Isn't 80% or some other ridiculous percentage of population of Canada in large cities? If a large portion of your population is living in large cities and large cities are experiencing a housing shortage then it makes sense to me to say there is a housing shortage in Canada.

The issue with this is most parts of large cities are substantially less dense than incredibly livible neighborhoods such as the plateau area of Montreal.

It is illegal to build such a neighborhood in 99% of Canada. People love it here, people start families here, tourists visit, it's quite, lots of parks and shops.

And it's 3-4 as dense as most areas of most major cities. But we've made it illegal to build. For zoning, double stairway rules, minimum parking rules, setback rules, strict permitting requirements, and thousands of other things.

Canada's housing crisis goes well beyond just the large cities. It extends into small towns as far as the Yukon. It may be a somewhat different situation compared with the US.

> Once again, there is NO SHORTAGE of affordable housing either in the US or in Canada.

> None. Nada. Zilch. Ноль. 零

Interesting. 零 means zero. But my (non-native!) instinct says that it's impossible to use it this way. I feel like you'd need 没有.

Classical Chinese has a negative universal quantifier 莫 (though in a technical sense it's an adverb and doesn't modify or stand in for nouns), but I don't think I've ever seen anything similar in modern Mandarin. I feel like I'd have to use a positive quantifier and a negative claim.

That's quite the popular and facile argument.

It’s a symptom of endless government regulation, bureaucratic overreach, and NIMBYism.

One of the worst developments in the history of government is this incessant creep of regulations and codes that specify, in excruciating detail, how residential land must be developed. How wide the streets are, how many lanes of traffic there are, how far the sidewalks are from the road, how far the front door is from the sidewalk, how much of the back yard is visible from the sidewalk, how houses must be arranged, how wide a house must be relative to the property width, how short/tall a house must be, how many separate entrances are allowed, … and on and on and on the regulations go. This has the effect of making old style neighbourhoods (with real character) impossible to build in the modern day. It also highly restricts the usage of the land and the number of structures in a way that make it impossible to have multi-family dwellings, studio apartments above houses, artists’ cottages in the back yard, coach houses, small used book stores or cafes in residential neighbourhoods, etc.

The new urbanist movement [1] talks a lot about this. They’ve argued for the return of streetcar suburbs [2] and I agree with them. These places are extremely beautiful to live in. They foster a far deeper sense of community than modern suburbia. They are wonderful spaces for humans to live in rather than places for urban planners who want to play SimCity in real life.

I don’t blame old people or any other particular group though. This is a widespread phenomenon of cultural and regulatory evolution by people who did not anticipate the final result. Now we’re stuck with this morass and the political will to fix it is still in its infancy. There’s also simply the hard problem that we can’t just bulldoze whole neighbourhoods to rebuild them the old way.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Urbanism

[2] https://youtu.be/MWsGBRdK2N0?si=Xw_E04B5q7HjpV7p

As much as I love to kick sand at the boomers, I'm sad to say that I've seen the exact same sort of behaviours from my millennial cohort that have been lucky enough to get their foothold on the housing ladder.

All of this sort of NIMBYism stems from a deep core problem of exclusivity seeking behaviours, classism and even racism.