Over several decades, the market has been transformed into a financialized wild west where the interests of the investor class are sacrosanct and social need is secondary
Can you help me understand what a non-commodified housing system looks like? Does everyone live in social housing or is there just a lot of social housing with a secondary open market? Are there restrictions on investing in housing, such as you may only own 1 home or maybe 2? I’m just trying to get my head around it.
(Back-of-the-napkin ideas from a nerd who has way to much time on their hands to read about stuff like this)
Does everyone live in social housing or is there just a lot of social housing with a secondary open market?
likely the second: it’s human nature to have preferences for things, and if you don’t accommodate for people wanting something outside the norm, it’ll just end up on a gray or black market. That’s not a defeatist “what’s the point in even trying” statement (“why ban xyz?? People will just get xyz anyways!” is not what I’m trying to say), just acknowledging the realities of people being an extremely diverse collection of individuals and how to work that fact into on-the-ground policy. If you’re in a position to be able to afford something else, you should be able to build it - so long as the external costs such as utility hookups and roads and so on are factored into “can afford” (property taxes should be replaced with a land value tax, or in lieu of that raised to cover the costs of infra to get to your home).
Are there restrictions on investing in housing, such as you may only own 1 home or maybe 2?
This would help slow the bleeding, but I don’t see it being a solution: numbered corps “suddenly” on the rise after that happens. The only real solution is for the government to build a ton of social housing themselves and not P3 it or leave it to the market, since we’re trying to leave it to the market and it’s obviously failing to deliver and P3s are a waste of money.
So this would be pretty close to what we have now, but with so much social housing people wouldn’t have to worry about being homeless. Like a basic income, but for houses.
More or less: the government would out-compete the investors and builders, leaving only those with sustainable business practices left to build the difference (I say this part because a healthy business can (ideally) compete on only the merits, as opposed to trying to cheat the market and hiding costs that way as quite a few do now).
There’s a whole ton of asterisks here, and we should probably steal a few ideas from Singapore (not everything, because there are things there that don’t apply to here, and vice versa), but it’s the general idea.
Gov’ts do this very, very badly from anything I’ve seen.
Can you share some details?
I don’t personally believe government-run projects are inherently doomed to be bad simply because they’re government-run: private industry shits the bed on a fairly regular basis, yet we give it a pass here, so what makes government special here? Both can (and do!) fail in exactly the same ways, and just because it’s government or private doesn’t mean we shouldn’t give it a chance: we’ve tried the private way for a few decades and look where it got us.
I can see the argument for not having qualified experts available in every municipality and that leading to poor outcomes, but that’s a people problem and not a government problem, and also not something unique to government (and the idea that every private industry expert is qualified is absurd: plenty of idiots in private orgs too).
The problem space is the same actual space for both, not a similar space, the exact same. If anything, Canada needs an “Army Corps of Engineers” or something to build infra+housing for municipalities.
Just keep building housing until there’s enough available that nobody’s left without an affordable home. Enough that investors can’t buy it all (without simultaneously killing the value, because TOO MUCH empty housing kills the value of the area). If that requires municipalities investing in building then let’s have them do that.
The cause isn’t “investors”, they are a symptom, of capitalism, the actual cause.
Housing is a human right and should not be commodified, anything less than that should no longer be acceptable.
Can you help me understand what a non-commodified housing system looks like? Does everyone live in social housing or is there just a lot of social housing with a secondary open market? Are there restrictions on investing in housing, such as you may only own 1 home or maybe 2? I’m just trying to get my head around it.
(Back-of-the-napkin ideas from a nerd who has way to much time on their hands to read about stuff like this)
likely the second: it’s human nature to have preferences for things, and if you don’t accommodate for people wanting something outside the norm, it’ll just end up on a gray or black market. That’s not a defeatist “what’s the point in even trying” statement (“why ban xyz?? People will just get xyz anyways!” is not what I’m trying to say), just acknowledging the realities of people being an extremely diverse collection of individuals and how to work that fact into on-the-ground policy. If you’re in a position to be able to afford something else, you should be able to build it - so long as the external costs such as utility hookups and roads and so on are factored into “can afford” (property taxes should be replaced with a land value tax, or in lieu of that raised to cover the costs of infra to get to your home).
This would help slow the bleeding, but I don’t see it being a solution: numbered corps “suddenly” on the rise after that happens. The only real solution is for the government to build a ton of social housing themselves and not P3 it or leave it to the market, since we’re trying to leave it to the market and it’s obviously failing to deliver and P3s are a waste of money.
So this would be pretty close to what we have now, but with so much social housing people wouldn’t have to worry about being homeless. Like a basic income, but for houses.
More or less: the government would out-compete the investors and builders, leaving only those with sustainable business practices left to build the difference (I say this part because a healthy business can (ideally) compete on only the merits, as opposed to trying to cheat the market and hiding costs that way as quite a few do now).
There’s a whole ton of asterisks here, and we should probably steal a few ideas from Singapore (not everything, because there are things there that don’t apply to here, and vice versa), but it’s the general idea.
I can’t see that going well at all. Gov’ts do this very, very badly from anything I’ve seen.
Can you share some details?
I don’t personally believe government-run projects are inherently doomed to be bad simply because they’re government-run: private industry shits the bed on a fairly regular basis, yet we give it a pass here, so what makes government special here? Both can (and do!) fail in exactly the same ways, and just because it’s government or private doesn’t mean we shouldn’t give it a chance: we’ve tried the private way for a few decades and look where it got us.
I can see the argument for not having qualified experts available in every municipality and that leading to poor outcomes, but that’s a people problem and not a government problem, and also not something unique to government (and the idea that every private industry expert is qualified is absurd: plenty of idiots in private orgs too).
The problem space is the same actual space for both, not a similar space, the exact same. If anything, Canada needs an “Army Corps of Engineers” or something to build infra+housing for municipalities.
Just keep building housing until there’s enough available that nobody’s left without an affordable home. Enough that investors can’t buy it all (without simultaneously killing the value, because TOO MUCH empty housing kills the value of the area). If that requires municipalities investing in building then let’s have them do that.