this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
88 points (88.6% liked)

Canada

7275 readers
367 users here now

What's going on Canada?



Related Communities


🍁 Meta


πŸ—ΊοΈ Provinces / Territories


πŸ™οΈ Cities / Local Communities

Sorted alphabetically by city name.


πŸ’ SportsHockey

Football (NFL): incomplete

Football (CFL): incomplete

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer


πŸ’» Schools / Universities

Sorted by province, then by total full-time enrolment.


πŸ’΅ Finance, Shopping, Sales


πŸ—£οΈ Politics


🍁 Social / Culture


Rules

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage: lemmy.ca


founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

This isn't an easy solution. It took us 40 years to get into this mess, and it's going to take a good while to get out of it.

No, there's a very easy solution: the government should build housing the same way they build roads and bridges.

Housing is societal infrastructure. Leaving that entirely to the private sector never made any damn sense.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Simple and easy are two different words. "Start doing something you used to do almost half a century ago and wait 5 to 10 years, and multiple potential changes of government, for tangible results," is pretty simple, but I wouldn't say it's easy. I'm also certain none of the pundits will say, "Look at all the money they spent, and we still have a housing crisis," followed by, "Sure we fixed one housing crisis, but look at all the people who lost money on the purchase of their homes!"

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

All excellent points, and you're right, I really meant "simple", not "easy".

My comment was really intended to highlight the narrowing of the solution space regarding housing. When houses became products and investments, we collectively decided the government had no place in building them aside from indirect nudges: zoning, various forms of incentives, etc.

Maybe it's time we accept that the free market has simply failed and we need to look beyond neoliberal orthodoxy for solutions.

That's not an easy shift! Not at all. But IMO it's a necessary one.

As an aside, it's not like this is new. "It's a Wonderful Life" highlighted this exact problem. Their only mistake is they assumed a benevolent capitalist (George) would come along and fix the problem. But that ain't how the real world works.