The YIMBY movement in the GTA is gaining steam

Supply and demand is a pretty simple concept to understand. If there are fewer items for sale, and a constant level of people who want to buy that item, prices go up. If there’s an increasing number of people who want to buy an item, and the supply of that item remains constant, prices rise.

As the population continues to increase, the GTA needs to keep building, even if those units are expensive, as more affluent people will buy and rent the new suites, freeing up less expensive units. This is called filtering, or a vacancy chain. The problem is that if you don’t build enough new units, the vacancy chain is broken, and it does not free up enough units for the least affluent people at the bottom of the market.

Pro-development stance

This is a hard concept for many people, but if you don’t build any expensive new cars, there will not be enough cheaper used cars for people to buy down the road.

This concept has birthed a new movement that believes building new housing will help with the housing affordability crisis. YIMBYs believe in the “Yes in My Back Yard” philosophy, a pro-development stance that holds the opinion that if we want more people to have homes, we need to build more homes.

This is in contrast to the NIMBY, or Not in My Back Yard, folks who oppose new development in their communities.

Housing advocate and Buildstack founder Chris Spoke appeared on the Toronto Under Construction podcast to discuss YIMBYs and key concepts and ideas around cities and new development. Cities are labour markets. The main reason you would move to a city is for access to more job options, and being close to restaurants and nightlife is secondary to being close to where you work.

According to Spoke, your place of employment is the most significant factor in where you live. He says that once a commute takes around an hour, people start looking for jobs closer to their homes. Smaller markets tend to be less innovative and productive.

Upzone and liberalize land use rules

Spoke also points out that not building enough housing forces people out of productive and innovative cities such as Toronto, but actually increases construction costs within the city. We have processes that are shaped by NIMBY forces that make it take longer and cost more than it should. Interestingly, the democratic process is also one of the main factors that contributes to the increasing cost of construction. The lack of qualified individuals (politicians and the general public) with a say in certain projects is causing the delays and cost overruns.

YIMBYS believe that our housing issues are relatively easy to solve; we just need to upzone and liberalize land use rules.

With these changes, we’d see more missing middle housing, more midrise and larger units for families. Spoke believes people should be able to live and raise a family in Toronto on one income. This should be the main objective of any politician running for office in Ontario and Toronto.

Spoke and I both agree that more housing activism is needed, and we both love and admire the work done by the More Neighbours group, and we suggest checking them out and reading their work.

If you’re reading this, you probably have some interest in buying a new home or in the new home industry, and it is as important as ever to support politicians that support new housing and have a YIMBY mindset.