HonoredMule

Trudeau did me a real solid by resigning. 2015 was the last time I voted Liberal and I'd since vowed never to vote for a Liberal under Trudeau again until electoral reform was delivered. If everything else today was identical but swap Carney with still Trudeau, I'd be seriously conflicted.

I think I have a pretty even-handed opinion about him that fairly considers his strengths and failings overall. But I can never see still having FPTP as anything less than a cynical, partisan betrayal of the nation. It is the singularly important time that he chose to rule rather than represent, and by extension denied Canada our best chance to rehabilitate our own demons. Instead, the reasserted disenfranchisement powered growing anti-establishment movements that aren't even completely wrong while they threaten our very core values.

Addendum: to clarify, I'm not saying I think he deliberately put party over country. His choices and conclusions, however, demonstrated motivated reasoning at its finest. I think history has already proven him wrong. And while his own views evolved enough that he could acknowledge his mistake, he still didn't try to fix it.

For sure. If we were to pursue nuclear armament -- and I'm not saying we should -- it would be in secret. Publicly withdrawing from NPT just paints a target on our backs well ahead of any possible benefit.

Seems pretty convenient and downright efficient to me. People are outing themselves faster than ever before. I can now spot the dumbass in one syllable.

What's up with the drain these days? It's starting to sound like a pretty happening place. I'm down.

One-upmanship at its finest. Thanks for the diversion, I guess. :P

Then it should be right up your alley, no?

I should have also mentioned: this past year Toronto finally reaped a boost in housing completions thanks to investments early in the last federal administration. Just? that has already driven down rents by something like 5-7.5%, to a 30-month low. (Of course that's at the same time housing starts are also at an all time low. 😑)

Aw dang, I was all set to upvote and let lie. But I feel compelled to clarify I do not blame the speculators nor the wealthy (really, I don't), nor do I think the apparent prosperity of the 90s belies there being consistent problems going back even further than that and even just in terms of housing. A poorly engineered structure does not become flawed only as it collapses, and it was never going to end any other way. I see no reason to expect the moment it actually starts to be particularly special or interesting. If it were, I might have believed I could predict it. If I really could, there's be good money in that.

Ok so my rant continues for a while and it sounds like I might be preaching to the choir anyway. I'm pretty much doing it for my own benefit of getting these thoughts out at this point -- so no hard feelings if you're done. 😛

TLDR takeaway: I concur. Hooray for building more housing -- even if it's an imperfect solution, and even if a deeper problem remains.

According to the article you linked, there is no housing crisis, since our income has kept pace with cost of living. 🤨 I'm struggling to contradict that with hard data, but I don't believe it for a millisecond. (Or to put it less argumentatively, I don't understand how that data fits into the bigger picture.)

Anecdotally, I as a very early millennial was very lucky to get my first and current house during a brief window where I'd finally mustered the means and housing prices hadn't yet completely galloped away. That was after over a decade spending more on rent than a mortgage would cost but next to nothing on transportation, and without having children, which was an economic non-starter even if I'd wanted them. (My partner and I did lots of cycling year round and bought a cheap utility vehicle before a house only because it was a prerequisite to accessing cheaper semi-rural housing.) If I could have gotten into a house 5 years earlier, I'd have about double the net wealth today. If my parents had been able to financially support me -- heck, even just house me -- through university, I'd have easily been able to do just that instead of graduating with what back then seemed like a tremendous student loan debt burden. It would be quaint today.

I view my place in history as straddling the tipping point of Canada's cost of living (not just housing) crisis. I've since watched others in my same field but with a later start on life have basically no chance to advance. Their inflation-adjusted junior professional salary is similar to what mine was, but between student loans and exploding rent they'll take even longer than I did just to be able to start saving for a down payment. By then…

I tried to source some proper data to more clearly demonstrate my point, but when it comes to charting historical trends, I don't think Stats Canada could be more obtuse if they tried. So I'm falling back on this confluence of formula and policy changes to vaguely gesture in the general direction of my point:

• CPI calculation and budget recommendations that used to allocate shelter around 25% of income (early 80s) and now is at 30%
• household debt-to-disposable-income ratio: 110% in 1999, 127% in 2007, 173.1% in 2021
• various policy changes like reducing maximum amortization periods, the First-Time Home Buyer Incentive, or the Home Buyers' Plan (a key reason I was able to buy a home), and the introduction of the CMHC itself -- all housing market controls aimed at postponing increasingly infeasible home ownership and/or hedging against growing household debt risk

The time span I "repurposed" before wasn't meant (by me) to indicate a tipping point of this wealth transfer. Rather I was ballparking that as how far this housing plan could roll back the trend (which is to say not all the way, and arguably the 70s isn't the true beginning either). Saying income has fallen behind inflation may be technically false, yet each new generation is still starting with less while their predecessor's wealth is/was siphoned into passive income for the investors backing mortgages and then buying the houses outright from retirees left with nothing to pass onto their children. Even if income is outpacing inflation, it's still falling short of the rate at which speculators can out-compete new generations for assets.

Anyway, imperfect a solution as it is, I'm all for this housing initiative because a) regardless we need more housing and especially the type not being provided by the free markets, and b) it'll disrupt the most egregious exploitation of the working class -- the new generations with the least means starting out by paying high rent for the privilege of owning nothing and getting nowhere while the rich pad their war chests to snatch up even more of the finite assets.

What changed is 20 years of incomes falling behind inflation and more wealth consolidated into the asset owning class. Generational wealth got siphoned to the 1%, leaving millennials set back and gen-z to start with nothing and their labor undervalued to boot.

Capitalism progressed.

With this kind of housing plan, enough real assets might be injected back into the working class (and temporarily withheld from capitalists) to roll that imbalance back two or three decades. And we'll have about that long before we find ourselves right back here again, unless we've finally mustered the global solidarity to tax capital and profit enough to sustain middle class wealth and pull up anyone below middle class who's willing and ready to accept the aid. Or at the very least, drive wages much higher, for as long as capitalists are in fact still largely dependent on human labor.

Hopefully the big parts of Carney's plan will be revenue-neutral (i.e. sell the houses at cost), lest next time around we find both the working class and the government wrung dry and leveraged out of options. Pessimistic as that outlook is, though, at least it buys us more time to finally agree robber barons were bad.

It's wild how many conservatives gleefully and knowingly troll with the same doublespeak their politicians model for them yet never catch it when those politicians talk about ~~rich people's money~~ "the economy."

While I'm pretty much just guessing that closing the supply gap will on its own force the market to compete rather than pad their margins, the obvious additional step would be having the public developer sell only to individuals/families that own no other property. Even if it isn't feasible to mandate the same for secondary sales, that would still sap rental demand. Plenty of young people (and older generations stuck in a poverty cycle or unable to map a retirement) would choose home ownership over the chance to flip a starter home for profit and then keep renting or gamble on upsizing while forces conspire to cool the market.

I can't recall for sure, but I think at some point Carney specifically mentioned developing small starter homes. That'll sap demand for the larger, more expensive homes that previously had no alternatives, and be a very inefficient property to manage. (Individuals will still speculate if allowed, and their financial blunders would likely add some downward pressure as well, though not as much as reducing rental demand.)

Overall, there certainly are some counterbalancing forces that would prevent housing prices from going down significantly, and I suspect that's also intended or at least included in projections. Carney is still a true blue neoliberal, and he's not looking to upset the asset holding class. I'd wager his target is continued appreciation but at a rate near or below general inflation.

I think you bring up a good point about capital holding back to buy a dip. The answer to that is probably enticing those dollars into other investments around further extraction, new manufacturing, and (maybe) R&D. The last one probably won't draw that much private interest though -- it's too high a risk when the economy isn't booming overall.