.MilkeMark says the best way to reduce housing costs is for government to get out of the way by speeding up the approval process through hard and fast deadlines.
August 22, 2022
“What I propose in the paper is that there’s an onus on city bureaucracies to approve a project within a certain time frame. If they don’t approve it, it’s approved automatically for good or bad, and that would put some pressure on to make sure projects move through the system quite quickly,” Milke said.
“Some cities are easier to do business in and others are not. It’s not just on the regulation side, the cost per hectare to develop. The cost to build new homes in Calgary is twice that of surrounding communities,” he said. Milke said current efforts such as Vancouver’s push towards densification and accommodation in Canadian cities for laneway residences is helping to an extent to alleviate housing pressures but pointed to other factors such as immigration as another pressure point.