Wohnraum billiger machen, ohne dass die Preise sinken? Mark Carneys neuer Wohnungsminister spricht in Rätsel
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/make-housing-cheaper-without-prices-coming-down-mark-carneys-new-housing-minister-is-talking-in/article_8a4a82dd-4c6f-43a3-bf21-5a747d89f442.html
8 Kommentare
Liberals still need to manage their comms better. Greg Robertson should have been ready for this question, and the answer should have been „what we are focused on is building new homes“. The effect of the answer he gave was okay, but opening it with „no we don’t want prices to come down“ is pure red meat. Remains to be seen how effective of a housing minister he’ll be, but he clearly doesn’t seem to realize how poor communication on this file can rub voters ages 18-40 the wrong way.
Justin Ling clearly doesn’t comprehend the underlying reasons for the Housing Minister’s statements.
Real estate and related industries are the largest contributors to overall GDP growth in Canada. Any kind of meaningful downturn in the housing market would be devastating for the Canadian economy. Which is why all levels of government, along with the Bank of Canada, implement policies that ensure a strong, robust, and continually growing housing market.
Furthermore, the majority of households in Canada are homeowners and landlords, and they rely on continuously increasing property valuations in order to fund their lifestyles and retirements.
Utimately, the only people who want housing prices to go down tend to be young and/or poor. This group has little to no political influence, and can thus be safely ignored. No political party will seriously cater to them, as they are completely and utterly irrelevant.
I think the problem that Canada has right now is that we’ve created an economy where too much personal finance relies on the price of housing, and it’s created a scenario where on the one hand we need more housing for a bigger population, but on the other doing so will cause financial problems for those that already have housing because we’ve financialized housing as a replacement for social welfare.
Like it’s not an incorrect observation to note that building more housing will hurt people’s retirement savings, and this was actually asked I believe in the 2021 or 2019 debates by someone. *None of the leaders* could figure out that hey, instead of saying „we’ll build more housing but the price won’t go down“ (which is a lie) that we should just create a stable retirement system that people can rely on to cover *all* of their expenses, and that part of solving the housing crisis is de-financializing it and not making it a primary asset for most households.
Of course, actually doing this requires the government expand social services, but neither the Liberals nor Conservatives seem capable of this because they aren’t capable of doing things like increasing corporate taxes or nationalizing industries and absorbing the profits into the public benefit, because doing so would force them to acknowledge that their neoliberal economic ideology for the past 40 years did not succeed in making people better off, and in fact contributed a lot to making it worse (or at least not as good as it could have been) for tens of millions of people.
This is an impossible problem. Building cheaper houses doesn’t do anything but put less sustainable houses on the market. The gov needs to do something drastic like regulating the market and subsidizing the devaluation of the assets for current home owners by spending trillions. Otherwise we’ll move straight into private equity owning all the property because – disparity.
This isn’t a liberal or conservative problem. This is a government of Canada problem that needs to be solved across the aisle.
The only way more houses solves the problem is if they build way past demand which isn’t a guarantee that it will result in lower house prices. Also just erodes the motivation for builders
I’m going to give Robertson the benefit of the doubt that he deeply cares about fixing housing in this country, and that’s why he signed up for the job that Carney gave him. I’m going to give him a chance.
However, the government needs to fix their communications on the issue because Robertson’s first comments will define him for his entire term unless he produces results. Aside from increasing supply and removing red tape, they need to consider other aggressive measures.
A huge barrier for prebuilds is the Harper Era law that requires selling 70% of the units before they can break ground and receive the next level of funding from the bank. The problem this creates is that development costs increase while they wait to sell the threshold. It creates a whole new set of problems, and could cause them to cancel the whole project all together.
This law was created to prevent a similar market crash like what caused the 2008 economic crisis. But we are in a housing crisis and this law does nothing but create a bureaucratic barrier.
The government should seriously consider lowering the threshold or put a freeze on the requirement so developments could break ground faster before costs increase. Make it temporary if you have to, but if this government wants to build faster, this is a start.
If Ling is genuinely confused here says more about his weak understanding of housing policy, politics and economics than Robertson “riddles.”
There’s a number of ways to reconcile what Robertson is saying.
I don’t find any of this terribly interesting but I’ve been following housing (in Vancouver) for years so this seems like mundane and well tread rhetoric to me.
I recognize that these folks have to write articles every day but the sort of mock confusion I’m seeing from media and pundits is weird. Do they genuinely not understand? Like feels like this is a bit of a play that is being put on.
Seeing others do this too like Mike Moffat.
I’m not sure what these folks were expecting to see here. Certainly not sure what they’d be looking for from a centrist Liberal government and establishment person like Robertson.
There are ways of making housing more affordable without reducing the price of a family’s current home. Build even smaller homes which we have been doing already and extend the amortization period which has been done at various times before. The issue is that they don’t address the fundamental issue that buyers have with the current market.
Of course he is. No homeowner is going to be on board with taking a haircut on the value of *their* property, so „prices coming down“ is not going to happen, in the more desirable markets, at least.
The play here is going to have to be building up less-desirable areas, where land is still cheap. In many areas, you can’t even build a home that can be sold for less than a million dollars (at minimum) because the cost of the land, development charges, building materials, and labour alone add up to a number that is not „affordable“ to many people, and that’s before any kind of profit for the developer.