Yea it still exists. Has to be over 6000#. Mostly pickups and larger SUVs that qualify.
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Maybe the electric F-150 but that’s probably not what you’re looking for.
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I think it’s much more of a two way street than that. In many North American cities the few “walkable neighborhoods” are in insanely high demand because the lifestyle is basically inarguably superior. There’s a big chicken-egg debate to studied and examined, but a lot of people assume that pure market demand gives rise to car-centered, single family home development and that is simply not the case. In many North American cities the zoning rules completely prohibit any other type of development. It is circular to say there is no demand for the type of housing we have banned by law, and as I say above this is actually demonstrably false for the existing neighborhoods that are walkable and have high quality public transportation and have mixed use zoning.
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Nah, if it got me a tax break so big to be worthwhile I’d consider an electric SUV, and it looks like a few qualify but they’re all $70K+. Also the amount of the tax break depends upon the amount of use that’s for business, so that’s going to limit it too. I assume most people are just committing tax fraud and saying it’s 100%.
I guess it does get interesting when combining it with an EV tax credit, assuming they can be combined/stacked. If I managed to actually use it 100% for business, went for the cheapest SUV that qualifies (an Audi etron or whatever it’s called), that’d be $70K. I’d probably save around 38% of that amount in taxes, so I’d save $26.6K there, plus a $7,500 tax credit. So the actual cost to me would be $35,900 versus about $23K to get another certified pre-owned mid-sized sedan.
That could actually be worthwhile next year. 
It’s not pure market demand, but it’s mostly market demand. What people want is a unicorn. They want all the benefits of high density (quaint walkable streets with local shops) without the density. They want a place to park a car or two, they want a yard for the kids, and that’s what they get. Efficient public transit isn’t viable at the density levels most people prefer.
Zoning laws aren’t forced on populations from above. They are weaponized by voters and residents to prevent the high density development they don’t want. The cities that have enough demand for denser development usually adopt zoning that allows it. For every sensationalized story about some egregious zoning battle in San Francisco, I can find you 50 examples of cities that went ahead and built the higher density, mixed-use projects everybody keeps claiming are illegal to build. They’re freakin’ everywhere now, many of them well over a decade old.
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Underground parking and roof yards.
Go try to sell that to Karen on Rivercreekbrook Parkway in the Woodland Forest Grove subdivision.
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I don’t know. Moved to Germany in early 2018 selling my cars and living there without cars for a little under 3 years. We moved back early 2021 and I bought one car for the family, planning to buy a second last fall when we moved from PA to New Jersey. I was working at home at the time and didn’t need two and was living in downtown Pittsburgh with one offstreet spot so owning only one made sense.
Now I’m in a situation where I haven’t bought a car for a year after I planned to not because I can’t afford it but because prices are higher than I want to pay and I was able to continue working from home. 1 car for 3 drivers (me + wife + nanny for 2 toddlers) is really difficult to manage. would live to get a PHEV or electric but prices one those are cray right now an it seems like supply will change in 2 or 3 years. Wouldn’t leasing a car make a lot of sense in my scenario? I never considered leasing before but was thinking that after reading this thread.
I’ve always been a cash buyer unless I can get under 2% financing then I finance and invest the money I would have spent. I’d like to maybe make a short term commitment to something and used cars seem more overpriced than new cars right now. Like the old buy a 12 year old Toyota for a couple thousand and drive it into the ground makes no sense when a 12 year old Prius costs 15k.
I really want to do right for the environment, but a short term commitment to a gas car until electric option are more available and reasonably priced seems to make sense in this moment and it gets tougher and tougher to be a one car house each month, my employer is pushing for 3 days back to the office and my wife commuted currently.
This is transparently false in cities in Ontario where I live. 70% of Ontario’s residential land is locked up in R1 zoning, which only permits single family residential builds only. Not even a duplex ls legal, let alone an apartment building or heaven forbid a coffee shop or a store. It is the natural order of things that coffee shops and stores are 6km away on the other side of a highway, dontchaknow.
I agree with you that much of this objectively bad city planning is the result of the demand of some of the market. But even among the people that gleefully put up signs on their lawns protesting denser development, often their stated goals including “nice” neighborhoods that are safe for their precious children, are actually inhibited by exclusive R1 zoning. It’s purely ignorance (with a healthy does of racism driving anti-density politics) that leads them to think that it’s better for their kids to live on their residential street with no sidewalks and that their kids can’t safely walk on and can’t safely bike on, and that doesn’t go to anywhere their kids want to go anyway because it’s just kilometer after kilometer after single family homes anyway. Their notion of wanting to live in a “nice” neighborhood for their kids by enforcing R1 zoning is like saying they want to ban books so their kids can be better educated.
In conclusion, everyone is stupid except me so what they think doesn’t matter.
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I’m only familiar with GTA, and not very, and most of it is a really shitty urban environment imo. Even the newer stuff where they get the density with high rises, but it’s still car-dominated and the streetscapes absolutely suck for pedestrians (mostly thinking Mississauga here).
But Vancouver gets it. They’ve been doing it exactly right for a long time. And plenty of places in the US are as well now. Houston, Dallas and Austin all have new light rail lines with transit-oriented development. Atlanta now has a streetcar line with (maybe?) plans for expansion. Lots of places know how to do good, dense development these days. I’m not sure why Ontario cities can’t get on board.
Doesn’t Vancouver have the same housing affordability issues as the US west coast and other Canadian cities?
Worse, if anything. If there is a correlation between density and affordability, it isn’t an obvious one.
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No pivot :)
A trend you’ll notice is that all the actual nice places are the ones that have been around for a long time and pre-dated current development practices under current zone laws.
Could there be a connection?
Even the skyscraper condo development ultra dense housing that people don’t like mostly arises because developers are restricted to their tightly limited 30% of residential space that permits multifamily housing. So up go 30 stories towers with 600 square foot units. A lot of the GTAs worst urban design problems come specifically because of the “missing middle”, multi-family housing that is actually built for families, with walkable streets and transportation options. Much of the car dependency comes from needing highway arteries that run right into downtown “neighborhoods” to service the cars that come from suburban R1 zones to work and play in the city. Is some of this stuff simply development meeting demand? Yeah, some of it. But some of it is also a self fulfilling prophecy. Build shitty neighborhoods with no sidewalks and nothing to walk to, and people will hate walking. Build roads that are death traps and people will hate cycling. Build public transportation systems that are inefficient and people will hate public transportation. This is the death spiral that Ontario has been stuck in for decades.
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An obvious factor at play here is that dense, livable neighborhoods are nice places to live so demand is high and prices are high. NYC is the densest, most friendly place to live for non-drivers city in the US and it’s not cheap. Good housing should be expensive.
Sort of a mixed message. Markets rallied initially based on the “we will take into account lags” as a signal tightening may be coming to an end, and hope over “only” 50 bps in Dec still seems legit, but then Powell killed the rally some by saying that terminal rates may be higher than previously expected.
I think we probably peak between 5 and 5.5% early next year then hang out there until 2024 even if we are in recession.
EDIT: and now looks like the sale is on as it is “very premature to start talking about rate hike pauses”
Great job today market, really nailed this one at every turn.
The swongs when this guy talks are incredible
There’s also a dislocation between what people want to buy and what is being built. Efficiency in housing supply doesn’t necessarily align to whatever maximizes the profits of the developer, free market ideology notwithstanding. In places like Vancouver, there are lots of families fighting over a limited supply of housing that is big enough for a family (say, a 3 bedroom property). In a theoretical free market paradise, developers would leap to built the missing 3 BDR properties. But through a combination of zoning restrictions and market demand for “investment” real estate, the developers face a system of incentives that steer them to smaller units in bigger towers.
The solutions to these problems aren’t obvious.
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Wonder how much insiders make on trading this shit since there’s no rules against it in practice.
Do they stop any of it? Someone slapped $100k of way OTM ABMD calls weeks before they just got acquired and made $5m. That option chain normally has essentially no volume.