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If Canada wants CoL to go down they should prioritize building a ton more housing. Seems like a very simple solution, but existing homeowners are a powerful bloc.
Not sure if Canada’s zoning problems are similar to the US but it legit takes years to get projects approved here. Certainly a big driver of lower housing supply.
Assuming that white Canadians are by and large believers of the climate change narrative, isn’t there any discussion of what to do with the massive endless expanses of northern Canada that will be transformed into pleasant liveable places by global warming?
Given that Canadians are a blue tribe suburb, they won’t question the narrative on climate change.
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Get with the times. Global warming is out, it's just climate change now, which is implicitly always negative. Or even climate injustice, where the beneficiaries of global warming don't deserve it.
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Large parts of the Western world have embraced the idea of home ownership as an investment vehicle (IIRC Japan is an interesting exception). In the last few decades this has worked as prices have increased, but it creates crossed incentives between current owners and people who want to buy a house. IMO my house's value to me (beyond the sentimental) is almost exclusively as a dwelling, and day-to-day it's price doesn't impact me.
I don't know that the idea was completely wrong, but there does seem to be a theoretical limit of residential property values in terms of wage-adjusted incomes before the average family can't afford to own anything ("and be happy"?).
But actually unwinding the model (reducing prices) will probably hurt a bunch of middle-class voters pretty badly, which seems like political suicide so I expect it to be put off as long as possible and maybe an attempt at gradual deflating.
Really, for most owner-occupiers it would be a wash: the value of your home goes down, but the price of your next home goes down too. The people it really hurts are the elderly who are ready to give up home ownership and reap a windfall profit, or their heirs.
The price of your house going down is a really big problem if you:
People make 1) work with vehicles, and 2) is, well, not exactly a sympathetic example.
I don't understand what you mean with this: "People make 1) work with vehicles"
And yeah boomers living off housing wealth are not sympathetic but they are a massive solid one-issue voting bloc and it is almost impossible to form governments in the West without their approval.
People make it work that they lose money on their cars. Cars depreciate, they don't appreciate, you eventually have to buy a new one, and you won't turn a profit on it.
Cars cost 1-2 orders of magnitude less than real estate. They are fragile machinery produced en mass in gigantic heavily automated factories. They have lots of moving parts exposed to huge amounts of wear and tear. None of these things apply to houses. I don’t see a valid comparison here
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The situation is totally fucked and is not going to improve until this stops, because this is the description of a ponzi scheme. You can't have house prices going up all the time and have the remain affordable to entrants in the long run. The math simply is not mathing.
Unfortunately the hole is dug really really deep and there's very little appetite to stop digging. The situation in Canada seems even worse than in the US - at least here the market deflated after 2008 so people who had the good sense to be born in the 80s or earlier could pick up some nice deals. In Canada the market has just kept going up.
Australia is only slightly behind Canada with this same issue. /r/ausfinance practically became a single issue subreddit about housing affordability before the mods had to enforce a 'personal finance only' rule set.
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Yes, i agree. We currently build around 150,000 homes annually. However In order to keep up with immigration we would have to triple our current manufacturing efforts. It is also not a matter of resources but of manpower. There is a huge shortage of experienced blue collar workers and they simply can't keep up with the demand. The government has tried many ways to increase supply but none of them have seemed to work.
I thought people said they couldn't find a job?
A large amount of the labor required to build a modern house requires extensive training and certification.
If there were an untapped supply of skilled tradesmen, the going rates for them wouldn't be as high as they are now.
In theory this is true, in practice you don’t have to be a plumber to dig the sewer line, you have to be willing to work and able to follow directions.
Realistically allowing plumbers to use much cheaper non-plumbers to do the grunt work can solve the issue, if anyone wanted to solve it.
I think a lot of this actually has to do with the certification more than it does the training. I've been told, for instance, installing a septic tank requires an insane amount of paperwork when it used to be you just needed some prefab and a shovel.
Something with which my parents are dealing with respect to their plans to build their retirement home on our place out in the Bush, exacerbated by the issues that permafrost — and the assorted inspections, regulations, effects on the water table, et cetera — adds to things.
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Build new cities, then. It is incredibly frustrating to me to hear any blame for all of this garbage placed on the people that currently live in the places people want to go. How are people unable to see that this is the exact same argument that allows for massive immigration in the first place?
No.
If having people living near you constitutes a reduction in your quality of life, city living might not be for you.
Interesting that you have to absolutely misrepresent what I’m saying in order to try and argue with it.
First of all: I do live in a city, next to a shit load of condos, and other than dealing with the violent schizophrenics being dumped in my neighborhood all the time, I love it.
The condos are on the edges of my neighborhood, built in former industrial districts which were turned into condos and shopping. GOOD. More coffee shops for me.
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To be fair, it's very easy to blame them when they hold that they have a right to monopolize both the commons and other people's property for the sake of their own preferences.
Are people allowed to have an interest in their own home?
I have an interest in my neighborhood being a place I like to live, my city being a place I like to live, and my country a place I like to live. I absolutely have a right to express my preferences in these matters via the state. Keeping me expressing them via elections instead of simply forcing things to look the way I want them to is very literally the foundational role of government.
This viewpoint would be significantly less obnoxious if fewer of the people expressing it also talked about freedom, self-reliance, the value of hard work and other libertarian-adjacent ideas. "You can't have my house, you should get your own, and if you try to build one I will send men with guns to demolish it" is still antisocial, but "You can't have my house, it's my property because I worked hard for it, go get your own just like I had to, and if you try to build one I will act on my God-given freedom to send men with guns to demolish it" is despicable.
I am an unapologetic nationalist at every level. Individuals, neigborhoods, towns, cities, states, and countries should all advocate for their own self interests. If a collection of people want their neighborhood to look the way it does, then that’s their right. Leave them (and me) alone.
If you support housing communism at every level, then you do you. But you will get the standard results of communism.
Can you please explain to us clueless readers of your exchange with firmamenti how the hell people advocating for their interests, such as electing representatives to enact preferable zoning policy, constitutes the government owning the means of production?
Houses are part of the means of production (at least according to the people who compile GDP statistics) because they are used to produce housing services. Firmamenti is advocating a system where houses can only be built with the permission of the local government (and where that permission can be granted or denied at a granular level) and can only be used for purposes approved by the local government. That is a system where housing is controlled by the government.
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Note that "zoning reform" is not necessarily synonymous with "upzoning and densification". For example, Vancouver's housing could be made cheaper by allowing single-family houses to be built in the empty "Green Zone" (1 2).
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And if you do want to live in Kowloon walled city, then good for you: go build it somewhere else where you don’t have to destroy the lives of the people living there.
Fully support building whatever configuration of city you can come up with, as long as the current residents are okay with it. If that means finding a place with no residents, then go do that. And by the way, I hope you power it with nuclear power, make cars illegal, ban Christians and whatever else you dream of. Go wild. Just leave me alone.
That's easy to say when every attempt at doing so is frustrated with extreme prejudice.
Turns out you've also made it illegal to build my libertarian paradise in the middle of a nowhere that I fully paid for. And people who try to do it despite this get evicted and shot by government goons. As they did in Kowloon.
"You can't build it anywhere near me and near me is the entire universe" is an interesting notion of being left alone.
Well what if I want you to leave me alone? What about that? Where can I go exactly that doesn't make it illegal for a man to build what he wants on his own property?
I'll go to the edge of the world, Mars if I have to, I just want to be away from the sort of people who think my property is their business but theirs isn't mine.
So is it spite or something? Some person won’t let you build Kowloon walled city so now you need to punish them by ruining their home?
I’m 100% on your side if you want to build a giant condo block out on the outskirts, out in the middle of nowhere, or even in the middle of the city if the residents want you to.
All I’m saying is: the people who live in a city have a right to have say in what their city looks like, just like the residents of a country have a right to say who immigrates into their county. The government should work on behalf of the people who currently live in their city/state/country, not on behalf of people who want to move there.
If me and my neighbors don’t want you to build condos here, then leave us alone.
The problem is of course, as soon as someone moves there, the government now should be representing their interests too no? If you and 30 neighbors don't want condos, then 50 people move in and decide condos would be just peachy, you are outvoted and the condos should be built. You don't get seniority for length of habitation. That seems to be the logical outcome of your position if it just based on the will of those who live there?
Yes exactly. If a bunch of people move into the neighborhood and then all collectively decide that they want to bulldoze the houses they own and build condos, that’s what they get to do.
And what a perfect analogy for immigration this is! And why limited, careful immigration policies are so important! An Irish Catholic with 3 kids and a mechanical engineering degree who wants to move to Texas and work at SpaceX to work on starship? Come on in, buddy!
A single 24 year old Muslim man from Somalia who thinks we should execute gay people, has no education whatsoever, and calls himself a refugee? No probably not, specifically because the first guy already shares the culture of the place he’s moving and won’t really change it, and the second guy doesn’t and will.
And when they vote to bulldoze YOUR house and build condos invoking eminent domain, because they have more votes than you?
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How? Are you just going to pick a random spot and build from scratch? History has not been kind to people who've tried to do this...
Irvine, California and The Villages seem to be doing pretty ok?
The Villages is near-100% dependent on fiscal transfers from working-age Americans.
Irvine, California is almost certainly a huge creator of surplus value.
Planned cities often work brilliantly.
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That’s what everybody who settled this continent did. That’s what my ancestors did, and unless your family moved here in the last 150 years then that’s what your family did too. They moved out west and founded new cities because they were unwelcome and unable to make a living in the existing ones.
If they did stay in the eastern coastal cities they experienced absolute hatred by the people who lived there and they settled/formed new neighborhoods in undesirable parts of town either in industrial areas where they worked, or on the far exurbs.
Maybe your city is different. In my city, nobody is demanding new high density housing be built on currently barren undesirable land, they’re demanding that nice neighborhoods bulldoze houses and build condos.
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It is not the exact same argument; you are missing a scale factor.
Imagine that a collection of nation-states has free movement within each state, and restrictions on movements between states. What works best? A world with 8 huge countries, each with a billion inhabitants, or a world with 800 small countries, each with 10 million inhabitants? Scale matters and there is something real to discuss. It is not the exact same argument at the different scales. There may well be a right size for a country, with strong borders and free movement inside.
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Fairly big difference between 'maybe relax the restrictions on building new dwellings a bit' and 'to reduce the housing shortage, we're moving three more people in with every domicile since 'cause'. I'd say your vibe is more against the latter.
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Some of us have children and growth is great for a nation.
Unless you were on the Mayflower there is a pretty good chance you were not the first person to live in your city.
My ancestors settled in the absolutely barren unwanted land in South Dakota. None of them showed up in Manhattan and demanded that somebody build them a house.
The myth of consensual housing
Purchaser: I consent!
Developer: I consent!
South Dakotan: I don't!
The question being discussed is, can people build housing on their own land? It seems a bit rich to cosplay the rugged frontiersman at the city council meeting to prevent people from exercising their god-given property rights.
What are you talking about?
I'm saying that our system of government allows people to vote on things. If the people who live in a town vote not to allow single family zoned lots to be turned into multifamily zoned lots, then they get to do that.
Similarly if the people who want to build giant condos want to build them, literally all they have to do is build them somewhere else that wants them.
This idea that a collective of people can decide what to do with the collective land that they own is pretty old.
I was responding to this:
I don't live in South Dakota, and never did. Eventually my ancestors moved away from there into various cities.
If you want to build condos, then I'm begging you: do it, but stop complaining because the place you want to build them doesn't want you to.
The problem is that people keep seething when even marginal changes are made to zoning, and people who want to build not even condos but somewhat smaller houses have to fight tooth and nail to exercise their property rights.
They don't want the condos in their neighborhood. Go build them somewhere else, and make the glorious condo utopia that the condo people imagine.
I don't understand - the people voted and the law got changed. Again, we're not talking about condos here. People have a right to exercise their property rights. I bet if I got together with my neighbors we could agree that my other neighbor's lot should be demolished and turned into a park but that is illegal too.
By the way, people are absolutely assblasted about the glorious condo utopia too.
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Allowing individuals to built multi family on their private property is hardly demanding someone builds a house.
Happy for you that you have no desire to leave the land of your ancestors but many people do and we should have land use policies that allow for building.
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One of the implications of the housing crisis is that many people who do want children are never going to be able to have them. It is extremely expensive to live even by yourself, let alone to support and provide for any children you may have.
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