So the meat of the article is splitting hairs over the fact that housing isn’t an acute problem and thus not a crisis? Is this the kind of “I’m so smart” bullshit the Walrus wants to drop on a society that can’t pluralize collection nouns properly and that also uses “literally” in a figurative sense?
We have people harming women with legislation entitled “protection of women and child act”. We have the environmental protection agency allowing aggressively carcinogenic fuel additives into our lakes and rivers.
We’re not ready for the thinking required to recognize some Walrus author’s obvious intellect, and give him the parade he feels he deserves; or at least some polite applause and a chorus of “hear hear, old chum” around our ornate tobacco pipes in the mahogany-paneled study.
Yes, I was going to comment the same thing! By saying “there is no housing crisis“, it implies that there is less of a problem, not more of one. It’s provocative, but misleading. At the very least, the title should’ve been changed to say “It’s not a housing crisis, but a broken housing system“.
But honestly, is that even a useful point to make at length? Everyone knows it’s broken beyond just the short term!
A shortage occurs when an external mechanism, such as government intervention, prevents price from rising.
While we do have such controls in certain areas of the economy – you were probably bitten by one case at the onset of COVID when toilet paper wasn’t legally able to rise in price due to price gouging laws, leaving the shelves bare instead – I’m not aware of any attempts to restrict the price of housing?
Setting a government mandated price limit on housing is oft suggested as a solution, but the so-called problem here is that the prices have been able to rise. Literally the opposite of a shortage.
It’s a “shortage” in the normal colloquial use of the term because the quantity of housing demanded exceeds the quantity supplied relative to some spectrum of desired prices. “There’s no shortage if you have $2 million!” is hardly reassuring. I think you’re misapplying the jargon found in economics textbooks. On that definition, the recent spike in rice prices which will lead to millions of people starving is not a “shortage” because prices were allowed to rise. Sure, but that’s silly. What people normally mean by “rice shortage” is “there’s not enough rice”. It’s not enough precisely because prices are too high.
If you like, call it a “supply-demand imbalance” or an “affordability crisis”, but it doesn’t change anything. The point is, supply is so low that it’s causing a lot of human misery. In normal English, that’s called a “shortage”, because there’s not enough of it.
There’s less houses per capita than this sort of economy should have, and as a result prices are high (low supply, same demand). What word you want to use for that is up to you, I guess; usually people get what I’m saying so I don’t think “shortage” is a bad choice.
Price is what moderates demand. The higher the price, the less demand there is. Maybe you can eke out a million dollar home, but at a billion dollars I’m sure you are tapping out and moving to the forest to live under a pile of branches. Well, I certainly am!
So long as price is able to rise, rise it will, and demand will keep eroding until equilibrium with supply is found. And I think it is fair to say we have found equilibrium. If you are in the market, there is no trouble finding a home. If you have sufficient transactional value in hand, someone out there will sell you their home, guaranteed.
That’s quite unlike the toilet paper situation we saw a few years ago, where even a million dollars in your pocket wouldn’t necessarily secure you a roll, even though the lottery winners were paying dollars at most. That happened because price gouging laws prevented price from rising. That’s a shortage.
If you ignore the price component then everything is in shortage. There is always someone who is happy to take more, more, more. Call it that if you want, but what’s the point? What, exactly, are you communicating when there is nothing not in shortage? There is good reason why the formal definition is more succinct.
The thing about putting real economic situations directly in basic economics terms is that it’s impossible. I’d maintain that such an explanation exists, but we’re so, so far from having all the data needed to do so.
What I’m doing here is using comparable economies as a litmus test. Canada has less houses per capita then them, and higher housing prices. This tells a story that can be framed in economics terms, and that I suspect is correct. Why we have less houses is the interesting question, which I can’t yet answer.
Maybe you can eke out a million dollar home, but at a billion dollars I’m sure you are tapping out and moving to the forest to live under a pile of branches. Well, I certainly am!
An interesting digression about this: it would be illegal. The building of permanent structures is very regulated in Canada. It also might be hard to commute to work from crown land, and hunting or foraging is a challenging skill that’s also very regulated.
What actually happens when you’re priced out of housing is you become either a couch surfer, or a homeless person that’s periodically harassed by the police. Our laws basically assume everyone can afford a house.
Why we have less houses is the interesting question, which I can’t yet answer.
That’s easy to answer: There is nobody to build them.
Anyone who is willing to build homes is already building as many as they possibly can, and are booked up years in advance. If you want to hire someone to build a new home for you tomorrow – you can’t – the people don’t exist. –– Well, yes, technically, offer an exceptionally large sum to those committed to other projects and they’ll drop everything they have going on and will wait on you hand and foot. Everyone has a price. But that does nothing to help with the cost of housing. Those wishing to build offering more and more money to people building houses to get their spot in line is what is driving the costs upward.
Realistically, the only real solution is high unemployment, forcing people currently doing pointless office jobs to start swinging hammers. More labourers in the labour pool means lower labour costs (drives wages down), which means less cost to build new homes and allows more homes to be built, which means used homes come down in price in kind.
The BoC is working on it, to be fair. They have made it clear that they plan to push this shift in the economy. It takes time, though. If you want to see results sooner, take up work in the home construction industry (if not already). Be the change you want to see, as they say.
Immigration is also an option. I’m surprised we haven’t heard more about a shift towards admitting construction workers, which there are tons of out there.
I’m more wondering why we got into this situation in the first place. Do we have lower construction workers per capita than the US, UK ect.? And if so why.
So the meat of the article is splitting hairs over the fact that housing isn’t an acute problem and thus not a crisis? Is this the kind of “I’m so smart” bullshit the Walrus wants to drop on a society that can’t pluralize collection nouns properly and that also uses “literally” in a figurative sense?
We have people harming women with legislation entitled “protection of women and child act”. We have the environmental protection agency allowing aggressively carcinogenic fuel additives into our lakes and rivers.
We’re not ready for the thinking required to recognize some Walrus author’s obvious intellect, and give him the parade he feels he deserves; or at least some polite applause and a chorus of “hear hear, old chum” around our ornate tobacco pipes in the mahogany-paneled study.
Honestly, Walrus, what the fuck.
Yes, I was going to comment the same thing! By saying “there is no housing crisis“, it implies that there is less of a problem, not more of one. It’s provocative, but misleading. At the very least, the title should’ve been changed to say “It’s not a housing crisis, but a broken housing system“.
But honestly, is that even a useful point to make at length? Everyone knows it’s broken beyond just the short term!
Plus, there actually is a shortage relative to similar economies, which is worth mentioning.
A shortage occurs when an external mechanism, such as government intervention, prevents price from rising.
While we do have such controls in certain areas of the economy – you were probably bitten by one case at the onset of COVID when toilet paper wasn’t legally able to rise in price due to price gouging laws, leaving the shelves bare instead – I’m not aware of any attempts to restrict the price of housing?
Setting a government mandated price limit on housing is oft suggested as a solution, but the so-called problem here is that the prices have been able to rise. Literally the opposite of a shortage.
It’s a “shortage” in the normal colloquial use of the term because the quantity of housing demanded exceeds the quantity supplied relative to some spectrum of desired prices. “There’s no shortage if you have $2 million!” is hardly reassuring. I think you’re misapplying the jargon found in economics textbooks. On that definition, the recent spike in rice prices which will lead to millions of people starving is not a “shortage” because prices were allowed to rise. Sure, but that’s silly. What people normally mean by “rice shortage” is “there’s not enough rice”. It’s not enough precisely because prices are too high.
If you like, call it a “supply-demand imbalance” or an “affordability crisis”, but it doesn’t change anything. The point is, supply is so low that it’s causing a lot of human misery. In normal English, that’s called a “shortage”, because there’s not enough of it.
There’s less houses per capita than this sort of economy should have, and as a result prices are high (low supply, same demand). What word you want to use for that is up to you, I guess; usually people get what I’m saying so I don’t think “shortage” is a bad choice.
Price is what moderates demand. The higher the price, the less demand there is. Maybe you can eke out a million dollar home, but at a billion dollars I’m sure you are tapping out and moving to the forest to live under a pile of branches. Well, I certainly am!
So long as price is able to rise, rise it will, and demand will keep eroding until equilibrium with supply is found. And I think it is fair to say we have found equilibrium. If you are in the market, there is no trouble finding a home. If you have sufficient transactional value in hand, someone out there will sell you their home, guaranteed.
That’s quite unlike the toilet paper situation we saw a few years ago, where even a million dollars in your pocket wouldn’t necessarily secure you a roll, even though the lottery winners were paying dollars at most. That happened because price gouging laws prevented price from rising. That’s a shortage.
If you ignore the price component then everything is in shortage. There is always someone who is happy to take more, more, more. Call it that if you want, but what’s the point? What, exactly, are you communicating when there is nothing not in shortage? There is good reason why the formal definition is more succinct.
The thing about putting real economic situations directly in basic economics terms is that it’s impossible. I’d maintain that such an explanation exists, but we’re so, so far from having all the data needed to do so.
What I’m doing here is using comparable economies as a litmus test. Canada has less houses per capita then them, and higher housing prices. This tells a story that can be framed in economics terms, and that I suspect is correct. Why we have less houses is the interesting question, which I can’t yet answer.
An interesting digression about this: it would be illegal. The building of permanent structures is very regulated in Canada. It also might be hard to commute to work from crown land, and hunting or foraging is a challenging skill that’s also very regulated.
What actually happens when you’re priced out of housing is you become either a couch surfer, or a homeless person that’s periodically harassed by the police. Our laws basically assume everyone can afford a house.
That’s easy to answer: There is nobody to build them.
Anyone who is willing to build homes is already building as many as they possibly can, and are booked up years in advance. If you want to hire someone to build a new home for you tomorrow – you can’t – the people don’t exist. –– Well, yes, technically, offer an exceptionally large sum to those committed to other projects and they’ll drop everything they have going on and will wait on you hand and foot. Everyone has a price. But that does nothing to help with the cost of housing. Those wishing to build offering more and more money to people building houses to get their spot in line is what is driving the costs upward.
Realistically, the only real solution is high unemployment, forcing people currently doing pointless office jobs to start swinging hammers. More labourers in the labour pool means lower labour costs (drives wages down), which means less cost to build new homes and allows more homes to be built, which means used homes come down in price in kind.
The BoC is working on it, to be fair. They have made it clear that they plan to push this shift in the economy. It takes time, though. If you want to see results sooner, take up work in the home construction industry (if not already). Be the change you want to see, as they say.
Immigration is also an option. I’m surprised we haven’t heard more about a shift towards admitting construction workers, which there are tons of out there.
I’m more wondering why we got into this situation in the first place. Do we have lower construction workers per capita than the US, UK ect.? And if so why.
Who’s to say that is the one true definition of crisis anyway? People call “crisis” anything they feel highly impacting, no matter the acuteness.