Michael Wiebe

Time to Get Serious About Non-Market Housing Non-market housing is in crisis—and that's a problem for residents in every other kind of home, too. It's time to rebalance our housing ecosystem.

Article:
www.urban-progress.com/articles/tim...

Corinth and Irvine have an article on this. When market rents are cheaper, subsidies go further:

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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Great article by @helenl.bsky.social on non-market housing. One important point: demand for non-market housing is related to the supply of market housing.

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So these projects started pre-covid?

No—we need to go longer.

What caused the boom?

For the same number of bedrooms, location, etc?

Yes, something to indicate that the land has been upgraded to have more uses (ie building apartments).

Formal writeup here:
michaelwiebe.com/blog/2025/07...

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The upzoned parcel itself increases in value, but this is irrelevant. What matters is that upzoning makes it easier to apartment-developers to acquire land: lower input costs = lower housing prices.

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Upzoning is like double musical chairs: it moves a chair (parcel) from the single-family game to the apartment game, making it easier for apartment-developers to get a chair.

And since apartments are a cheaper form of housing, this improves overall affordability.

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Let's talk about vacancy chains

bsky.app/profile/mich...

Vacancy chains How building expensive new homes lowers the price of old homes

www.buildingabundance.ca/p/vacancy-ch...

New project: I'm writing a literature review called Building Abundance on housing and infrastructure research.

First post is reviewing the literature on vacancy chains, link below.

Classic reasoning: "why should we build a bridge here? No one commutes here anyway"

First Shaughnessy has a floor space ratio of 0.25?!

bylaws.vancouver.ca/zoning/zonin...

Demand based zoning – Mountain Doodles What if zoning was responsive to underlying demand to live in an area? A simple model to estimate demand-based zoning in Vancouver.

When discussing reforms like multiplex zoning, demand estimates rarely enter the discussion (except as a force to be countered).
@lausterna.bsky.social and I think that’s unfortunate and we run some simple estimates what it would look like to zone for the demand to live in an area.

YouTube video by About Here The Problem with "Luxury Housing"

How would you classify this argument?

"No to megatowers, yes to affordable housing"
youtu.be/pbQAr3K57WQ

Your argument is "that's liberal-nimbyism, not left-nimbyism"?

Maybe the issue is your idiosyncratic terminology.

Important point by @jensvb.bsky.social and @lausterna.bsky.social: when people move out to live on their own, their housing costs go up, but (by revealed preference) they are better off. Hence, housing costs alone are an incomplete picture.

doodles.mountainmath.ca/posts/2025-0...

Prop 13 again?

BC has assessments split by land and structures.

What if P(God will send you to hell for praying)>0?

Do you think market rents are disconnected from, say, the top 10% of wages?

But also, it was affordable before the current vacancy?

Did they actually make apartments feasible, or are there still regulations about height, setbacks, parking, etc that kill projects?

Ok, so you're saying that no market-rate housing is affordable, no matter how old it is?
(Because when it is vacated, the landlord raises the rent above an affordable level)

Vacancy chains take 1-2 years. This is totally different from depreciation, where it takes decades for new housing to age and become cheap.

Markets have been blocked by zoning regulations. We need to max out on both market-rate housing and subsidized housing.

Local Effects of Large New Apartment Buildings in Low-Income Areas Abstract. We study the local effects of new market-rate housing in low-income areas using microdata on large apartment buildings, rents, and migration. New buildings decrease rents in nearby units by ...

Have you seen this?
direct.mit.edu/rest/article...

You think the rent of old 3-storey walkup apartments is the same as the rent of new apartment buildings?