COMMENTARY: The free market will not fix our housing crisis - NB Media Co-op
COMMENTARY: The free market will not fix our housing crisis - NB Media Co-op
The free market won't fix anything
Canadian government and their corporate owners: ...... but we're gonna spend the next five years trying.
How's the Canadian government going to get around restrictive zoning? You're blaming the wrong level of government. As long as that happens, all we're going to get is half-assed programs and little results. Ferret Face can propose all sorts of things, knowing he'll never have to deliver, "Courts struck down the program, sorry.".
Housing continues to be the jurisdiction of the provinces. The article ignores the patriation of the constitution in 1982, which lead to the Feds withdrawing from a bunch of programs they formally funded.
It also ignores the fact that housing prices in the GTA (among other places) were stagnant through the 1990s, so there was little incentive to continue building projects that would only increase supply and add downward price pressure. Once Harris got in, any chance of social housing development went out the window.
We also have to recognize that average house sizes have doubled since the 1960s. We're using more land and more material to build fewer houses. What the hell did people think was going to happen to house prices? The sub-1000sq.ft. "strawberry box" houses built in the thousands as post wartime housing can't be built in large part due to lack of demand and restrictive covenants. The same for the three story walk ups.
but we're gonna spend the next five years trying pretending to try
You can't have a free market with a product that is both limited, non-renewable, and necessary to live.
For almost 20 years after Jean Chrétien came to office, the market was still over-building McMansions relative to multi-family projects, and taking up huge amounts of space and resources that would soon be needed for a growing population.
The "market" wasn't doing that; the zoning restrictions that prohibit density were forcing that. Blaming the proliferation of single-family housing at the expense of the "missing middle" on the "free market" is ridiculous disinformation.
The free market is incapable of existing. Human nature makes it an impossibility. So we should focus on desirable public housing to free people from the rigged markets, and keep human nature in check.
I'm not necessarily saying that appropriate regulations wouldn't be better than no regulations at all, but I am saying that the current regulations are worse than nothing at all.
In the spectrum between requiring only single-family housing, allowing any kind of housing, and prohibiting single-family housing, we could argue about which of the latter two is best -- but in either case, the first one is definitely wrong!
I mean, we can at least agree that before you fill in a hole you've got to quit digging, right?
That is an excellent primer on how the housing crisis got started.