Canada

That's why I'm intrigued by Carney proposing the build Canada homes company..... Will be interesting to see since we did something like that during WW2 that saw the feds build the housing and set the price?

I don't agree. This is only true because supply is so badly constrained. If each province had another million homes tomorrow, with the biggest cities building another 200 thousand plus a year until capacity is greater than demand, such a thing wouldn't happen. It's entirely because people were allowed to believe that a necessity to life could be treated like investible asset despite being an entirely non-performing asset.

It's like hoarding wheat, then blocking farmers from increasing production so that the value of your wheat stockpile grows. Yes, it technically works, but that's because you're artificially preventing the market from doing its job. The value of homes only go up because demand rises without supply keeping up, and various housing associations and interest groups have kept it that way to make their investments grow instead of prioritizing on making this country more livable.

The fixing taxes can fix things, but they're not the root problem. It's the sheer lack of development, and if normal developers won't do their damn job, then it's the government's job to step in and fix things like it once did.

I agree that such tax reform (and other regulatory measures) is really needed.

But, if the units are purpose built for affordable housing (as proposed federally in https://liberal.ca/housing-plan/ , for instance), this should at least not fall into the investor problem, no?

Yeah. And tax reform is far outside the political mainstream at the moment. So we're stuck with bandaids (GST rebates, zoning changes, etc) when we need serious reform.

Don't get me wrong: all those lil things are nice, as is building homes, but they aren't going to add up to a serious improvement in the next few decades. If ever.

Yes it will, assuming they get rented out then of course it will.

The problem is zoning and developer fees. Our government at the municipal level is regressive with zoning and development taxes. While the Federal government uses mass immigration to artificially boost GDP to hide a technical recession, which adds a huge amount of new demand.