Canada’s political and media class has spent years chasing convenient villains to blame for the housing crisis, pointing the finger at foreign buyers, immigrants, supply shortages, zoning rules, or an overheated market.
Every MP and MLA is a real estate investor and that’s what is driving all of this madness. A home used to be a place for your family to live, for generations. Now, it’s a quarterly, profit-driven investment.
Homes should be homes, not speculation.
I’ll vote for you if this is your platform!
Well shit if we are pitching platforms, I’d like a chance to run
Maybe no one will vote for you. You haven’t said anything to differentiate yourself from the current group of selfish opportunistic politicians we have.
Well, free mental healthcare is at the top of my list
This is not a new thing, access to housing has always been a fundamental mechanism of control in settlers colonial states. This was only recognised as a real problem once it affected privileged groups who have experienced enough generational wealth to normalize homeownership.
You’re right, most representatives who make our decisions on housing happen to be members of a privileged class which is actively invested in profiting off that control. It does not end at housing, the exact problem with reform in a capitalist system is the link between privilege and material wealth ensures that the interests of capital remain paramount in society.
I would say most instead of “all”
Switch to your credit unions folks!
Canada’s big banks rake in so much interest money it’s sickening. The banks want the economy to suffer so more borrowing can be done. It works at odds with societal progression for the citizenry. In retrospect, we sure fucked up by choosing capitalism…
Capitalism chose us
Government is a bigger player, they are expanding existing metropolises instead of building new metropolises.
Instead of providing incentives for housing in suburbs around Toronto and Ottawa they could increase taxes on those cities to build a new one halfway between them, connect it via high speed rail. Then use the increased taxes in the other cities to offset taxes in the new one.
Nobody wants to live in Kingston, come on.
This made die laughing hahaha
That’s halfway by road not halfway.
Also Belleville is closer to half on the 401 than Kingston.
Even worse.
To be serious, the new Alto high speed rail line will go through Peterborough. Could be that it helps spur some development there.
The problem with Peterborough is kicking the people out to start building apartments and have no low density housing in the city.
That’s why it must be in an undeveloped place.
I really don’t see why we can’t infill Toronto and Ottawa. Make single-family home builds illegal, only triplexes or bigger. Kill off parking minimums. Expropriate demolition-by-neglect sites and abandoned commercial property. Same thing with Peterborough if we want that built up. Building a metropolis from scratch usually ends up awful anyway, see Brasilia as a notorious example (in James C Scott’s Seeing Like a State.
As someone who lives in Peterborough, and has to look at the burned-out husk of the Baskin Robbins Ice Cream building every day and wonders “Why the hell isn’t this housing?”, I can agree with all of this.
As seen in China, it only makes sense to build the city and then move people in. Intermittent building causes inefficiency as you have to build around people and people have to work around building.
Infilling keeps Canada separate and limited. As per the above we have to put the GTA people somewhere while we demo their homes.
If we can string together cities across Canada with rail that has a 30 minute to 1 hour between stops then it makes Canada function much stronger logistically and muvh more defensible.
End immigration, hand out suicide pills as alternative medicine and get our population down to a few million. Problem solved!
This is an absolutely stupid take, especially considering the rough evidence we can literally see with our own eyes at this point.
Vancouver’s housing prices are down ~4% this year, and have been edging down since ~2022. Rents have also been coming down, ever since the liberals reversed their policy on immigration.
“It’s the banks!”… bullshit. It was the immigration situation, with 99% of our population growth from immigration, housing supply couldn’t keep up, and locals got priced out. House prices and Rent prices have reversed course ever since they massively clipped immigration. We need immigration, of course, but not at the levels that the Liberals had jacked it up to for so long.
