this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
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In the real world there are no single "true solutions". More social housing is needed. Capping speculation is needed. Taxing empty houses is needed. Building new dense and walkable neighbourhoods is needed. Carefully deflating the bubble to free up capital to productive investments is needed. Retrofitting existing buildings is needed. Housing coops are needed. All these things are needed.
Start The War on Landlords. Declare the housing crisis a national security threat, build housing till every landlord commits suicide.
Stop bending the knee to the for profit house building corporations. Stop protecting the status quo because it doesn't work for everyone. Stop making excuses for this way of life that has only been around for not even a thousand years yet. Stop acting like how things are are inevitable.
AND, electoral reform. I distinctly remember Canadians being promised electoral reform! Where the fuck is it? How about you get to vote for a kick in the nuts or a kick in the face? Sound fair? No? What's wrong YOU HAVE A CHOICE! Feeling free yet?
Welcome to earth, Where money is made up and the rules doesn't matter.
And here I thought the answer was to light rental properties on fire until it was too expensive to insure them and all of the landleeches ended up in squalor?
None of those are solutions. They're all Band-Aids. No matter how much you do any of those things you proposed, prices will continue to climb.
Not a single developed country has managed to rein in prices, no matter what tactics they've tried. There are places with all of those suggestions, and still... expensive housing.
Building more density in well-designed, walkable neighbourhoods is absolutely part of the answer.
We need to make it so that there are about as many homes as people who need homes. Right now the numbers are wildly out of wack. The reason prices won't go down is because the government is resistant to opening the floodgates of density (as you said, because too many of their constituents are homeowners).
If we just abolished single family zoning and said anyone can build dense housing anywhere that is residentially zoned, we'd have affordable housing within a few years. Zoning is an artificial bottleneck on the supply of housing. Imagine if every shitty carbrained suburb suddenly could house 2x or 3x as many people! But then of course we would need to make them a bit less carbrained by introducing more walkability, better public transit, and more mixed use. That can all be done gradually by relaxing zoning restrictions.
This is just objectively false.
Japan didn't have single family zoning, anyone could build dense housing anywhere residential in any of the major cities and they absolutely did, and yet it was never affordable. They have massively walkable cities, with great public transportation, and yet... not affordable unless you want to live in a 100 square foot closet that most north Americans couldn't even fit through the door on.
A bunch of US cities have no zoning and are still not affordable.
Zoning is a slight bottleneck, but it's not even close to the core problem.
I'm not saying don't change the zoning, go ahead, but expecting things to become affordable in a few years is an absolute pipe dream.
BC just did it, and developers are just shit talking the policy saying it doesn't change anything.
What are you arguing for? Because it seems you're championing doing nothing.
I'm championing land value taxes, but they won't pass until ownership rates drop another 20-30 percent over the next 20-30 years.
Honestly, the best option for my children (who are still quite young) right now is for me to try to make it worse faster so that we can make such a radical change sooner.
So, doing nothing. Got it.
There are places that cap real estate speculation? And also are shifting equity away from real estate and towards the productive parts of the economy? While also promoting social housing and coops and building new walkable neighborhoods? Like all of those things at once? Where is that social-democratic utopia?
Singapore.
Explain why the real estate sector in a small island city-state is comparable in any way to that in the country with the second largest landmass in the world.
Because 99% of the Canada landmass is rural, and a city is a city.
Also, last time I checked, Montreal (the first city mentioned in the article) is an island.
Singapore is 735.2 sq km and has a density of 7,804/sq km.
The Montreal metropolitan area is 4,258.31 sq km and has a density of 1,007.85/sq km.
I don't know if 1% of Canada is urban. But assuming it is, and assuming that it is impossible to grow that 1% of the 9,093,507 sq km that make up the country (a ludicrous assumption that one), that is still 90,935.1 sq km.
Your comparison is just plain irrelevant and wrong.
Your comparison has no relevance. What does total available landmass have to do with anything related to the policies in question?
Sorry but any analysis of real estate economics that does not take into account the scarcity or abundance of ...land is just pointless.
Singapore does not have a Brossard to connect with a REM to build a new urban core. Even more, it does not have multiple options for different places to develop and densify, like Montreal has, just based on the current plans for the REM, and without taking into account future transit projects or the idea of, oh I don't know, creating an Ottawa-Montreal megacity with HSR.
Again, what does having abundance of land have to do with policies like Walkability, Speculation, or Social housing?
Explain why they don't because to me it's obvious.
You don't improve walkability by spreading things out, you actually want the exact opposite.
Speculation is harder if there's more of something available.
Social housing... I fail to see any connection to the amount of land in a country.
Yes but we are not talking generally about the correlations, we are specifically talking about Singapore which you brought up as a place where many policies are implemented and there is still a housing crisis. My response is that the Singapore scenario suffers from extreme scarcity of land which would explain a lot of Singapore's problems and is therefore not a good counterargument for the Canadian context which is very very difficult.
Their population hasn't increased at all in the last 6 years, so how does a lack of land explain the cost increases of housing they're seeing over that period?
You misrepresent what I'm saying. I'm saying that the constraints in one vs the other country are so vastly different that you can't draw direct conclusions.
I have no idea how the Singaporean society and economy functions. Maybe they need more space for factories and vertical farms. Maybe the previous situation was too crowded to begin with and they are taking up more space. I don't know. Do you?
And regardless, it's up to you to explain why the real estate market of a tiny island city state is a useful paradigm from which to learn policy lessons in the second largest country on earth. It's a counter-intuitive position, so the maxim that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence applies.
You're using the "no true scotsman" defence right now. There is no other country comparable to the size of Canada in the world other than Russia, so does that mean we can only look at them for policy?
"I don't know about this place so I'm not going to be able to even consider it's policies" - That's an ignorance argument.
Where's your proof that any of the policies you're suggesting will work? Do you have a single example of them working elsewhere?
No I am not. I am not even defending: I did not reject off hand your position, I said it is implausible based on what I know, explained why I think it is implausible and asked for you to explain why you think it isn't. It's dialogue, not sparring.
I don't even have to provide "proof" of policies working. You are the one that said none of them would work, i.e., you're the one that makes a blanket statement. I'm saying try them all, some combination will probably do it, because these all sound like good ideas that are also not mutually exclusive. You're asserting something logically stronger than me, so you're the one with the burden of proof.
The person who makes the original assertion needs to prove it, not the one that "asserts something logically stronger"
I can also just point to the fact that we've tried a bunch of these policies at a smaller scale, other places have tried a bunch of these policies at various scales, and as far as I know there isn't a developed country that has declining home prices in cities, or that have managed to keep any of their bigger cities affordable.