Just adding "more supply" the way that developers and the real estate industry want will not work.
It's all the product of corruption.
Speculators & money laundering drive the market. Projects driven by developers wants (i.e. build cheap, sell fast, then GTFO), instead of society's needs.
Rental housing is routinely destroyed in favour of condos that almost nobody can afford. Zoning is warped, agricultural and industrial land rezoned as residential. Forests hacked down to build condos immediately with no intermediate step. Greenery gone, quality of life destroyed. Public land is sold off cheap to private developers, under the guise of revitalizing civic facilities (rec centres, hospitals, etc.).
Mayors and councils think only about increasing the tax base at any cost, just adding more and more properties, more and more population. It never occurs to them that driving working people out to the boonies will kill their cities, and make peoples lives much harder by adding the burden of super-long commutes.
Centralized, long-term planning? There is none. Even the building of the Skytrain lines was done so stupidly that they dithered over when or where to put it in, as the land values skyrocketed. Business will never create a city that makes sense in the big picture - their goal is just to grab small patches of land, convert it from low value to high value, then sell it. It's doesn't need to make sense or even be built well; it just needs to have just enough gloss to pass muster with colluding bureaucrats and municipal officials. Even though they benefit from government corruption and weakness, they developers still run well-funded media campaigns to complain about "red tape". It's not red tape to say they should only build what people here actually want or need.
All of this could be stopped if the elected officials had the backbone to say "no", but the big problem is that governments never say "no" to developers. They barely have the balls to tell them to delay or redesign. Pet projects get rammed through, but public opposition is routinely ignored. Cities are promised all sorts of things which the developers never deliver on, or just cheap token measures to fill the dead space, like dog parks and community gardens. Really the purpose is just to pretend they ever gave a fuck.
Until the reforms to municipal campaign finance were brought in, a lot of mayors and councils owed their whole political careers to donations by developers. When that sponsor money was cut off, a lot of the crooked pols chose to retire.
Instead of developers asking permission for projects they want, governments should say what they want in a location, and private contractors can bid for the right to build it. Well, nobody ever does that do they?
We (still) end up with a city built for the elite, mostly overseas investment and laundering black market money, not just from here but world wide.
So how is doing more of the same failed "build condos on every patch of ground, ignore the consequences" routine going to actually solve anything? Over 20 years of building like crazy for people nobody knows, while the actual citizens see their incomes stagnate and their cities become more unlivable with each passing day.
