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They are also adding high speed trains all around the country. MJ is legal way before usa, gay marriage is legal too way before usa... National healthcare.
Hey but the usa has ice, NFL subsidize stadiums , almost non existent public transportation and unaffordable medicine.. ah..and AI data centers..
Somebody put together a database of how the majority of our politicians are also landlords/heavily invested in real estate - look for your answer there
Building social housing is great. I also want to empty residences taxed out of existence.
Ban corporations from owning single family homes and plexes. If they want to own Real Estate, they can build apartment complexes.
Most Canadians basically have their net worth in their homes and many treat their homes as their retirement plan. An economy with a solved housing crisis is an economy with a much lower competitive demand for housing, which naturally means lower housing prices, which means most voters in the country seeing their net worth go down and their retirement expectations negatively affected. So, there's a petty strong incentive to pay lip service to solving the crisis, but a very strong disincentive for actually solving it.
These people also don’t understand that, even if their houses end up selling for less, they still get a shit load of money for them.
Like, isn’t wild that for landlords the tenants are expected to pay for the mortgage and the maintenance and then, after the landlord has profitted once by getting their building paid for, they get to sell it and get all that momey a second time, essentially for free?
I really, truly, do not give a shit about the people that demand they get more than they paid for for their house. They can rot in hell.
What does it mean that you're home is your retirement plan? You'll sell it when you retire? And what, move somewhere cheaper? Doesn't that do weird things to demographics?
You can borrow against its value or reverse mortgage it for money to fund your retirement. Or as you said, many choose to sell their expensive city homes and retire to a small town with lower cost of living. That usually drives up prices in the nearby, more desirable small towns.
Tom Sellek takes your home.
Yes, we've already seen that with people moving to the Maritimes to retire. As such Nfld, NS, NB have the highest average age in Canada.
The traditional path is that you have a bigger house when you have children and downsize when the kids leave the family home. By the time this happens, the house has appreciated in value and you can have the extra value as cash for retirement.
We tried nothing, and we're all out of ideas! Thats why!
Canada has this thing where we choose not to do anything that might upset someone. So instead we do nothing and upset everyone.
Because housing is considered mostly a for-profit business in this country. We have substandard poorly maintained public housing and co-ops with multi-year wait lists but that is the exception and not the norm. If you are not employed in a lucrative trade, white collar job, or don't have family money and live in an urban area your fate is to live in a multigenerational roach and bedbug infested shithole with a landlord who would sell your ass for TicTacs. Not even orange or wintergreen TicTacs - the plain ass white mint ones.
Because we have pussy capitalist MPs who only care about business profits over the welfare of the people.
It's about time Canadians started rioting over housing and food inaccessibility.
We need a general Canada-wide strike.
Are they actually solving their housing crisis though?
This plan was announced in 2024, so far they have delivered only about 30k units. They have another 270k under construction, and supposedly contracts for 600k more. That puts them on pace to... not hit their targets at all.
Then Mexico has 133 million residents, building 1.2 million government homes over 6 years is ambitious, but the market was already building 140k new units a year anyways, which would be 800k units over 6 years.
Even with years of prep, you can't just double the amount of units produced per year. The number of skilled workers needed can't be trained that fast.
At the end of the day, even if they succeed, they will have spent an absolutely egregious amount of money and built about 2% more total homes in the country. Does anyone think that's realistically going to drive prices down significantly?
Don't get me wrong, building houses is important, but the government should not be building them with tax money and then using a lottery to give them away to a few lucky low-income people.
Driving prices down is not the aim though. Housing people is.
Would you rather live in a world where 1 in 2 low-income people have adequate housing provided by the government at an affordable rate, and the rest wait on a list for someone to die just barely scraping by. Or a world where the housing is affordable for everyone?
Housing some people is great, but housing everyone is preferrable and achievable.
We do not lack houses in Canada (or pretty much anywhere that housing prices are the issue), it's the distribution that's the problem. There are more bedrooms in Canada than people, I did the math.
Land Value Taxes would solve the distribution issue, remove speculation, and reduce overall prices for everyone who isn't living in a massive single detached house with too few people to be considered reasonable (Cough My parents Cough)
We're not talking about 1 or 2 though, are we? We're talking about hundreds of thousands (and also presumably most of the private development will continue).
We can transform our own housing bureaucracies—the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) and Build Canada Homes (BCH)—from passive financing tools into active housing institutions. And we can wrest control of planning and building back from the financial interests that have turned our homes into sites of profit extraction.
See, when Carney was campaigning on making Build Canada Homes, releasing the design guidelines and all, I really did believe that he would appoint contractors to make new federally managed housing units for people. The most cost-efficient contractors with good quality workmanship could be brought on as part of the crown corp itself. When it became more like a stripped down CMHC, I cooled on it.
Avi Lewis should really publicize these many cases where left-wing governments are capable of getting things done, in Mexico, Europe and elsewhere, to point out it's not just a coffee shop fantasy to achieve big things for people, rather than the elite class' benefit.