Latest / The Missing Middle Podcast / Is Alberta Killing Its Housing Advantage? | Interview with Millennial Moron

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Is Alberta Killing Its Housing Advantage? | Interview with Millennial Moron · The Missing Middle Podcast

0:00
SPEAKER_02: They're trying to get the supply in place before it becomes a supply crunch, before it becomes an affordability crisis, rather than just scrambling to respond to it as pretty much every other city is doing.
0:09
SPEAKER_02: Anti-development people, the NIMBY's, whatever you want to call them, have leapfrogged over the municipal government and gone to the provincial government.
0:17
SPEAKER_01: Compared to provinces like Ontario and British Columbia, Alberta has been seen as a housing affordability model, but progress in Calgary and Edmonton is facing pushback and provincial interference.
0:30
SPEAKER_01: Both cities have been at the center of debates over multiplexes and infield development, raising a bigger question: who gets to decide what can be built and where?
0:40
SPEAKER_01: Today we're joined by Millennial Moron, a Canadian commentator who uses data, humor, and a healthy dose of skepticism to examine housing and public policy.
0:50
SPEAKER_01: We'll look at what's happening in Calgary and Edmonton, why the politics of NFIL are proving so contentious, and what Danielle Smith's intervention could mean for the future of housing in Alberta.
1:03
SPEAKER_00: Classonomics, hosted by Sabrina Matto and Mike Moffat.
1:08
SPEAKER_01: So, millennial, uh, thank you so much for being here today.
1:12
SPEAKER_01: Thanks for having me.
1:13
SPEAKER_01: Oh, no worries.
1:14
SPEAKER_01: This is something uh this has been on our wish list uh for a while.
1:17
SPEAKER_01: So let's jump right into it.
1:19
SPEAKER_01: And uh before we talk about you, let's talk about me.
1:23
SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, about a year ago, we uh put out a research report that assigned letter grades to each of the provinces based on a variety of housing metrics.
1:32
SPEAKER_01: And uh Alberta didn't like it so much.
1:34
SPEAKER_01: And in fact, I think uh Premier Smith denounced me personally, uh, but they did score well in a number of categories, and they actually ranked number one uh for increasing housing supply relative to population growth.
1:48
SPEAKER_01: And you know, that's no easy task.
1:50
SPEAKER_01: You know, last year, Calgary and Edmonton were the only metros in Canada to see their populations grow by more than 50,000 people.
1:57
SPEAKER_01: Uh, to put that in perspective, the number three city, Ottawa, where I live, we grew by less than 40,000.
2:04
SPEAKER_01: GTA didn't grow at all.
2:05
SPEAKER_01: So, uh, you know, we've got these these two cities in Alberta that they're growing really quickly, but we've also got some some housing blowback.
2:13
SPEAKER_01: So you kind of give us a recap of what's been going on the last few years.
2:17
unknown: Yeah.
2:18
SPEAKER_02: So both Calgary and Edmonton have put housing affordability programs into place.
2:21
SPEAKER_02: Uh, Edmonton has been working on it for, I would say, a bit longer.
2:24
SPEAKER_02: Calgary just the last four or five years.
2:27
SPEAKER_02: But part of those plans, in among all the other programs they were doing, was allowing less restrictive zoning citywide.
2:33
SPEAKER_02: So uh in Calgary it was uh four plexus, and in Edmonton it's eight plexus or four up and four down.
2:40
SPEAKER_02: And those have proven some of the most controversial and contentious aspects of it.
2:45
SPEAKER_02: Now in Calgary, they had an election after the rezoning.
2:49
SPEAKER_02: Uh the city council pretty much turned over, and the new city council repealed that rezoning.
2:53
SPEAKER_02: In Edmonton, the same city council that had implemented rezoning was re-elected.
2:58
SPEAKER_02: But what's happened now is a lot of these anti-development groups in Edmonton have sort of leapfrogged over the municipality and gone up to the province and demanded change from there.
3:07
SPEAKER_02: And because municipalities are creatures of the provinces, and because I would say this is something that appeals to Danielle Smith's base in the province, um, she has decided to go top-down and impose a reversal of the rezoning policies back to uh, I believe it was pre-2020.
3:23
SPEAKER_01: Could you give us some specifics, Aaron?
3:24
SPEAKER_01: And like kind of what else is is going on?
3:26
SPEAKER_01: You know, why are they doing so much better than uh say Ottawa or Toronto?
3:31
SPEAKER_01: Now is Alberta's chance to uh you know uh tell uh tell Ontario what we're doing wrong here.
3:36
SPEAKER_02: If you look at construction timelines, I have some data over here on my other monitor.
3:40
SPEAKER_02: Um, the average construction time for uh at all housing types in Calgary and Edmonton is around 10 to 11 months.
3:48
SPEAKER_02: In Toronto, it's about 26 months.
3:50
SPEAKER_02: And if you look at apartments, um that's about 13 months for Calgary and Edmonton.
3:55
SPEAKER_02: And for Toronto, it's about 31 months, right?
3:58
SPEAKER_02: So it's about two and a half times the construction timeline in Toronto, and you know, that's before you account for permitting and things like that.
4:06
SPEAKER_02: It's just regulations, how quickly can you get things built?
4:09
SPEAKER_02: Now, for example, take that 30 months in Toronto that it takes to build an apartment.
4:13
SPEAKER_02: Um, this is an urbanation stab, but how many months do you think it takes to go from application to completion, right?
4:19
SPEAKER_02: The construction timeline is from the start when they pour the foundation to the completion when the building is ready to move in.
4:24
SPEAKER_02: That's 30 months.
4:25
SPEAKER_02: How much more do you think you have to add on to go from when you first apply for a permit to when that purpose-built apartment project would be completed?
4:32
SPEAKER_01: Oh God, I think you'd probably be looking at four or five years, maybe?
4:35
SPEAKER_01: It's a hundred months.
4:36
SPEAKER_02: So about eight and a half years.
4:38
SPEAKER_02: So 30 months for construction, 70 months to get from application to construction.
4:43
SPEAKER_02: And you know, you don't see that on the consumer side, right?
4:46
SPEAKER_02: When you're looking at it, you don't see the time lot of it takes to go from application to completion.
4:51
SPEAKER_02: But on the construction side, when you're looking at almost six years of additional time being added, how much cost do you think that adds?
4:58
SPEAKER_02: There's carrying cost for the property, there's staffing costs, there's, you know, redesign costs from all the you know interminable public hearings that you have to go through to get anything built.
5:09
SPEAKER_02: And that adds a lot of cost to the end product.
5:12
SPEAKER_01: It really does.
5:12
SPEAKER_01: And we see that you mention a bunch of them.
5:14
SPEAKER_01: And other things changed, but like the building code can change during during that period, right?
5:18
SPEAKER_01: So then you're kind of having to redesign things.
5:21
SPEAKER_01: Uh, so all of those costs add up.
5:24
SPEAKER_01: As you say, they're uh invisible uh to the end consumer, uh, but but they all matter and they're all in the final bill.
5:31
SPEAKER_01: And I think for the most part, uh, you know, I get the sense that those kind of approvals processes, uh, changes and acceleration, you know, they're not that controversial.
5:42
SPEAKER_01: But I think where the controversy comes in is that focus on intensification.
5:46
SPEAKER_01: You know, we saw the federal government had its housing accelerator, uh, which was you know basically paying cities to make a number of changes, but a lot of those changes were around making building infill easier.
5:58
SPEAKER_01: Uh, and then Edmonton, you know, not only implemented those changes, but went well above and beyond what the accelerator required, you know, making changes to everything from setbacks, you know, to allowing eight plexes, none of which was it was in the accelerator.
6:15
SPEAKER_01: Um, but now we've seen the Premier Danielle Smith kind of override uh Edmonton Council and the mayor.
6:23
SPEAKER_01: So, like what's going on there?
6:25
SPEAKER_01: Like, what's kind of causing this kind of provincial municipal fight?
6:29
SPEAKER_02: Well, I want to say, first of all, that Edmonton has been ahead of the curve on zoning compared to almost every other metro in Canada.
6:35
SPEAKER_02: And it's one of the reasons why I always use them as an example of a city that has been very proactive on housing affordability.
6:41
SPEAKER_02: They're trying to get the supply in place before it becomes a supply crash, before it becomes an affordability crisis, rather than just scrambling to respond to it as pretty much every other city is doing.
6:51
SPEAKER_02: Um, but what happened was back in 2018, they allowed duplexes and secondary suites.
6:56
SPEAKER_02: They've continued to advance the amount of density that they're allowing for infill.
7:01
SPEAKER_02: And more recently, they've introduced eight-plexes, right, which are um what in other cities might be called four plexes, where it's um four units with four secondary suites, four up, four down, right?
7:12
SPEAKER_02: And that has been controversial.
7:14
SPEAKER_02: And I think to some extent it is because of the aesthetic of those builds.
7:18
SPEAKER_02: Um they are large boxy things to put into existing neighborhoods.
7:23
SPEAKER_02: In my opinion, I we can talk about this later, but I think these aplexes are actually a very tortured housing form that is designed to fit into overly restrictive zoning that is, you know, a compromise on things that very anti-housing people dislike, but I think regular people don't care about.
7:39
SPEAKER_02: We'll get into that later.
7:41
SPEAKER_02: Basically, what has happened is that the the anti-development people, the NIMBY's, whatever you want to call them, have leapfrogged over the municipal government and gone to the provincial government uh from Edmonton.
7:52
SPEAKER_02: Because uh, as Daniel Smith said in the press conference, you know, Calgary, they reversed their rezoning after a municipal election.
8:00
SPEAKER_02: And the way she described the Edmonton situation is that we haven't seen the same renewal on council as we saw in Calgary.
8:06
SPEAKER_02: What that means is that council got re-elected after doing all these zoning changes.
8:11
SPEAKER_02: And the people who ran on reversing the zoning changes lost the election.
8:14
SPEAKER_02: But then they just went up to the province and said, you know, we want this reversed.
8:18
SPEAKER_02: Municipalities are technically creatures of the province, so the province can direct them to do whatever they want.
8:23
SPEAKER_02: Uh so they just found another lever to pull to prevent housing development.
8:26
SPEAKER_02: And I think it's it's not that much of a surprise.
8:28
SPEAKER_02: If you have ever watched a public hearing or a series of public hearings, the way that I have, you see that pretty much everything that they say is we want more consultation, we want more um thoughtful development.
8:41
SPEAKER_02: It's usually just finding another way to obstruct housing development.
8:44
SPEAKER_02: Now, that's for the people who show up to the public hearings.
8:46
SPEAKER_02: I think there are people who have legitimate concerns about infill in their neighborhood, but I've talked to a lot of those people, and I think they are more flexible on what could get built.
8:57
SPEAKER_02: It's just they have a specific issue with the current specific built form that's going in.
9:02
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so you had kind of mentioned, you kind of piqued my interest when you called this Aplex a kind of tortured housing form.
9:08
SPEAKER_01: So could you expand on that?
9:10
SPEAKER_01: Because you've gotten my curiosity here.
9:12
SPEAKER_01: What did you mean by that?
9:14
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so basically when we're putting these apexes onto existing single-family lots, um, they have put in a lot of restrictions on, for example, uh height and um grade-oriented units.
9:25
SPEAKER_02: This means you have a direct entrance into the unit from outside at ground level.
9:30
SPEAKER_02: Nobody else knows what grade-oriented units are, and nobody really cares.
9:33
SPEAKER_02: Like one of the things that pro housing people have compromised with anti-development people on is grade-oriented units, right?
9:40
SPEAKER_02: But and not having stacked units, for example, like you wouldn't have a three-story walk-up apartment building.
9:46
SPEAKER_02: And I think most people don't actually care about whether the units are stacked or not.
9:50
SPEAKER_02: They care about what it looks like from the outside if they're not living there.
9:54
SPEAKER_02: And so we've created this situation where if you want eight units, eight up, eight down, you have to have eight ground level entrances.
10:01
SPEAKER_02: And that sometimes creates these absurd situations where you've got, you know, four front doors and then these little basement wells going in on the side with, you know, maybe no guardrails to prevent people from falling into them that have the other four entrances.
10:14
SPEAKER_02: You have to expand it to cover the lot to make the project pencil at all, right?
10:18
SPEAKER_02: To actually make it work economically, you have to use up as much of the space as you're allowed to.
10:25
SPEAKER_02: And we've put these strict restrictions on uh grade-oriented entrances and making sure the height is, and they sacrifice things like setbacks.
10:33
SPEAKER_02: And I think setbacks are more what people who are living in a detached neighborhood care about.
10:38
SPEAKER_02: They want, you know, some green space around the edge of the property.
10:41
SPEAKER_02: So I had an interesting conversation about this the other day with someone who was opposed to a-plexes, and I said, okay, what would you rather have in your neighborhood?
10:50
SPEAKER_02: Three aplexes go in at the end of the block, side by side next to each other that are filling up basically the whole lot.
10:56
SPEAKER_02: Or would you rather have those three units get assembled into one parcel, put a small 24-unit apartment building on it, same number of units, but also have bigger setbacks, you know, some remaining green space and space for on-site parking.
11:10
SPEAKER_02: They said, Well, of course, I'd rather have an apartment building.
11:12
SPEAKER_02: But we make that impossible to build.
11:13
SPEAKER_02: And so that's why I say the Aplexes are we're we're compromising on the wrong thing, right?
11:18
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I can see that.
11:19
SPEAKER_01: And I I do see, you know, when folks kind of complain about these changes uh on on Twitter and they send a photo, it's almost always uh on the setback uh side of things.
11:29
SPEAKER_01: And I get that uh, you know, that there's still a lot of rules and and and regulations and it you know kind of causes some suboptimal buildings.
11:39
SPEAKER_01: But yeah, the same right, like this is at least somewhat uh deregulation play.
11:43
SPEAKER_01: And I I, you know, allowing aplexes and so on, right?
11:47
SPEAKER_01: You're you're creating uh opportunities to do things that were illegal before.
11:52
SPEAKER_01: And I find the politics of that really uh interesting.
11:56
SPEAKER_01: And the politics around the the kind of the relationship between the levels of government, uh, because you know, most of the changes that Edmonton had to make here really they weren't requirements under the accelerator.
12:08
SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, accelerator was just fourplexes and some other changes.
12:11
SPEAKER_01: But, you know, despite that, uh Premier Smith, you know, like really threw the federal government on under the bus here, blaming the accelerator uh for the reform.
12:20
SPEAKER_01: So who is the public blaming here, particularly the public who are against aplexes?
12:27
SPEAKER_01: Are they blaming the municipality?
12:29
SPEAKER_01: Are they blaming the federal government?
12:30
SPEAKER_01: Is Smith's argument uh resonating there?
12:34
SPEAKER_02: They're blaming the municipal government and crediting the federal government with an assist.
12:38
SPEAKER_02: Uh, they're saying that, you know, if you look at what Edmonton has been doing, as you say, it wasn't required under the housing accelerator fund, but they've been proactive about zoning reform for a long time.
12:48
SPEAKER_02: And they've been doing that because they're proactive, they're getting ahead of the demand curve.
12:53
SPEAKER_02: Whereas the housing accelerator fund is the federal government trying to push cities that are behind the demand curve to get up to speed.
13:00
SPEAKER_02: Whereas Edmonton is saying, we don't want a housing crisis to emerge here.
13:04
SPEAKER_02: And so we want to keep building at a pace where we can absorb population increases, whether those be from natural increase, which they still have in Alberta, or from international migration or from interprovincial migration.
13:17
SPEAKER_02: And you can't really stop interprovincial migration because it's it's in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
13:22
SPEAKER_02: If you're in Canada, you're allowed to enter, leave, and remain within Canada and move about as you please.
13:28
SPEAKER_02: And, you know, if you have good opportunities and affordable cost of living, people are naturally going to be flocking to that place.
13:34
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, absolutely.
13:36
SPEAKER_01: And you look at the kind of the differences in uh home price and the differences in income as well, that average incomes in Calgary and Edmonton are higher than they are in lots of parts of Ontario, and then the home prices are half as much.
13:49
SPEAKER_01: And I also find the the ideological uh divides here somewhat counterintuitive, right?
13:54
SPEAKER_01: That you have uh, you know, the housing accelerator was done under kind of a center-left Trudeau government.
14:00
SPEAKER_01: You know, Edmonton has always been seen as by far the most left-wing part of Alberta.
14:06
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, these are at some level, not completely, but some level deregulation plays.
14:12
SPEAKER_01: Whereas, you know, that you have a provincial conservative government, and conservatives usually, you know, believe A in cutting red tape, but also uh, you know, not having interference from higher orders of government.
14:25
SPEAKER_01: So, like, why are the politics of this so counterintuitive?
14:28
SPEAKER_01: I could I could more understand it if it was the other way around, where you had a conservative council trying to deregulate and a left-wing provincial government blocking that.
14:38
SPEAKER_01: That would make sense to me, but this seems to be the opposite.
14:41
SPEAKER_02: I think it's pretty simple.
14:42
SPEAKER_02: It's the people perceive change that is the result of a policy change to be government interference in whatever they were doing with their lives before.
14:49
SPEAKER_02: You know, it's you only you only feel the wind when it's moving, right?
14:53
SPEAKER_02: And so if you have been living in a single detached neighborhood for a long time, you don't perceive the continued existence of that single detached neighborhood, even as the city grows past it, to be a continuous government interference in the free market.
15:07
SPEAKER_02: You think, well, this is just the way it is.
15:09
SPEAKER_02: And then when it changes, if it's due to the government relaxing restrictions, doing less set central planning, then you perceive that as the government interfering in your lifestyle as opposed to perceiving the previous situation as the government interfering in the free market.
15:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, okay.
15:25
SPEAKER_01: I I've never thought about it that way, but that that that makes sense here.
15:28
SPEAKER_01: That go, oh, well, government did something, therefore, you know, that's uh, you know, government interference, even if that thing is is deregulation.
15:37
SPEAKER_01: I guess that makes makes sense.
15:38
SPEAKER_01: What were the things that kind of upset them the most uh with the the changes that that Edmonton put into place?
15:45
SPEAKER_02: I think it's hard to sort out exactly what is a good faith argument and what is a bad faith argument when you're talking about people who are coming to public hearings and uh and arguing against development because they they will say a lot of things that they will then come to other meetings and kind of argue against themselves.
16:02
SPEAKER_02: One of the big issues is people feel like they're not being consulted on what's going on in their neighborhood.
16:08
SPEAKER_02: I don't know if that's always necessarily true.
16:11
SPEAKER_02: Like uh in the in the press conference, Daniel Smith said, well, people are seeing bulldozers show up next door with no warning to demolish the house and put up an apex.
16:19
SPEAKER_02: But if you look at the requirements for permitting, there will be a permit notice up for redevelopment of a parcel for months at a time.
16:26
SPEAKER_02: So these places that people are seeing suddenly have bulldozers show up are often properties that they haven't really looked at for months, right?
16:33
SPEAKER_02: That they might only see a few times a year.
16:35
SPEAKER_02: So it doesn't have that much of an impact on them.
16:37
SPEAKER_02: But other issues that people talk about are, you know, more people coming to the neighborhood.
16:41
SPEAKER_02: I think that's a big concern for a lot of people, especially if they're renters.
16:45
SPEAKER_02: It's a classist thing.
16:47
SPEAKER_02: I think there's not that many other ways to describe it.
16:50
SPEAKER_02: If you're worried about renters coming into your neighborhood, there's obvious implications there.
16:54
SPEAKER_02: Parking is another one.
16:55
SPEAKER_02: People are concerned that there's no parking minimums and that street parking will be overwhelmed, which is a potential in places where street parking is already basically at capacity.
17:04
SPEAKER_02: The last one that people uh express concerns about a lot is infrastructure and whether the infrastructure like sewage, electricity, etc., has the capacity for these additional residents.
17:15
SPEAKER_02: And I think the cure to that one would just be actually showing them the studies about what the original capacity was and how many people are actually living in the neighborhoods now.
17:25
SPEAKER_02: A lot of these single detached neighborhoods have not grown in population or even been stable in population.
17:30
SPEAKER_02: They have declined in population over time, which I think is the most obvious sign that this is government interference in the free market.
17:37
SPEAKER_02: If you have an inner city neighborhood or a close to downtown neighborhood that is declining in population, it's because you're restricting who can live there.
17:45
SPEAKER_02: And previously it was, you know, designed and built for a lot of young families to live there.
17:50
SPEAKER_02: As it becomes more unaffordable, as the people who are there age in place and their kids move out, you see a decline in population.
17:56
SPEAKER_02: And then you start seeing things like the supporting infrastructure, like schools, they will have to bust kids in from other neighborhoods to keep those schools full.
18:04
SPEAKER_02: It makes the whole thing less efficient, right?
18:05
SPEAKER_02: When you can just allow more people to live in the neighborhood.
18:08
SPEAKER_02: Besides that, in order to upgrade or maintain or replace this infrastructure as it's aging, it's going to be a brownfield project.
18:17
SPEAKER_02: It's going to be more expensive than it was putting it in the first time.
18:20
SPEAKER_02: So you're going to have to densify the tax base to support that anyway.
18:24
SPEAKER_02: So I think the argument for allowing density in the inner city is very strong, apart from the fact that that's what we've done for thousands of years of human history.
18:34
SPEAKER_02: I don't think we've just suddenly, you know, 40, 50 years ago, found the exact perfect built form for X neighborhood.
18:43
SPEAKER_01: It really does feel that way.
18:45
SPEAKER_01: And it's funny, you know, despite the depopulation of some of these uh neighborhoods, uh, it does feel like a lot of the opposition is ultimately either directly or indirectly opposition to population growth, uh, you know, either at the neighborhood level or wider, that, you know, it'll be more traffic, more people using parks, you know, more noise and so on.
19:09
SPEAKER_01: And because of that, like I feel from my uh Ottawa bubble outsider uh perspective, it does feel like there's there's been a shift in the zeitgeist from okay, we've got to figure out how to build more homes to that solution of, okay, we just got to reduce population growth.
19:27
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, you you kind of see it in the premier herself.
19:30
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was uh uh just a few years ago where she was calling for the population of Alberta to double.
19:37
SPEAKER_01: Uh, she was asking the federal government to loosen immigration restrictions.
19:41
SPEAKER_01: She had a very famous Alberta is calling ad campaign.
19:45
SPEAKER_01: We saw it on the TTC.
19:46
SPEAKER_01: There were radio ads here in Ottawa uh trying to draw out, you know, priced out uh Toronto and Ottawa residents to Alberta.
19:55
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, is it just Premier Smith who's kind of changed on this?
19:58
SPEAKER_01: Or have you seen kind of seeing Albertans kind of change their views when it when it comes to population growth?
20:05
SPEAKER_02: I think population growth has been a major issue in Canada over the past five years, but I don't think that housing only became a problem over the last five years.
20:13
SPEAKER_02: And that's the simplest way I can put it.
20:15
SPEAKER_02: Is yes, population growth is something we need to get under control.
20:19
SPEAKER_02: I do think that we had some very irresponsible immigration policies, particularly around non-permanent residents.
20:25
SPEAKER_02: I think that's absolutely true.
20:27
SPEAKER_02: But I don't think just because you take that away that we fixed all of our housing problems, right?
20:32
SPEAKER_02: This is an issue that has been going on for decades.
20:35
SPEAKER_02: It is mostly due to new housing being obstructed from being built either through regulation or added costs, et cetera, et cetera.
20:42
SPEAKER_02: So, yes, we need to fix the population growth issue, um, but we also need to fix our housing policies.
20:49
SPEAKER_02: Not that I'm a big fan of what Premier Smith has been doing, but I think people often bring up this thing of she was asking for looser restrictions on immigration.
20:58
SPEAKER_02: Specifically, what she asked for was an increase in the cap on the provincial nominee program, which is actually consistent with the rest of her rhetoric around giving the provinces more control over immigration, because the PNP provincial nomination program, that's just where the province can select specific immigrants that they want with certain skills, et cetera.
21:18
SPEAKER_02: And it's, you know, it's it's a sliver of the total immigration program.
21:22
SPEAKER_02: So it's that's more like giving the province more control in her defense, I suppose.
21:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and and and I find these federal provincial dynamics uh interesting.
21:32
SPEAKER_01: I I do think uh provinces and municipalities are right to point to some of the failures uh when it comes to uh immigration policy, particularly temporary foreign workers, international students, and and and so on.
21:46
SPEAKER_01: And I'd also agree with you that that those didn't cause a housing crisis.
21:50
SPEAKER_01: I, you know, I view the housing crisis as a bit of a fire, and then the federal government, with these policies, you know, just threw some big buckets of gasoline uh on that fire and kind of made A bad uh situation worse.
22:02
SPEAKER_01: And actually, you know, the people who are most harmed by that were the newcomers who came to a country and found that they uh couldn't afford housing here.
22:11
SPEAKER_01: There's there's another kind of policy area I want to examine, uh, the sort of federal uh provincial dynamics.
22:17
SPEAKER_01: A lot of the criticisms we see on social media are frankly kind of ignorant, but uh, but I will say there there's one in particular that I find interesting that, you know, guys like me will argue, well, you know, Edmonton is deregulating, is uh, you know, kind of putting in more free market reforms.
22:36
SPEAKER_01: And one of the more kind of intelligent arguments against that that deal with the kind of provincial federal dynamic is they say, well, look, you know, the the federal government, specifically the CMHC, has a bunch of programs like the construction loans and insurance, so like uh ACLP, MLI select, and so on.
22:54
SPEAKER_01: And the way that those programs are designed, you get the best bang for the buck uh by you know building buildings with as many units as possible, which in Edmonton with these deregulations are eight.
23:05
SPEAKER_01: So they're saying, well, you know, the fact that we're building all of these apexes at all, at all, there's not uh a free market uh outcome, but rather it's because uh the federal government's kind of put their thumb on the scale, you know, intentionally or or inadvertently.
23:20
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, what would you say to that around, you know, how the provinces and municipalities kind of interact with the federal housing policy?
23:29
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think there's an argument to be said for that.
23:30
SPEAKER_02: I mean, the federal government was responding to a nationwide housing shortage with a nationwide program that would allow more multifamily to get built, right?
23:40
SPEAKER_02: But if you have a city where, you know, they're already doing okay on housing, I think it probably accelerates what's going on there.
23:47
SPEAKER_02: It doesn't completely change it, right?
23:49
SPEAKER_02: If they're making it viable to build aplexes here and there, aplexes will get built, maybe not as quickly in as much of a rush.
23:57
SPEAKER_02: I do think MLI Select pulled some demand forward into the present.
24:01
SPEAKER_02: And from people I've talked to in industry, it does seem like they're trying to wind down a little bit in terms of having more frequent rule changes, being slower to get back to people, and they're they're just trying to make it more frustrating to use this program while at the same time, um, conventional financing through banks is becoming more competitive with MLI Select.
24:20
SPEAKER_02: I do think at the municipal level, there are ways to redirect it into other forms of housing being built.
24:27
SPEAKER_02: For example, in Calgary, they had a subsidy for office conversions.
24:31
SPEAKER_02: They have all this excess office space.
24:33
SPEAKER_02: A lot of cities are wondering well, how do we make sure we keep our downtown core vibrants?
24:37
SPEAKER_02: Do we need to force people to come back to the office?
24:39
SPEAKER_02: And what Calgary said, because they had kind of double the problem, right?
24:44
SPEAKER_02: They had the oil crash in 2014, which hollowed in a lot of office space, and then they had COVID, which introduced a lot of work from home.
24:51
SPEAKER_02: A few years ago, downtown felt very hollowed out, right?
24:55
SPEAKER_02: There were not a lot of people walking around, businesses were closing, and a lot of it was that there were not people downtown during the day, during the afternoon, and even less so during the night to some extent.
25:05
SPEAKER_02: So what they did was they introduced a subsidy of about uh like$75 a foot was the max per square foot for these office conversions to residential.
25:14
SPEAKER_02: That program has been very, very successful.
25:16
SPEAKER_02: They've converted, I think, a few million square feet of office space now to residential.
25:20
SPEAKER_02: And you're starting to see the knock-on effects of more businesses being open, more people downtown during the day.
25:26
SPEAKER_02: Uh, because rather than trying to bring them in to work in an office, they're like, why don't we just have people live there where they're in walking distance to all these amenities?
25:34
SPEAKER_02: And from a changing in the neighborhood perspective, it's not a big impact, right?
25:39
SPEAKER_02: Because the building already exists there in its current built form.
25:42
SPEAKER_02: You have some construction, and that just gets the use gets converted, but the built form stays more or less the same.
25:48
SPEAKER_02: And I think that's been a lot more amenable to people.
25:51
SPEAKER_02: And at the same time, that has allowed some interaction with these federal programs like MLI Select, where if it's already pretty feasible to build these office conversions because of the subsidy that they're getting from the municipal government, then they can take advantage of getting these extra points in MLI Select through things like affordable units.
26:11
SPEAKER_02: So you're also seeing a decent number of non-market affordable housing, you know, units downtown for as little as like$1,200 for a two-bedroom unit in downtown Calgary, which is quite good.
26:21
SPEAKER_02: Those are coming to market as well.
26:23
SPEAKER_02: And so there are ways to leverage those federal programs through municipal direction into different areas.
26:31
SPEAKER_02: Uh, you just have to be proactive about it.
26:33
SPEAKER_02: And it's it's been quite successful in Calgary.
26:35
SPEAKER_02: They're actually now viewed as a world leader in this kind of office conversion.
26:39
SPEAKER_02: They just solved two problems at once using what they had lying around.
26:43
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
26:43
SPEAKER_01: And I somebody I uh was in Calgary in uh 2013 and I went back in 2017, and it didn't even feel like the same city.
26:51
SPEAKER_01: It had changed uh so much, and it's you know great to uh see them be able to utilize uh some of this uh office space that that got overbuilt.
27:02
SPEAKER_01: I want to transition to Edmonton uh for a minute.
27:05
SPEAKER_01: If we had a time machine and we could kind of go back and redesign uh Edmonton's reforms, like what should have Edmonton done differently to you know maybe take down the temperature uh with existing residents and and maybe you know not led to uh the the province kind of stomping on those reforms?
27:24
SPEAKER_01: Like, like how could have they made this uh more attractive while still allowing for intensification?
27:29
SPEAKER_02: Well, I think you can argue that there is room for a lot more community engagement or community input into how neighborhoods are developed.
27:37
SPEAKER_02: The problem that we've seen over many years is that they will come up with these local plans and then still come out to oppose whatever is being built within the local plans.
27:46
SPEAKER_02: So a way that you could implement that properly or you know, with more success, I think, would be to make those local planning processes very community involved, but also more committing.
27:58
SPEAKER_02: For example, if you come up with a local area plan, then you allow, first of all, for the zoning changes that are required for that local area plan to be implemented to come along with the local area plan, right?
28:10
SPEAKER_02: At the same hearing, you're not doing individual parcel rezoning hearings and having them argue, well, it's it's in compliance with the local area plan.
28:18
SPEAKER_02: You just make the local area plan, you put the zoning where it needs to be, you pass it all at once, and then you expedite permitting for things that are compliant with the local area plan.
28:27
SPEAKER_02: If you want community engagement, it should be community engagement to enable housing, not community engagement to give them another lever to oppose every project, even if it's in compliance with the local area plan, right?
28:38
SPEAKER_02: You can engage people, but make them put their money where their mouth is.
28:41
SPEAKER_02: I also think that the zoning requirements could be less restrictive, um, but with more trade-offs, for example.
28:49
SPEAKER_02: Like I th I think it's just the way the reason we're getting this one built form of these eightplexes is because it's too restrictive, not because it's not restrictive enough.
28:58
SPEAKER_02: Just start allowing trade-offs for things like height versus setbacks.
29:02
SPEAKER_02: Right.
29:02
SPEAKER_02: If you imagine in your own neighborhood, would you rather have like a three to four story walk-up apartment building if it had a small footprint?
29:10
SPEAKER_02: Or would you have something that has a lot of lot coverage but is very low rise?
29:14
SPEAKER_02: I think it's even or for me, it would be leaning towards the larger building with the smaller footprint.
29:20
SPEAKER_02: And I I think that's the kind of community engagement that needs to be done is see what people actually care about in a broad sense and not just uh ask uh ask people who oppose all developments what they want changed because it's nothing, right?
29:34
SPEAKER_02: They they want nothing to change.
29:35
SPEAKER_02: If you're talking about these inner city neighborhoods, a lot of people do understand that densification will happen over time.
29:42
SPEAKER_02: I don't think it's reasonable to buy a property in a city and expect that nothing will change around you, but it's about choosing the change that you want to see.
29:49
SPEAKER_02: And that happens even with no regulatory change, right?
29:52
SPEAKER_02: If you live in a city, if you live around other people, change is going to happen whether you want it or not.
29:56
SPEAKER_02: And for me, I would rather see that happen as an increase in density versus an increase in homelessness or seniors struggling to afford the cost of their housing versus the cost of their food, young families not being able to find a place that works for them that's close to work.
30:12
SPEAKER_02: I would rather see the change in density versus all these other sort of extraneous social impacts.
30:18
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm certainly with you uh on that one.
30:22
SPEAKER_01: And I like the idea of uh, you know, asking community members about trade-offs of going, okay, you know, if we have to allow a 6,000 square foot uh home here or you know, building here to to home everyone, you know, would you prefer taller versus shorter, but you know, differences on setbacks and so on?
30:41
SPEAKER_01: And and we often don't ask uh those questions.
30:45
SPEAKER_01: Uh and I do think getting people's opinions on that, you know, would would certainly help.
30:50
SPEAKER_01: Because I, you know, as much as I like these changes, I see the setback one is ones where I kind of uh agree with some folks going that lack of green space is is really problematic.
31:02
SPEAKER_01: Um, but I'll I'll talk about a reform I happen to like that that not everyone does.
31:07
SPEAKER_01: Guys like me have often said um you know we should do away with parking minimums.
31:12
SPEAKER_01: We had a Henry Garber uh interview uh that that we'll link to.
31:16
SPEAKER_01: Uh because we basically said, you know, let individuals figure out how much uh parking is appropriate.
31:23
SPEAKER_01: Uh, but we've since seen uh Danielle Smith reinstate uh those parking minimums.
31:28
SPEAKER_01: So how much of this fight revolves around parking?
31:31
SPEAKER_02: I think it looms large in a lot of people's minds, especially in cities that they perceive as car-centric, like Edmonton or Calgary.
31:38
SPEAKER_02: Now, I would argue that, for example, Calgary has some of the best alternative transportation infrastructure in North America, and you know, Edmonton is similar.
31:48
SPEAKER_02: They that they have a lot of green space that enables it.
31:50
SPEAKER_02: They both are cities that are on rivers that gives you basically a highway for bikes, pedestrians, scooters, etc.
31:57
SPEAKER_02: But that doesn't work for everyone, right?
31:59
SPEAKER_02: A lot of people are gonna be relying on the car to get around, and so having a place to put it is important to them.
32:05
SPEAKER_02: And in certain neighborhoods, especially older neighborhoods where they have relied on street parking for the indefinite past, then having less parking available on that street is going to be a concern for them.
32:18
SPEAKER_02: Now, I think a lot of neighborhoods have handled this with just parking permits, so that you can't have random people parking in your neighborhood.
32:25
SPEAKER_02: You have to be a resident of the neighborhood.
32:27
SPEAKER_02: But people imagine kind of the worst case scenario of what if everything on the street is turned into an ateplex?
32:33
SPEAKER_02: What if each of those units has two cars with it?
32:35
SPEAKER_02: What if they all use street parking and there's no off-street parking?
32:38
SPEAKER_02: I think what you've actually seen is that builders understand that the market is not demanding that much zero parking product.
32:47
SPEAKER_02: So if you look at a lot of these aplexes that are being built, they have garages on site, right?
32:52
SPEAKER_02: And so I think to an extent you can allow the market to handle that.
32:58
SPEAKER_02: I think there is probably some planning that could go along with it.
33:01
SPEAKER_02: And I think that could be incorporated into those trade-offs, like I was talking about.
33:05
SPEAKER_02: If you're allowing an apartment building with stacked units, et cetera, and a higher height limit, then you could also say, well, we need like a 0.5 parking ratio or something as opposed to zero.
33:16
SPEAKER_02: But I do think to an extent the free market sorts it out on its own.
33:20
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think so as well.
33:22
SPEAKER_01: Where do you see this battle going right now, particularly since the political situation in Alberta I think is even more chaotic than it usually is?
33:31
SPEAKER_01: You know, we just had the the 10 referendums and so on.
33:35
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, what what's kind of next in your view on this housing battle?
33:38
SPEAKER_02: It's hard to say.
33:39
SPEAKER_02: I mean, I think the uh the scales are very much tipped in favor of people who are obstructionist.
33:44
SPEAKER_02: And I think we're seeing that emerge now as the pro housing people are getting wins on municipal policy, they just take another avenue to head it off.
33:54
SPEAKER_02: And I think what needs to happen, it's it's not really clear what's going to happen next, but if the pro housing people want to keep accruing wins and keeping housing more affordable, then we need to start working with uh ordinary people as opposed to getting into these complete policy wonk battles with other people on the other complete opposite side of the spectrum.
34:15
SPEAKER_02: We need to start speaking to what works for the ordinary person, what their concerns are, and and make reforms that go along with that.
34:24
SPEAKER_02: I think a lot of people, by and large, think that cities do need to change over time.
34:29
SPEAKER_02: I think there are a lot of people who, unlike the people who show up at public hearings when they say, I'm not opposed to all new density, I just want responsible density, they're actually telling the truth and not just saying I'm not opposed to all new density, I'm just opposed to every specific instance of new density.
34:44
SPEAKER_02: Um, and so we need to find reforms that work for them.
34:47
SPEAKER_02: And that might be more flexible zoning.
34:49
SPEAKER_02: It might be a sort of automatic zoning process that gets zoning in place before the product needs to be built.
34:55
SPEAKER_02: For example, something that I like to throw out there as an idea that I don't think anybody has seriously considered would be presumptive upzoning based on land value density.
35:05
SPEAKER_02: Right.
35:05
SPEAKER_02: And that's sort of looking at where is the market demanding either mixed use or higher density for housing.
35:13
SPEAKER_02: And if there's no other specific good reason to keep that zoning as is, then we'll just bump it up a level once it hits a certain threshold of inflation adjusted land value per square meter.
35:25
SPEAKER_02: Right.
35:26
SPEAKER_02: And then say, okay, we're seeing these inner city neighborhoods are getting more and more expensive, so we'll allow more density there.
35:32
SPEAKER_02: And that's a way of naturally allowing the zoning to move with the growth of the city as opposed to having to do it parcel by parcel or opposed to having to do it all across the city all at once.
35:44
SPEAKER_01: So I I've never heard that, and I absolutely love it.
35:47
SPEAKER_01: Uh, because I I've been kind of pushing something uh similar, but with urban growth boundaries, where we say, okay, you know what?
35:55
SPEAKER_01: What when land costs hit a certain threshold, maybe that's the time that we go, okay, we we need to add more development land uh to the inventory and taking more of a market uh-based approach rather than uh you know government kind of coming in and you know using their best judgment.
36:13
SPEAKER_01: So we might have to have you on again for that because I'm super interested in that uh idea.
36:18
SPEAKER_01: Uh, but we do only have uh so much time here.
36:22
SPEAKER_01: Like we had you on for kind of two reasons.
36:24
SPEAKER_01: The one, we really wanted to talk about Alberta, what's going on there, and we love your content on that.
36:31
SPEAKER_01: Uh, but we also just love your your YouTube content.
36:34
SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, I was telling producer Meredith that uh like every day I log on to TikTok, you know, you end up being about the fourth or fifth video in my feed, which is impressive because my feed is mostly like baseball and 1980s pro wrestling, but you still uh somehow show up on that feed.
36:53
SPEAKER_01: And one of the ones that we love around here, nothing to do with uh Alberta, Calgary, Edmonton, uh, but it's your videos where you compare European castles to Canadian real estate listings.
37:05
SPEAKER_01: So uh, you know, how many of you done and like how did you come up with that concept?
37:10
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so just recently I finished uh episode 30.
37:13
SPEAKER_02: Um, I took a sort of long hiatus from them, but I've started making them again just because they're fun to make, people like them, it helps grow the overall channel.
37:21
SPEAKER_02: But that was actually an idea that I had probably 10 years before I started making videos, kind of like early 2010s, is uh there were a lot of stories in the news about these horrible derelict tear-down Vancouver places that were being listed for millions of dollars.
37:35
SPEAKER_02: And of course, they were development properties, but and you know, if you're looking at a country that has a severe housing crunch and you're saying, well, this is a development property, why has it just been sitting there with a rotting house on it for so long?
37:47
SPEAKER_02: And the thing that I was wondering about was what else could you buy for this?
37:52
SPEAKER_02: And the most luxurious form of properties I could think of at that time.
37:56
SPEAKER_02: This was before the castles thing.
37:57
SPEAKER_02: I thought, private islands, right?
37:59
SPEAKER_02: And I thought, how many of these crummy rundown Vancouver homes would you need to buy a private island?
38:04
SPEAKER_02: And uh turns out the answer was one.
38:06
SPEAKER_02: And so I started doing research on it.
38:08
SPEAKER_02: I came up with a bunch of examples, but I could never really think of a way to make the concept work and be punchy and funny with the formats I had available at the time.
38:17
SPEAKER_02: But then when TikTok was out and there's these green screen video capabilities in the app, and you can just talk over these background images, I thought that this could actually work.
38:27
SPEAKER_02: And then there was one weekend where you know my wife was out of town just doing something.
38:30
SPEAKER_02: I was kind of bored.
38:31
SPEAKER_02: I thought, well, I'll just I'll film one of these and throw it on there and show it to my friends.
38:35
SPEAKER_02: And the first couple videos, you know, the a couple days in I showed my friends, I was like, oh, my viewers will be miss, they'll be disappointed in this small error I made in this video.
38:44
SPEAKER_02: And I showed them that it had like, you know, 10 views, two views.
38:47
SPEAKER_02: Um, but then over that week it started blowing up to hundreds of thousands, millions of views.
38:51
SPEAKER_02: Um, and then what happened after that was in turn, people started asking, well, what's going on with real estate prices in Canada?
38:57
SPEAKER_02: And unbeknownst to them, this is something I had been studying for that past 10 years as well, doing analysis on it.
39:04
SPEAKER_02: And I started explaining why I thought what was happening was happening.
39:08
SPEAKER_02: And then over the next few years, a lot of the things I was talking about started panning out more.
39:14
SPEAKER_02: And that's when people finally started listening to what I had to say instead of just, you know, me yelling at my friends in a bar about how none of this made any sense.
39:22
SPEAKER_01: And I find all that intro again to someone who consumes a lot of housing and real estate uh content.
39:29
SPEAKER_01: Uh the folks out there like are are people I know in many cases knew before they became social media famous.
39:37
SPEAKER_01: Ron Butler, you know, uh mortgage agent, you know, he has commercials and things like that.
39:43
SPEAKER_01: You see people who work at uh you know various uh you know banks or development firms or or uh or realtors or or what have you.
39:53
SPEAKER_01: And they're very, very visible and uh and well known.
39:57
SPEAKER_01: And you know, some of them I could, you know, I could write their own biography for them uh because they're so well known and everybody knows who they are.
40:06
SPEAKER_01: You are the opposite.
40:07
SPEAKER_01: Uh you're clearly a private person.
40:10
SPEAKER_01: You use a pseudonym, and uh, you know, I'll tell the audience, I have no idea what your real name is.
40:15
SPEAKER_01: I don't know what city you live in.
40:17
SPEAKER_01: You're just this guy who does fantastic content on YouTube and TikTok.
40:24
SPEAKER_01: So uh, you know, I know you're not gonna tell us too much, but can you give us a little insight to your background and you know how you got interested in Canadian housing policy and real estate in general?
40:35
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so I think this is one of the things that has helped me in the social media stuff is that I'm not selling anything and I have a different perspective on it than a lot of the industry people.
40:43
SPEAKER_02: And part of that is just that I, until a couple of years ago, I did not work in the real estate industry.
40:48
SPEAKER_02: What I did was more mathematical and numerical simulations of physical problems.
40:53
SPEAKER_02: And so I've always taken sort of a mechanistic view of how to model a system.
40:58
SPEAKER_02: And so instead of looking at, you know, empirical correlations in housing of, oh, well, home prices have been going up this much over time, I thought, well, what's driving that?
41:05
SPEAKER_02: And the way I could break it down for myself when I was doing this analysis earlier was that it's interest rates that were driving a lot of the home price increases we saw, which is why we were seeing home prices increase a lot, but rent not increased nearly as much in the past.
41:20
SPEAKER_02: Uh there was an actual supply and demand crunch over the past few years where rent shot up.
41:25
SPEAKER_02: But before that, it was um home prices going way, way up and rents only growing kind of around the rate of inflation, maybe a little more.
41:34
SPEAKER_02: And so to me, what got me into housing was I was starting my career and deciding, you know, okay, I'm moving cities, should I rent a place or should I buy a place?
41:44
SPEAKER_02: And when I ran the numbers, I thought it does not make any sense whatsoever to buy a place when rent is this cheap relative to the price of a home.
41:53
SPEAKER_02: But I do think that one of the things that got missed is that there was very irrational market behavior in Canada, which I could see because I was doing the mechanistic analysis on where these price increases were coming from.
42:06
SPEAKER_02: Um, nobody cares what the price of a home is.
42:08
SPEAKER_02: They care what their monthly payment is.
42:10
SPEAKER_02: And I think once you understand that psychological element of it, then the entire reason for the run-up in home prices that we saw over the past 20 years becomes very, very clear, right?
42:18
SPEAKER_02: It's just a function of how much you can borrow for a given monthly payment, which is also relative to, you know, inflation, wage increases, that kind of thing.
42:25
SPEAKER_02: People are willing to pay a certain percentage of their income on a monthly payment for a home, whether they're owning it or renting it.
42:32
SPEAKER_02: And people got this idea of, well, homes always go up in value, um, investment properties always go up in value, prices just always go up, up, up.
42:42
SPEAKER_02: Uh, and they they didn't really see where that price increase was coming from, which is just that you can borrow more money.
42:47
SPEAKER_02: And you we started getting into these situations where investors were putting money into cash flow negative properties.
42:54
SPEAKER_02: And I've had one-on-one conversations with people on this subject, and I was saying, like, what why does it make sense for you to buy this property and hold on to it instead of selling it if you're not able to rent it out at an amount that covers the cost?
43:06
SPEAKER_02: And they say, Well, the price appreciation.
43:08
SPEAKER_02: And I would say, where does the price appreciation come from in that situation?
43:12
SPEAKER_02: Why would somebody take an unprofitable business and buy it from you at such a higher price that you now turn a profit and then they're the one losing money?
43:21
SPEAKER_02: It's it can't go on forever that way.
43:24
SPEAKER_02: So I realized that this was another reason that I started making videos, is that I realized that as soon as interest rates went back up and stayed there for a bit of time, home prices were going to come down sharply.
43:36
SPEAKER_02: And so it was after those price increases or those interest rate increases came in and started sticking that this topic was on my mind again.
43:44
SPEAKER_01: Well, it's my uh my father-in-law uh was a well-known applied mathematician, and uh, you know, he would say kind of applied math is is everything.
43:53
SPEAKER_01: And I I think you're proof of that, uh, that you kind of took these uh quant skills and have turned them uh into you know housing and and real estate knowledge that you're you're sharing across Canada.
44:06
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, millennial moron, I'm gonna have to call you that because I don't know your real name.
44:10
SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for being here.
44:13
SPEAKER_01: And I recommend our audience uh check you out on YouTube and TikTok.
44:18
SPEAKER_01: And again, can't thank you enough.
44:20
SPEAKER_02: Yes, and thank you for having me.
44:21
SPEAKER_02: And if you want to see more of my in-depth analysis, I've also been producing a podcast for Urbanation and Rentals.ca called The Rent Report.
44:28
SPEAKER_02: And that's more with industry experts.
44:30
SPEAKER_02: Gets more into the nitty-gritty details.
44:32
SPEAKER_02: I think the audience of this podcast might be more interested in that than my usual audience.
44:36
SPEAKER_02: But yeah, again, thanks for having me and uh yeah, great discussion.
44:38
SPEAKER_02: I'd be happy to talk to you again.
44:40
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
44:40
SPEAKER_01: You're pitching to the uh right audience.
44:42
SPEAKER_01: You you've got an audience of podcast listeners here.
44:44
SPEAKER_01: So so thanks very much uh for being here.
44:47
SPEAKER_01: Uh thank you to the missing middle audience for watching and listening.
44:50
SPEAKER_01: Uh, my name is Mike Moffat.
44:51
SPEAKER_01: Our producers for this episode are Meredith Martin and Kara Stern, our editor is Sean Foreman.
44:57
SPEAKER_01: If you have any thoughts or questions about making multiplexes manageable in municipalities, please leave a comment because we'd love to hear from you.
45:05
SPEAKER_01: We'll see you next time.