Submitting for this truly astonishing quote:
" Landlords in Quebec, however, feel they need to catch up to other provinces as Quebec is still one of the most affordable places to live in the country, said Jean-Olivier Reed, a spokesperson for the Quebec Landlord Association (APQ)."
None of those are solutions. They’re all Band-Aids. No matter how much you do any of those things you proposed, prices will continue to climb.
Not a single developed country has managed to rein in prices, no matter what tactics they’ve tried. There are places with all of those suggestions, and still… expensive housing.
Building more density in well-designed, walkable neighbourhoods is absolutely part of the answer.
We need to make it so that there are about as many homes as people who need homes. Right now the numbers are wildly out of wack. The reason prices won’t go down is because the government is resistant to opening the floodgates of density (as you said, because too many of their constituents are homeowners).
If we just abolished single family zoning and said anyone can build dense housing anywhere that is residentially zoned, we’d have affordable housing within a few years. Zoning is an artificial bottleneck on the supply of housing. Imagine if every shitty carbrained suburb suddenly could house 2x or 3x as many people! But then of course we would need to make them a bit less carbrained by introducing more walkability, better public transit, and more mixed use. That can all be done gradually by relaxing zoning restrictions.
This is just objectively false.
Japan didn’t have single family zoning, anyone could build dense housing anywhere residential in any of the major cities and they absolutely did, and yet it was never affordable. They have massively walkable cities, with great public transportation, and yet… not affordable unless you want to live in a 100 square foot closet that most north Americans couldn’t even fit through the door on.
A bunch of US cities have no zoning and are still not affordable.
Zoning is a slight bottleneck, but it’s not even close to the core problem.
I’m not saying don’t change the zoning, go ahead, but expecting things to become affordable in a few years is an absolute pipe dream.
BC just did it, and developers are just shit talking the policy saying it doesn’t change anything.
There are places that cap real estate speculation? And also are shifting equity away from real estate and towards the productive parts of the economy? While also promoting social housing and coops and building new walkable neighborhoods? Like all of those things at once? Where is that social-democratic utopia?
Singapore.
Explain why the real estate sector in a small island city-state is comparable in any way to that in the country with the second largest landmass in the world.
Because 99% of the Canada landmass is rural, and a city is a city.
Also, last time I checked, Montreal (the first city mentioned in the article) is an island.
Singapore is 735.2 sq km and has a density of 7,804/sq km.
The Montreal metropolitan area is 4,258.31 sq km and has a density of 1,007.85/sq km.
I don’t know if 1% of Canada is urban. But assuming it is, and assuming that it is impossible to grow that 1% of the 9,093,507 sq km that make up the country (a ludicrous assumption that one), that is still 90,935.1 sq km.
Your comparison is just plain irrelevant and wrong.
Your comparison has no relevance. What does total available landmass have to do with anything related to the policies in question?
Sorry but any analysis of real estate economics that does not take into account the scarcity or abundance of …land is just pointless.
Singapore does not have a Brossard to connect with a REM to build a new urban core. Even more, it does not have multiple options for different places to develop and densify, like Montreal has, just based on the current plans for the REM, and without taking into account future transit projects or the idea of, oh I don’t know, creating an Ottawa-Montreal megacity with HSR.
Again, what does having abundance of land have to do with policies like Walkability, Speculation, or Social housing?
What are you arguing for? Because it seems you’re championing doing nothing.
I’m championing land value taxes, but they won’t pass until ownership rates drop another 20-30 percent over the next 20-30 years.
Honestly, the best option for my children (who are still quite young) right now is for me to try to make it worse faster so that we can make such a radical change sooner.
So, doing nothing. Got it.