The Liberals and NDP need to up their housing game before the next election. They’re more worried about protecting paper gains for existing homeowners than than getting prices back to affordable levels.
Why is the Liberal Party still droning on about protecting high home values while promising to make new home ownership easy? The Liberals should drop this obvious lie – voters can see the impact of housing speculation on increasing generational wealth inequalities for themselves – and heed their own legislation by focusing on the federal role in ensuring renters’ equal rights.
And why is NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh prioritizing owners’ returns over renter rights? British Columbia, which is the only NDP government in power in Canada, is the most pro-housing supply province. Build on that. Income-based housing targets, leasing public land to scale up non-market housing, and tax change to lessen wealth inequalities should be talking points for the “workers party” right now.
At the federal level, it seems absolutely nobody cares about pushing the real solutions – abolishing our insane zoning codes that bake in inequality, abolishing other crazy land use regulations like parking minimums, and taxing land.
Canada has some of the most habitable land per capita in the world, so clearly it’s not a shortage of land or a “toO mAnY iMmiGrAnTs” problem (as some people would like to make it out to be). The problem is we have all collectively bought into the same delusion as America – that we can have government-mandated suburban sprawl for all, and that home values can go up in perpetuity.
But suburban sprawl is thoroughly unsustainable – both environmentally and economically – and the land use laws we use to artificially manufacture suburbia are artificially restricting housing supply, choking the economy, and driving inequality sky-high.
And those very same laws we use to mandate sprawl-for-all are responsible for maintaining housing-as-an-investment. But to be a good investment, housing has to appreciate faster than inflation, but if it’s outpacing inflation, it by definition cannot be affordable!
Plenty of desirable, high QoL cities have shown that upzoning can stabilize rents. Plenty of desirable, high-growth regions have shown that taxing land can stabilize housing prices. And any new housing – even market rate or “luxury” – improves overall affordability.
The housing crisis is a policy choice.
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My pet peeve is the provincial policy that as well pushes the needle to be expensive.
I own a home in Calgary that is zoned to allow for secondary suites. I already have a kitchen down there. I wanted to add a walk-out exit but the province said no, unless:
I redo the HVAC for the whole house so that the basement is on a completely isolated loop with a completely seperate furnace, and I rip apart the roof and walls to apply sound dampening materials.
The hurdle is insane. I spent a great portion of my life living in basement suites without either of those… And much worse!
I’m all about safety, but this is far past that.
We talk about densifying urban spaces but the new regulations make it cost prohibitive to do so on an existing build. I’d love to help ease the stress on the INSANE rental market in Calgary… But even provincial policy makes it extremely difficult to densify.
Ah yes the “let’s build our way out of an monetary imbalance” policy that literally cannot possibly work.
Most notably because such concepts never include massive infrastructure spending nor a way to prevent 1%ers from just buying up stock as investment vehicles.
The only viable solution is punishing people who buy housing as an investment, strict rent control, building denser, more efficient housing And completely redoing our cities to remove car reliance.
Barking at the wrong tree, zoning, housing, municipalities… All of that is provincial.
The article actually mentions fixing (butchering is what’s needed, really) zoning for the moment it wanders away from parliamentary politics.
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How do you suggest the federal level tackle those problems without breaking the law?
Or are you saying that the feds should try to overthrow the power that be in some kind of coup? That would be interesting, but how could that happen when the people who control the feds are, ultimately, the same people who control the power that would need to be overthrown?
In fact, the same people who went out of their way to ensure that the feds don’t have legal authority over these kinds of matters. It would be kind of strange to walk back on that now after all the toil to set that up in the first place.
Typically by tying federal funding of municipalities and provinces to bare minimums of legislation. That’s what the feds did with the last round of provincial health funding, for example.
I would like it if they at least talked about the real solutions, or perhaps provided incentives for municipalities to institute the necessary changes. Instead, we get them talking about things like rent control (well-meaning but horrible policy) and banning boogeymen like foreign investors (as if native-born slumlords are any less predatory).
If absolutely nothing else, they oughta be using their bully pulpit to get a national conversation going about these things, rather than solution theater that maintains the status quo.
Of course, the biggest thing they could do would be a federal land value tax to replace some amount of income taxes and other federal taxes. Land value taxes are more economically efficient, progressive, basically impossible to evade, can’t be passed on to tenants, incentivize more and denser housing (and less sprawl), and reduce upward speculative pressure on housing prices. In theory, there is no limit to how many taxes can be replaced by land value taxes; it has been shown that land value taxes are capable of replacing all taxes at all levels of government.
It is not likely that they have all the information to talk about it intelligently. It is not their jurisdiction. This would be like asking municipalities to comment on military operations.
They tried that with childcare. Remember how that went? Not well, in case you forgot. It was treated like the world was going to end if the incentive was accepted. And that was a complete nothingburger in comparison to this.
Have they not? In my mind they have made it abundantly clear that if people end up underwater in their homes, we’re in serious, serious trouble. It would be like what happened in the US in 2008, except way, way worse as we’re in much, much deeper.
How much clearer can they be without actually scaring people away from housing, which will then become a self-fulfilling prophesy?
I get that you, an individual, may actually want that to happen, but it is pretty obvious why the representation of the entire country does not.
Doesn’t every province now has policy requiring affordable childcare? That was as a direct result of federal intervention.
Yes and yes. Is there something that’s not stating the obvious that you want to add?