The Case for 100 Million Canadians
The Case for 100 Million Canadians
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The Case for 100 Million Canadians | The Walrus
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The article thankfully mentions what I believe is the main issue. Housing is a commodity now not a need to be filled.
Housing is now considered an investment. And investments are expected to go up in value. Since the majority of our population have adopted this stance, any policy that may lower the cost of housing gets torpedoed because a large amount of the population either owns property or thinks they will own property soon. People don't vote against their own interests.
This problem is compounded by the fact that people with land have more power, they can borrow against their assets to acquire more capital. People with more capital can lobby the government more effectively.
Of course my stance is that these people can get by with LESS money so that the people with almost NO money can survive. Convincing them of this though may prove to be nearly impossible and without their cooperation it's going to be a real uphill battle.
All this to say that until we NEED to get the cost of living under control. Immigration is necessary to keep our economy growing at the rate we'd like it to grow but it also is exasperating the cost of living crisis. It's complicated.
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The one good thing about this mindset is that building high density housing actually increases the value of any one specific plot of land, since the land is worth like 80% of a home's sales price in the first place nowadays. Even a low-rise apartment will increase the number of units of a single plot of land by a dozen or more, even if each individual unit is worth a tenth of the original plot, it will still come out to an overall higher value. Hundreds of times more if you build a high rise.
So if you can convince people that if you can approve the building of a high rise in any neighborhood at the place of a handful of houses, that those who sell can get double the value of their plot all at once, we can do this.
Even when people think of housing in the insane way as an investment, there are ways to spin things so that they can be convinced it's a good thing even for them. Either that, or we go the way of Japan and China, and the housing prices will collapse to only a quarter of what they are currently worth in less time than they can notice what's going on and sell them.
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15 comments