US homebuilders are urging the White House to address issues that threaten the housing market. In related news: US housing starts unexpectedly rise in March; Canadian starts trend lower; building material prices continue to rise; and Japan’s prices surge as Russian lumber imports are banned.
In Forestry/Climate news: USDA invests $31 million to reduce wildfire risks; Pacific NW wildfire smoke impacts air quality near and far; Oregon’s wildfire risk map may mandate ‘home hardening’ measures; Whistler adopts new wildfire resiliency plan; and locking up forests for carbon is not so clear cut.
Finally, just in case you were off Easter Monday, lots more headlines in yesterday’s news.
Kelly McCloskey, Tree Frog Editor
VICTORIA — When Victoria city council voted last week to speed up approval of non-market and affordable housing projects, Housing Minister David Eby fast-tracked his praise. …The shift is expected to shave nine months off the approval timeline for a typical project, according to the city. The expedited approval process will reduce costs by $2 million on a typical project. …The implications of Victoria’s decision go well beyond the boundaries of the provincial capital. With B.C. accepting 100,000 new residents last year, Eby says it’s a given that the province must increase the supply of all types of needed housing. He’s been pressuring local governments to expedite approvals of housing development. Eby, who is also the attorney-general, is preparing legislation for introduction at the fall session to allow the province to override local authority if necessary.
New residential construction in the U.S. expectedly saw modest growth in the month of March, according to the Commerce Department. The report showed housing starts rose by 0.3 percent to an annual rate of 1.793 million in March after spiking by 6.5 percent to an upwardly revised rate of 1.788 million in February. The uptick surprised economists, who had expected housing starts to fall. With the unexpected growth, housing starts once again reached their highest annual rate since hitting 1.802 million in June of 2006. The modest increase in housing starts came as multi-family starts soared by 4.6 percent to a rate of 593,000, more than offsetting a 1.7 percent drop in single-family starts to a rate of 1.200 million. …The Commerce Department said building permits also climbed by 0.4 percent to an annual rate of 1.873 million in March after slumping by 1.6 to a revised rate of 1.865 million in February. Building permits had been expected tumble.
Lumber prices have reached record highs in Japan since economic sanctions were imposed against Russia, leading to expectations of a spike in housing costs in the years ahead. Russia accounts for more than 80 percent of Japan’s imports of wood veneer sheets, which are used to make plywood boards. Nearly 20 percent of Japan’s imports of rafters, which are used to build home roofs, also come from Russia. But Japanese construction companies have halted orders for Russian wood amid waves of economic sanctions against the country for its invasion of Ukraine. …The expected paucity of Russian housing material in the coming months has also contributed to the rise, according to industry officials.
Singapore—A UK-Singapore joint venture is set to introduce engineered timber, or Laminated Veneer Lumber (LVL), for housing projects in India and other South Asian countries in an ambitious bid to substitute wood for steel and concrete and help scale up low-carbon construction. A team of designers and engineers working with locally-sourced timber will be located in Chennai in the coming months, said Kevin Hill, Managing Director of timber design and construction company Venturer Pte Ltd, a partnership with Singapore’s Woh Hup Construction Group. …“The world is finally accepting that timber construction can be the single most important way to cut emissions for the built environment,” said Hill… He pointed out that “Wood for good” is no longer an idle wish. …Hill sees a huge market for timber housing in India, Nepal and Bhutan, backed by the availability of good grade timber, responsibly-sourced from the region and not imported from Europe.
In 2021, British Columbia endured one of the worst wildfire seasons on record, fuelled in part by record-breaking temperatures across the province in June—including in Whistler. …Aside from some smoky skies, Whistler largely avoided the impacts of the 2021 wildfire season—but that doesn’t mean local officials are sleeping easy. …Avoiding a similar fate to Lytton is top of mind for the Resort Municipality of Whistler (RMOW), which is why mayor and council voted to adopt a new Community Wildfire Resiliency Plan (CWRP) at the April 5 council meeting. The new CWRP—which replaces the 2011 Community Wildfire Protection Plan—was drafted by B.A. Blackwell & Associates with input from community stakeholders and RMOW staff. …While the plan recommends thinning forested areas in and around Whistler, particularly along the Highway 99 corridor, FireSmarting high-risk neighbourhoods is its highest priority.
One often hears that the forests of the Sunshine Coast are so productive that they practically beg to be logged, that no amount of logging (read clear-cutting), could possibly put a dent in this apparently inexhaustible resource. This sophistic conception of the forest as anthropocentric extractive resource is built on the old colonial productivism paradigm, which is the opposite of the ecological conception of the forest as an infinitely complex ecosystem whose equilibrium has evolved over millennia, to sustain all living beings and not only humans. …Apparently, the logging company known as the Sunshine Coast Community Forest (SCCF) is of the opinion that this old forest [Blk EW24] is not worth keeping as it is surrounded by logged out land (land which used to be “productive” forests no doubt…).
How should Oregon determine which parts of the state face the highest wildfire risk? A 
We are closer than ever to climate tipping points that could significantly change life as we know it. Bearing the brunt of the climate crisis are our forests, which are the basis for so-called nature-based solutions, or NBS. …While they may sound appealing on paper, the reality is that GE trees could further exacerbate the climate crisis by threatening forest ecosystems, Indigenous peoples, and biodiversity, especially in eastern forests. …There are no long-term assessments of the risks these GE trees pose to forest ecosystems, water, or nearby human communities. Rather than provide a solution, GE trees have the potential to damage forests, and escalate climate change, environmental destruction, and economic inequality. …GE trees will not solve climate change but exacerbate it by interfering with efforts to protect and regenerate forests. Without a fundamental systemic transformation, no progress towards a liveable future will be made.
I have written before about the huge reliance the UK has on imported timber – after China, it is the second largest net importer of wood products in the world. That reliance on imports is set to increase in the coming decades as domestic demand for timber grows further and domestic supply is forecast to fall. In Scotland, in recent years, we’ve seen real action taken to increase planting and much of that new forest will produce the wood we use in our everyday lives and which will help us to achieve our climate change targets. …The conflict and reset in the Russian/Western relationship, will have fundamental implications political, social and economic. Putin’s war is forcing governments to revisit assumptions and recalibrate policies. The rest of the UK needs to follow Scotland’s lead and plan for a future where we cannot assume that wood will always be freely or cheaply available.
The smoke in the US Pacific north-west during wildfire disasters in past years has caused atmospheric carbon monoxide levels to spike, with the contaminants offsetting recent reductions in emissions, scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research have found. …But scientists are increasingly finding that the fires may be part of a feedback loop that could accelerate the change in conditions and that health impacts officials have long warned would worsen with climate crisis, may in fact already be here. …In August – when CO was expected to be driven to its lowest points – there were instead spikes. The scientists found that this not only affects atmospheric carbon monoxide, but was found closer to the Earth’s surface as well. …The toxic output from fires contributes to an estimated loss of more than 15,000 lives in the US each year. Some scientists say that number will double by the end of the century.