“This has become probably the most important both economic and political problem facing the country right now,” said Tyler Meredith, a former head of economic strategy and planning for Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland.
“And especially given the significant emphasis the government has put on immigration and the relationship between immigration and the housing market, there is a need to do more.”
It is a fundamental issue with the way we have been building and running the urban and economic fabric of our cities. Car centric design and infinite growth housing goals have pushed our cities into debt building sprawling suburbia. The economy also shifted away from manufacturing and production towards more service industries that support suburbia and add less value to the overall economy. Canadians have been spending more on necessities while making less in wages and part of this is influenced by the financially unstable ways we build our cities, the reliance on automobiles, and a less productive per capita economy.
While I disagree about service industries bringing less value to the economy (remember, the technical term service industry doesn’t refer to the hospitality industries like hotels and restaurants, but instead things like programming, design, and making movies).
On the other hand, yes, suburbia is the death of economies and livability. I hate how people are more willing to spend two hours driving 100km every day to work than to live without a lawn but be in walking distance of everything you need every week. And that doesn’t take into consideration that suburbia actually costs tax dollars to maintain rather than high density mixed uses urban areas that actually generate taxes instead. People forget that the downtown areas of most cities are actually subsidizing the suburbs, rather than their land taxes paying for themselves.
The subsidizing of suburban development is the biggest issue of it all in my opinion. It is poor economic and land use policy that almost exclussively promotes car centric infrastructure.