From faster approvals to hiring more workers, governments need to step up: experts
Peter Armstrong · CBC News
The mainstream research says keep building to become affordable, we’ve been building at max capacity for almost a decade now… and we’re further away from affordable than we were 10 years ago.
What’s wrong with using the metro values? How are they less valid than a smaller core city value? A metro value is going to better represent the population, the city lines are extremely arbitrary.
https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/21671/tokyo/population Yes Metro Tokyo has declined every year since 2018
Lots of economists agree with me, including Nobel prize winning ones. We need land value taxes to reign in land values and speculation, this current problem of rent seeking behavior was predicted literally hundreds of years ago and they came up with the solution as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
The CMHC says we need to build an additional 3.5 million homes by 2030 to bring affordability back to 2004 levels, and yet we’re currently only able to produce 250k a year (so about half of the number we need) and already every construction site has a help wanted sign. How the fuck is that supposed to work? How is anything the government is even talking about going to reach that number? The answer is simple: it won’t. It’s all smoke and mirrors from politicians says “look at us, we’re doing something” and in a decade, it will be worse than it was today despite all these programs.
The only realistic way we hit that number is if the Canadian government institutes a draft and forces those people to build homes overriding all zoning and probably even appropriating land while they’re at it.
So experts are wrong and you’re right, but also plenty of experts agree with you? How do you believe these contradictory things?
Experts agree on a land value tax and so do I. If that’s all you said, we wouldn’t be disagreeing. But the crazy thing you said is that we need no new housing supply, which no one agrees with.
You also seem to be completely ignorant as to why taxing land value works. When land value is not taxed, we subsidize inefficient use of land like the economically and environmentally disastrous suburban sprawl you seem to like so much.
I need to get back to my own students. Please consider taking an intro economics or urban design course, or even just read a book or two.
The mainstream consensus is wrong because it’s driven by politics, not economics. Nobody is willing to suggest the simple economic policies that would drop housing prices by 50%, because it would lose them the next election. The government could drop a 100% capital gains tax on land values tomorrow and fix the issue entirely. Of course it would eliminate a very large chunk of the savings of more than half the population which would cause all sorts of social and economic problems, but it would reign in housing costs overnight.
I never said no new housing supply, point out a single statement where I said that. I’m pointing out that building by itself won’t makes homes affordable. There’s a theoretical way, where we wave our magic wand and have millions of houses appear, but there’s no practical way to get that number of units we would need to drop prices to affordable levels without massively inflating the cost (counter productive) in order to pull more labour from other industries and it would take decades to retrain that many people anyways.
Land value taxing would work to reduce prices because it drives down profitability of holding land. The efficiency of the tax at regulating use is almost secondary to the removal of the profit motive for holding land. As I’ve pointed out, there isn’t a huge shortage of housing with less than 2.5 people per unit across the country, the price is the current problem. That current price is mostly driven by what people expect to make in terms of the investment, rather than the value they get from living there.
I should know, my wife and I are around 800k more wealthy simply by owning the home we’ve lived in for the last 13 years (We’ve upgraded twice from our initial starter) and we knew that was going to happen when we took out the largest mortgages we could afford in order to maximize the leverage on the investment.
