• wampus@lemmy.ca
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    1 day ago

    Well, the noise he’s making doesn’t rule out having a fab site in each province, or a few even. Also, the work they’re describing in terms of streamlining the bureaucratic side, would likely be working towards the backyard suite option etc. He explicitly mentions working towards sorting out municipal roadblocks, if I remember right? The real question mark for me is what price point propping up the industry with gov investment will bring overall – like right now, many of the ‘decent’ sized prefabs I’ve seen start at like $200-300k. That, ontop of the really high land cost in the metropolitan areas, means its likely still outside the reach for most locals working local jobs. You’d either need to use inherited land and redevelop it, redevelop it for higher density, and/or build outside the major metropolitan areas (it’d be interesting to see if they got housing back down to reasonable levels in many of the small-medium sized towns/cities, if we’d see a migration of people… I’d be in favour of that, just not sure how it’d play out).

    Like personally, I have a parent who’s likely to move into a home soon, potentially selling his property in the lower mainland. If there were an “easy” option to instead redevelop that property (cause the house is ancient/not great), and drop down a few modular units for the main resident + 1 or 2 renters, I’d happily drop some money on that, prolly be able to convince my siblings to kick in too as the combo of main property + renters would eventually be some passive income to pay down any loan required to finish it off even quicker. I think that’s the sort of ‘shift’ that Carney’s approach would generally encourage, or that they want to try and encourage, as it opens up additional housing space. The question is whether they can get it to a price point that it makes sense to invest in it, especially as many people are fairly tapped in terms of financing these days it seems.