General Urban Kitchener Updates and Rumours

[Bytor]

The plan the city(cities) and region have is mostly fine anyway.

No, not really. It ignores the missing middle.

so the argument that we need more single family homes is just ridiculous.

That's correct, but that doesn't mean that we mostly need one-bedroom (condo) apartments, either

There is a reason we're building condos and why so many of them only have 1 or 2 bedrooms.

Yeah, it's called bad zoning plans that extremely strongly bias new builds toward single-family houses or condo towers. And the condo towers are biased towards one-bedroom units because the land is expensive, concrete+steel is more expensive than timber-framed, so the developers want to squeeze in as many units as possible so the sale price doesn't go beyond what people are wiling to pay.

It doesn't really have anything to do with "the market" because we've distorted thing with that extreme bias. We don't know whether people want to buy missing middle housing types because for so long we've really only given the the possible of a single-family house or a one-bedroom condo. Surveys usually ask 1) "what type of home do you plan on buying" rather than 2) "What type of housing would you like to buy, if it were available". If you're a young couple wanting to have kids and your only options are a SFH in the 'burbs or a one bedroom condo in the core, of course you're going to say SFH when answering 1), even if you'd really rather have a larger two-bedroom in a mid-rise just outside the core but still walkable to it.

We have no clue how many people are like that, and assuming that everybody just automatically wants an SFH in the 'burbs shows how strongly we've been forced and locked into that box. ironically it's just as tiny, metaphorically speaking, as the "tiny concrete shoe box in the sky" that so many NIMBYs ignorantly rail against.

And since we are also attempting to densify as per our regional plans, that should hopefully open up the door for more missing middle which is one thing residents know we are missing.

No. No they don't.

Missing middle homes can be a good alternative for families who want to live in the city but who don't want or can't afford a detached home in the suburbs, so hopefully we can adjust zoning to make it easier to build such stuff.

Nobody's talking about changing zoning, though. Whenever I bring it up in response to others talking about the housing crisis, outside of niche groups like WRC, I get blank, uncomprehending stares that have never heard of the missing middle (even by a different name), or adamant, even angry rejection of upzoning the 'burbs for a variety of reason WC people are already familiar with.

Kitchener's CRoZBy is a pathetic attempt to make it look like they are without actually doing anything. Changing zoning bylaws isn't even on the radar for Waterloo and Cambridge.