Yes, things are tough now. Climate change is a very serious challenge ahead. I vote Green, ride a bike, etc.

All that being said, I’m probably older than most of you. I grew up during the cold war, when we sincerely believed we were at the brink of nuclear annihilation.

It didn’t happen.

I will spare you the countless doomsday headlines I’ve read in the news over the years. The hole in the ozone layer, the wars, the genocides, the natural disasters, the political churn.

The details don’t matter. We were truly terrified of the future, just like you are. Yet, the immense majority of the fears we had did not materialize, either because we took action to prevent them or because they had been overblown. We also faced some challenges that the news didn’t warn us about.

We prevail, like we have always done. People are much more resilient than they imagine. You can handle it and so can your children, and your children’s children. Living in fear doesn’t solve the problem, so why do it?

JFC. This one is so much worse, being in the kernel.

I don’t know who is downvoting you because you are completely right.

At the same time, I am delighted at the idea of a bunch of speculators being stressed out and losing a ton of the money they obtained while making housing unaffordable for everybody else.

Housing can be affordable or it can be a good investment. It can’t be both, and it is time it starts being the former.

If my family of four can live cramped inside a one bedroom apartment for years, then overleveraged folks can downsize from the large houses they bought during the pandemic. And, if nothing else, it will feel a little like justice.

I don’t understand what’s so complicated about “act first, sort out funding later.”

That is exactly what they did, and see what happened. They brought in a good number of refugees without assessing their ongoing needs and how much it would cost to meet them. We all suffer the consequences now, and the solution you propose is to repeat the same mistake again?

Before any further rash decisions are made we need to sit down, be rational, and see what we can afford to do. Chow has made a very good point: since the Federal government is responsible for bringing in refugees, they should be ultimately responsible for bearing the cost.

Land can either be a good investment, or it can be affordable; it can’t be both. A land value tax does nothing to prevent wealthy people to hoard vast amounts of land, driving the cost of land higher. Foreign investments in real estate are particularly damaging to affordability, because it makes ordinary Canadians compete against the wealthiest people around the world, a fight they can never win.

Things have gotten so bad that I’m willing to vote for whoever takes the most significant measures to make housing affordable. Here’s a half-baked assortment of the sort of policies that would either increase supply or reduce demand:

1. Allow mixed-use medium-density housing in areas that now allow only single-family homes. Allow mixed-use high-density housing to be built in proximity to subway, train, bus stations.

2. Reduce the taxes and paperwork required to (re)build a home.

3. Pay several architecture firms to design a variety of housing and offer those projects free of charge to the public. A la “Vancouver Special”.

4. Use public land to build social housing below market rates

5. Municipalities buying old apartment buildings and renting them out below current market rates

6. Maintain a central registry of who owns what housing and who lives there (necessary for the policies below). This can be used to audit abuses

7. Raise property taxes on vacant housing

8. Introduce a new yearly anti-speculation tax that depends on the owner of the unit:

   • Canadian citizens: 0%.
   • Permanent residents and people with work permits: 0%.
   • Companies established in Canada:
     • Single-family dwelling: 5%.
     • Dwelling between two and 6 units: 2%
     • Housing with more units: 0%
   • All other assumptions: 10% <-- this includes foreign investors

9. Halve immigration targets until housing crisis is over

Edit: 10. Eliminate parking minimums. Let business decide how much parking they need.

I hope the speculators who are leveraged to their tits will feel the pressure and this will lead to a housing crash. I don’t care if this causes a recession – what is the point of having a “good economy” if we can’t afford a place to live?