living on the street.

I guess the key is that they need to be affordable.

[-] BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 hours ago

A boarding house usually has shared spaces as well. These units do not. They almost all have external facing doors too. More like a tiny motel than a boarding house or dorms.

[-] GreenBeard@lemmy.ca 2 points 14 hours ago

That's the problem. Here it would be billed as a "Luxury Tiny Home Experience" and they'd charge $3k/month rent. Corpos know plebs don't have money, so the only market is the luxury market.

[-] healthetank@lemmy.ca 4 points 19 hours ago

I guess the question is, what price would you require to drop down one or two bedrooms?

We used to have much smaller homes. Our enormous houses aren't helping our cost, for sure, but its a difficult sell for many. I had to convince my wife we didn't need a huge house when we moved, and managed to get her to look at sub2k sqft houses. The amount of space we STILL don't use is ridiculous, but she wasn't willing to go below 1750.

[-] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 3 points 18 hours ago

Post world war 2 the CMHC built all these houses that were perfectly adequate for families for one or two generations. The quality has fallen off as they were built with cheap materials, but they lasted long enough to solve a crisis.

I don’t know why we can’t mass build housing like that in areas like North Bay or small cities with suitable power and sewage capacity.

It’s not like North Bay doesn’t need workers either, it would go well with Ring of Fire type initiatives.

[-] healthetank@lemmy.ca 2 points 17 hours ago

Tbh its not even that we need to sacrifice quality at this point. we have the knowledge to do good builds.

Build lowrise or duplex townhomes that are big enough for families, in the 800-1200sqft range, and save on building costs. Save on the space, so land costs and servicing costs stay low. Sure its not as appealing as a suburban house with a huge backyard and no shared walls, but its a lot cheaper, and it'll alleviate the housing crunch.

I've said it before, but my firm works with municipalities as the external engineer to review development plans. Those have all dried up the in last 6months, despite the housing crunch still being here. Know why? Costs have come down since people can't afford it, which means developers are willing to sit on vacant land and/or approved plans and hope that costs will rise again before building. They're hoping this dip is a short term correction.

This isn't sustainable. We need a nonprofit or govt funded builder providing supply regardless of what the financial feasibility of doing so is, based on the required demand for housing. Housing should not be a commodity, nor should be it a retirement plan.

[-] sbv@sh.itjust.works 1 points 16 hours ago

I find it's a phase of life thing. My partner and I used to live in a 700ish square foot, single bedroom apartment. We loved that thing. With kids, that would be really hard. But I expect we'll go back to something similar after our kids are established.

[-] healthetank@lemmy.ca 1 points 14 hours ago

For sure- I think house size does need to scale with family size. But no family is big enough these days for a 3k sqft house, especially not a typical nuclear 4 person one. 12 or 1500 is sufficient for most 4 person families while still maintaining standards theyre used to, though obviously layout can make a big difference.

[-] ZC3rr0r@piefed.ca 1 points 16 hours ago

That's so relatable, and I don't know where that desire for ever expanding housing comes from. And it's not just the house sizes increasing themselves (and the associated price of housing going up) that's a problem. Ever growing square footage also directly impact the cost of living for folks as maintenance, repairs, heating, and electricity costs all scale right along with the size of the building.

If we can get folks to accept smaller houses we can tackle the two biggest affordability problems we are dealing with, but nobody seems to want to accept that message.

[-] nyan@lemmy.cafe 3 points 19 hours ago

Cut the private sector out of things altogether, and start a government initiative to build housing to a limited set of designs in the areas where it's most needed. Ideally, pay the people actually doing the work better than the private sector does, so that they gravitate toward the government jobs. Helps the economy, makes one segment of people who've been profiting off this look silly, generates housing—what's not to like?

Failing that, tell for-profit building companies, "You must not only build N affordable housing units for every for-profit luxury unit, you must build the affordable units first. No, you may not pay to get out of this. If you do not do this, you will be fined three times the inflated price you assigned to your luxury build for every offence. If one of the affordable units is found to be defective in materials or worksmanship within five years of the build, you will fix it at your cost, or it won't count toward your total of affordable units. If you try to dissolve your company or file for bankruptcy, you will need to place funds in escrow to cover this first—if there's any left after five years, it'll be released to you or your creditors as appropriate. If you buy out another company, you assume its construction and maintenance obligations."

Either way, continue until a reasonable stock of housing exists. Of course, none of it will ever happen.

[-] GreenBeard@lemmy.ca 4 points 14 hours ago

There's a really simple answer. Many countries have done it before. The best example is the UK "Council Housing" system that they used to clean out the tenements and slums in the late 1800s.

First of all, we have to deal with the the fact that a lot of people have their whole life savings wrapped up in their houses. You issue "Canada housing bonds" and buy them out with bonds. This gives them an investment vehicle that can be traded or held until mature to ensure they're not losing their shirts and we end up with a bunch of old people who can't take care of themselves. Then you turn around, transfer those to municipal governments along with a bunch of development loans. Cities manage the properties, the already have massive construction and maintenance contracts on public buildings so by economy of scale they can actually build and maintain buildings at a lower cost than private property owners.

The loans back the bonds, the rents pay the loans, and you can still set rents so low, being a private landlord is no longer profitable and get a reasonable return on the bonds. At the height of the program in the UK the average rent was around 10-15% of monthly income and around 40% of the country had lived some part of their lives in council housing. The system was so effective it basically rebuilt Britain after the German Blitz. We have nearly 100 years data on both the positives, the potential hazards, and how to mitigate them.

We know how to fix this, we just won't. It doesn't make rich people richer and so there's no political will to actually go out and do it.