Absolutely, and it's a great question.
The thing that happened, and it's a little...well, I don't want to say insidious, because that speaks of mal-intent. What happened was that no one was really paying attention to the overall picture, the overall housing environment, and looking at the connections with health care, education, early childhood development and things like that, which it affects. Housing is a fundamental need, like food and security. It's different in economic terms. It's not a want, although it is a want for some people.
The big problem is that the process became more complex. Regulations grew. No one was looking at how everything came together. You had different levels of government in our wonderfully decentralized country, the most decentralized in the developed world, with multiple agencies and government bodies—we counted 45 government entities that are involved in the approvals process—and it became a mess.
Of course, buildings became more complex—we're building greener and trying to reduce carbon and things like that as best we can—and we're doing a pretty good job on that, I would say, but it was just that no one was at the helm. It was like you had a boat without a bridge.
