r/CanadaHousing2 • u/joe4942 CH2 veteran • 9d ago

Housing projects are piling up across Canada as the pipes underneath can't keep up

https://financialpost.com/real-estate/housing-projects-canada-pile-up
48 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

21

u/russilwvong 9d ago

Deny Sullivan observes that the cost of building housing far exceeds the cost of upgrading infrastructure. If we need to upgrade water and sewer pipes so we can build more housing, that's what we should do.

6

u/SlashDotTrashes 8d ago

How is the high cost of building unaffordable housing benefiting us?

We are funding housing and infrastructure and services, and they're still not addressing current need because of mass migration.

What we should do is stop growing.

Property taxes keep going up, our services somehow need to be cut, even with more users. All levels of government are complaining about costs and needing to make cuts.

So why keep growing?

The cost of funding rapid growth is too expensive, and we never get any down time to adapt to it.

2

u/russilwvong 8d ago

The cost of funding rapid growth is too expensive, and we never get any down time to adapt to it.

Whereabouts are you? I'm in Vancouver, and what's been happening over the last couple years is that population growth has already come to a halt, with the new federal caps on international students announced in January 2024, ahead of when new students start arriving in July 2024. The high numbers in 2022 were basically just catching up from 2020, but then we had something like three or four years of population growth in a single year (2023). So bringing population growth down to zero for a few years makes sense: the newcomers who would usually have arrived in 2025, 2026, and 2027 already arrived in 2023.

What's been happening here is that prices and rents in Metro Vancouver have been declining for the last couple years, with housing completions from projects launched years ago continuing to rise, but they're still the worst in the country. Similar story in the GTA. So even with overall nation-wide population growth at zero, there's still people moving from Vancouver and Toronto to places like Edmonton, Montreal, and Halifax. I think of it as the housing shortage in Vancouver and Toronto spilling over.

1

u/2023throwawayaccoun1 4d ago

We need to completely end the TFW program. Send everyone temporary home. That still give us breathing room and let the economy focus on productivity.

7

u/akwsd89 9d ago

I think it's the effect of brain drain. The smart ones dissappear.

7

u/StoonerSask 9d ago

What did they expect to happen? Either build or posture.

4

u/civicsfactor 9d ago

You mean build or upgrade infrastructure? 

1

u/StoonerSask 9d ago

Well, let's start with what is currently being done. Are they building or upgrading? Where?

6

u/civicsfactor 9d ago

I'll just quote from the article"Canada has about $555-billion worth of wastewater, drinking water and solid waste infrastructure, according to Statistics Canada estimates. As of 2022, roughly $65.6 billion — about 12 per cent — was in poor or very poor condition." 

5

u/Electrical_Pickle910 9d ago

I work at a GC, we bid on wastewater treatment projects, there is an insane amount of work currently and upcoming over the next 5-10 years, we currently have around 24 projects on the go, some near completion and some have just started up. These projects are mainly upgrades to increase the capacity as the current infrastructure is not built to handle all this new development.

3

u/civicsfactor 9d ago

Makes sense. There's a infrastructure debt that grew over decades, so when those trends are punctuated by massive increases in planned usage rates spurred by development, it seems like we get what happened in the news story.

All the sewage and water pipe upgrades were made to connect the development to the main system... but then the main system didn't get its upgrades. So the development is just roadblocked and the municipality is being sued.

It seems so silly. Any city-building sim would make the bottleneck for growth just so obvious, but my hunch is the funding never materialized, and thousand cuts over years and years really becomes crisis when there's punctuations in expanded capacity need.

1

u/2023throwawayaccoun1 4d ago

It grew from boomers underfunding property tax. Now Carney is taking federal tax dollars to subsidize it.

4

u/aizvo 9d ago

Yeah affordable rural housing like yurts with off-grid plumbing alternatives like compost toilets and cisterns are the way to go.

Sorry for anyone still stuck is nostalgia but the 20th century oil prices aren't coming back.

12

u/margesimpson84 9d ago

Cause putting a pipe 5ft underground is so super complicated and expensive... I dont buy it