From faster approvals to hiring more workers, governments need to step up: experts
Peter Armstrong · CBC News
That is absolutely not true. Tokyo famously has some of the most affordable real estate of any major world city. You can buy a spacious detached home in the Tokyo area for less than in Hamilton, ON. Despite the stereotype, Japanese homes are bigger than the average in most European countries.
Montreal has had the most affordable housing of the big Canadian cities. Why? Because they have the least land restricted to single family homes. Check out this zoning map. Even now, Montreal has three times the housing starts of Vancouver.
The reason why we build shoeboxes is because we preserve single family home zoning. Super high density towers, or super low density suburbs, the two most expensive forms of housing with nothing in between. To tackle affordability, we need missing middle housing. And I totally disagree about using up space: suburban sprawl sucks. I want to live in charming medium density!
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Tokyo has affordable units, but not per square foot which is what I said. The average family lives in less than 200 square foot per person. Half the Canadian population wouldn’t even fit in a Japanese sized bathroom because they’re too fat. The unit sizes is so small even our micro apartments here look massive.
A detached single family home in tokyo is often less than 700 square feet on 400 square feet of land. This level of density simply isn’t necessary in Canada, and we shouldn’t be using it as a model of affordability.
The reason Montreal is cheap is because its French and nobody wants to live there. Very little growth.
I honestly don’t know where you’re getting your information from. Homes in Tokyo are famously very affordable, and units are bigger than in comparable cities like New York or Paris. This is very well known in the urban planning community, so it goes to show you’re new at this topic and making things up.
Montreal has had a growing population for years. The Francophonie is huge and Montreal is a popular destination. Your anti-French bigotry is showing. Last time they had a speculation bubble in the early 2000s, they quickly built more affordable medium density supply and the bubble receded.
That article you linked is just straight up wrong, it says Tokyo grew by over a million people in the last 10 years. 2013 population was 37.116m and 2023 is 37.194m, that’s a growth of only 78,000 people over a decade, and equates to a growth rate of 0.2% over 10 years, or 0.02% per year. It peaked in 2018 and has been declining since. https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/21671/tokyo/population
Yet prices still went up around 20% over the last 5 years. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/QJPN628BIS
They say it’s affordable, but they also forget that affordable doesn’t mean “cheaper” it means “cheaper as a percentage of income” The average income in New York is almost twice that of Tokyo. https://versus.com/en/new-york-vs-tokyo/avg-salary
I’m hardly new to this topic, I’ve lived in Japan multiple times. Every time I see an article about affordability in Tokyo it’s written by someone who has never actually lived in 120 square feet. I’ve slept on a 1 inch thick mattress that I had to put away to use my apartment during the day, have you?
Urban planners are not who we should be looking to. They’re given direction by politicians, they don’t get to set the policies that would optimize for affordable housing.
Affordable housing doesn’t exist for one simple reason, there are too many owners who benefit from using their housing as an investment. 65% of all residential properties are owned by the family living in them. Until we remove the ability to make money off simply living in a house, they will never be affordable. Convincing voters of that is going to take another few decades at the very least.
