General Urban Kitchener Updates and Rumours

[tomh009]

But in both cases, they also recognize that restricting housing pushes up prices which I believe benefits them as well.

Restricting housing (through zoning) certainly increases land prices, which is reflected in the real estate prices -- not sure which way the causality runs there. But are the developer profit margins substantially higher now than they were five or ten years ago, given that their input costs have also gone up? I don't really know. I suspect surfing the financials for some publicly-traded developers might give us the answer to that, but I don't really have the time for that at the moment.

However, on the flip side, reducing the zoning constraints would increase the number of development opportunities, and somebody would need to build those projects, too, more likely an existing developer than someone who has never developed a property before. So, there would be growth opportunities there, too.