- cross-posted to:
- canada@lemmy.ca
- cross-posted to:
- canada@lemmy.ca
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So the meat of the article is splitting hairs over the fact that housing isn’t an acute problem and thus not a crisis? Is this the kind of “I’m so smart” bullshit the Walrus wants to drop on a society that can’t pluralize collection nouns properly and that also uses “literally” in a figurative sense?
We have people harming women with legislation entitled “protection of women and child act”. We have the environmental protection agency allowing aggressively carcinogenic fuel additives into our lakes and rivers.
We’re not ready for the thinking required to recognize some Walrus author’s obvious intellect, and give him the parade he feels he deserves; or at least some polite applause and a chorus of “hear hear, old chum” around our ornate tobacco pipes in the mahogany-paneled study.
Honestly, Walrus, what the fuck.
housing isn’t an acute problem and thus not a crisis
Who’s to say that is the one true definition of crisis anyway? People call “crisis” anything they feel highly impacting, no matter the acuteness.
Yes, I was going to comment the same thing! By saying “there is no housing crisis“, it implies that there is less of a problem, not more of one. It’s provocative, but misleading. At the very least, the title should’ve been changed to say “It’s not a housing crisis, but a broken housing system“.
But honestly, is that even a useful point to make at length? Everyone knows it’s broken beyond just the short term!
Plus, there actually is a shortage relative to similar economies, which is worth mentioning.
A shortage occurs when an external mechanism, such as government intervention, prevents price from rising.
While we do have such controls in certain areas of the economy – you were probably bitten by one case at the onset of COVID when toilet paper wasn’t legally able to rise in price due to price gouging laws, leaving the shelves bare instead – I’m not aware of any attempts to restrict the price of housing?
Setting a government mandated price limit on housing is oft suggested as a solution, but the so-called problem here is that the prices have been able to rise. Literally the opposite of a shortage.
It’s a “shortage” in the normal colloquial use of the term because the quantity of housing demanded exceeds the quantity supplied relative to some spectrum of desired prices. “There’s no shortage if you have $2 million!” is hardly reassuring. I think you’re misapplying the jargon found in economics textbooks. On that definition, the recent spike in rice prices which will lead to millions of people starving is not a “shortage” because prices were allowed to rise. Sure, but that’s silly. What people normally mean by “rice shortage” is “there’s not enough rice”. It’s not enough precisely because prices are too high.
If you like, call it a “supply-demand imbalance” or an “affordability crisis”, but it doesn’t change anything. The point is, supply is so low that it’s causing a lot of human misery. In normal English, that’s called a “shortage”, because there’s not enough of it.
There’s less houses per capita than this sort of economy should have, and as a result prices are high (low supply, same demand). What word you want to use for that is up to you, I guess; usually people get what I’m saying so I don’t think “shortage” is a bad choice.
Price is what moderates demand. The higher the price, the less demand there is. Maybe you can eke out a million dollar home, but at a billion dollars I’m sure you are tapping out and moving to the forest to live under a pile of branches. Well, I certainly am!
So long as price is able to rise, rise it will, and demand will keep eroding until equilibrium with supply is found. And I think it is fair to say we have found equilibrium. If you are in the market, there is no trouble finding a home. If you have sufficient transactional value in hand, someone out there will sell you their home, guaranteed.
That’s quite unlike the toilet paper situation we saw a few years ago, where even a million dollars in your pocket wouldn’t necessarily secure you a roll, even though the lottery winners were paying dollars at most. That happened because price gouging laws prevented price from rising. That’s a shortage.
If you ignore the price component then everything is in a shortage. There is always someone who is happy to take more, more, more. Call it that if you want, but what’s the point? What, exactly, are you communicating when there is nothing not in shortage? There is good reason why the formal definition is more succinct.
The thing about putting real economic situations directly in basic economics terms is that it’s impossible. I’d maintain that such an explanation exists, but we’re so, so far from having all the data needed to do so.
What I’m doing here is using comparable economies as a litmus test. Canada has less houses per capita then them, and higher housing prices. This tells a story that can be framed in economics terms, and that I suspect is correct. Why we have less houses is the interesting question, which I can’t yet answer.
Maybe you can eke out a million dollar home, but at a billion dollars I’m sure you are tapping out and moving to the forest to live under a pile of branches. Well, I certainly am!
An interesting digression about this: it would be illegal. The building of permanent structures is very regulated in Canada. It also might be hard to commute to work from crown land, and hunting or foraging is a challenging skill that’s also very regulated.
What actually happens when you’re priced out of housing is you become either a couch surfer, or a homeless person that’s periodically harassed by the police. Our laws basically assume everyone can afford a house.
This article goes in circles and repeatedly contradicts itself. Basically saying that it’s not a failure of the markets, but one of exploitation.
Except, it is exactly a failure of the markets. It states that the exploitation comes from the ability of landowners to charge whatever they want, but they don’t address the fact that they can only charge high prices because of the lack of those who are willing to charge low prices. And nobody should be expected to charge a low price if they can charge a high price and still sell/rent easily.
It’s an issue of people treating homes as an investment, and that can only happen because the price of homes skyrocket far faster than inflation and wages. And that happens because of a lack of supply.
Sure, treating homes as an investment is fine for apartments and condos, but if the land itself ends up being worth a million for a single lot, there’s no way anybody can afford it without both a high wage and putting themselves into debt for a half century. And if that happen, the entire spectrum of housing goes up in price as there is a lack of competition to lower prices.
The only real way to lower home prices (from houses to apartments and condos) is to significantly increase competition, and that can only happen if supply actually comes close to demand, not falling so far behind that people share a single place, even to the point that they bribe the local authorities to look the other way that they have too many people in a single unit.
Except, it is exactly a failure of the markets.
Well, the market is acting rationally given the circumstances. The trouble is that the market is heavily encumbered by regulation, so the cure for high prices being high prices isn’t able to exercised.
Is that a market failure, or is it that it is not truly a market, but rather a government program?
Could you name the unnecessary regulations specifically?
The trick is they’re all “guidelines” that planners will use to arbitrarily foot-drag on approvals. None of them are formally “regs” but just tools for a kangaroo court to dither.
Don’t take my word for it, see this video of deposition by Mark Richardson of Housing Now TO (an affordable housing builder):
https://mastodon.social/@Pxtl/110300343308877005
He specifically calls out “guidelines which are treated like they’re cast in stone”. An example of such a “guideline” would be angular plane rules, which result in Toronto’s wierd stepped buildings, resulting in this complaint:
“You want green buildings? Green buildings are big chonky boxes made outta wood. They’re not Mayan pyramids, which is what the urban design guidelines require.”
Or even vaguer height limits that seem to be complaint-based:
“$20 billion dollar intersection in Forest Hill; somebody said that should be a 7-storey and 70-unit building in 2018. How…where did that number come from? Somebody picked that number. Because it “conformed to the current planning policy for Forest Hill” and somebody adjacent to the site had a backyard swimming pool. That can’t be our priority in 2023.”
I loathe the Poilievre conservatives, but they’re right about this. First step to stopping the housing crisis is to kick some municipal government ass. Trudeau is trying to do it with carrots through the Housing Accelerator Fund, but it’s long-since time for sticks and not carrots.
No, obviously not. That would be unanswerable and has nothing to do with the discussion. Best to read the comments before replying.
Mostly agree, and I’m not even a communist. Whoever controls the land a society is built on essentially has a license to skim off any excess value added by others. David Ricardo figured this out over 200 years ago. The solution is to tax land, not labor or capital, and capture this excess for public use.
I keep telling people baffled at the apparent inaction that two thirds of Canadian households own properties. If such a large majority of voters own properties, is it any surprise that no significant action that would hurt them is taken? Rather, things work as intended and non-owners are squeezed more than they used to be several years ago.
People don’t seem to really care about their kids/grandkids being unable to afford housing. Or, at least, they care less about that than the value of their property continuing to rise fast enough to fund their retirement. Or, maybe, they have enough cash that they can help their own kids, so fuck everyone else, right?
I really think this is about generation divides in wealth; those who have parents able to front them 100K+ to put toward a down payment can get into the market and two the rewards of intergenernational wealth; those who don’t are likely doomed to a life of housing insecurity.
My kiddos are young, but my wife and I are trying to ensure we’ll have enough extra cash to help our kids but they’re first homes. It’s the only way they’ll be able to afford to live close to us.
It’s too abstract. They can’t mentally connect their own economic success with everyone else’s harm.
People don’t seem to really care about their kids/grandkids being unable to afford housing.
Well, that’s because affordability is about the same. Granted, that is because the youth have much cheaper lives than we did. In my day we had to spend $20 to see a movie. The kids these days can watch all the movies for $20. To listen to a song you had to pay $20 too. Today you can listen to any song ever made for free. We dropped $100 a night at the bar. They flip through Tinder. We had to buy $20,000 cars to get anywhere, and let’s not even talk about the costs that followed. They toss a few bucks at transit and move around to their heart’s content.
There is concern for whether or not they are missing out on their lives because of that. Going to the movies, for example, brought more than just a movie. It was a social adventure. Staying home to watch Netflix is not the same. But it’s also hard to judge if that is actually something to be concerned about, or if it’s just us trying to re-live our youth? Is one life actually better than the other?
Of course no, super easy for people earning 15$/h part time to rent a 1bd appartement 2000$/month. Or for a couple to buy a 600k condo, 3500$ mortgage + 400$ taxes + 600$ fee per month, 4500$/month is super easy, add power, internet, cellphone, cars, and maybe food? No crisis. Oh I have an idea, let’s take 500k to 1M new immigrants per year, it will fix the health and education system! Obviously not fix the housing crisis as there is no crisis.
/s
