Canada’s inhabitants is rising by about 500,000 per yr. The brand new residents want housing. The place ought to these new properties be constructed?
Readers can in all probability predict that I’ll suggest letting the market decide the situation of the brand new housing. However let’s suppose you had different objectives, past market effectivity. Suppose you wished to protect Canada’s lovely wilderness areas. In that case, the place would you construct the housing?
British Columbia is an particularly lovely Canadian province, absolutely of snow-capped mountains and deep fiords. If the objective had been to protect that wilderness, then the optimum location of recent housing could be in present city areas—construct up, not out. That additionally occurs to be the answer that will be adopted in a free market. And that’s precisely what Canada’s indigenous individuals have determined to do. They’re planning to erect a huge housing growth stuffed with excessive rise buildings proper within the metropolis of Vancouver (on native owned land.):
Sure, I get the joke—and it’s form of humorous. And on the danger of being a killjoy, I’d additionally prefer to level out that this really is the “pro-wilderness” answer.
Ronald Coase wouldn’t be shocked.
