The actual solution was burried at the bottom of the article:
But here we can take another page from the wartime playbook: the massive construction of housing by the government. We don’t need to rely on profit-seeking developers to build our housing. The government could do it, like it did during the period around WWII.
Government-built and -run housing side-steps the profit requirement altogether. With that out of the way, the focus can return to building the kind of housing people need, in the places where they need it.
Rent controls are lazy policy used by negligent governments who have failed to act until a crisis is reached. If the problem is greedy landlords you don’t try to ban being greedy, you force them to compete. If they can’t, you just build until everyone is housed and congratulate yourself for being so efficient.
But that’s not even possible because we have terrible zoning practices in many places and lots of outdated legislation that adds too much cost to projects. Ever wonder why we don’t have any multi unit buildings beyond fourplexes and giant condo complexes? You can thank outdated, ineffective laws related to stairwells for that one.
Rents have been going down for a while now. You sure this isn’t a ploy?
Where’s that? Definitely not a nationwide trend.
It’s mostly apartments, but pretty significantly for the last few years
Interesting. Without all the actual data I’d have to hypothesize the big cities finally hit a tipping point, and these drops haven’t hit the smaller towns that the people priced out by the cities have been moving to.
I doubt that rents will fall all that much outside of the big cities. Unfortunately, the cities have also become more of a playground for the wealthy, wealthy people in denial (children of homeowners that will receive assistance to join the property market), and a home for the unhoused and people in precarious living situations.
If you’re not in either ends of the social classes, there isn’t as much of an incentive to remain, since most leisurely activities and meeting areas are crowded, behind an expensive paywall (if not at the gate, then the activities themselves), or they’re outside the city anyways.
If the government is going to get more involved, they should build more, not force owners to fix their prices in a volatile economy.
Instead, the rent should be managed by the markets, which will be beneficial to all renters if government built supply can beat the demand. We shouldn’t stop building until we reach such a point.
We also need policies for how many homes you can own, building more won’t help if they all turn into airBNB. Thankful BC halted airBNB unless it was also your primary home, we did see a flood of units back onto the market as “Investors” had to sell
I’ve been out of country for 6 months, has it gotten worse out there?
