How about publicly owned non-market housing, like they have in Scandinavian countries and Japan, etc.?
We need Basic Minimum Housing. Some sort of minimum level of housing that is available to anyone, so that no one ends up on the street.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A coalition of housing experts, advocates and industry representatives are calling on the government to overhaul its policies to get more rental units built.
This is from a new report titled A Multi-Sector Approach to Ending Canada’s Rental Housing Crisis, co-authored by Mike Moffatt, founding director of the PLACE Centre at the Smart Prosperity Institute, Tim Richter, president & CEO of the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness, and Michael Brooks, head of REALPAC, a group that represents 130 real estate firms.
The report, being released Tuesday, makes a number of recommendations to address a dearth in rental units in Canada’s largest cities.
One of the report’s key recommendations calls on the federal government to take on a leadership role and co-ordinate with provinces, territories and municipalities to ensure that more rental units are built.
Brooks said that costs to the industry have increased to the point where the number of construction projects for rental units is likely to drop significantly in the coming years.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has suggested in the past that the federal government should tie infrastructure funding to municipalities to local housing permit approvals.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
So. “Industry representatives” want the gov to somehow generate more business for them?
And what does this Rush Housing look like? Proper density to make a difference, or more matchstick low-boy firetraps built as poorly as possible and falling down in 20 years?
Remember when the guy left a candle burning in his apartment and people from the other SEVENTY UNITS were left homeless and bereft of everything because of the ensuing fire? That was TWO WEEKS AGO. And, knowing first-hand the generational trauma from losing absolutely everything - including all your basic needs - in a fire, maybe we should put a proper moratorium on fuckng matchstick sprawl and focus the build on properly planned, hyper-dense clusters with proper transit and zoning within and between them.
Rushing something half-assed just because some industry friends want more pork is reeeally the wrong thing to do for a non-con government.
Canada is in no danger of building too much supply too quickly. We have some of the lowest housing starts in the developed world. We build less than almost anyone. I agree that, for how little we build, quality is shockingly low, but that’s actually a symptom of low supply, not high supply. When there’s too little housing, consumers take what they can get, even if it’s terrible. Imagine the quality of food in a small town with only 1 restaurant, vs that same town with 20.