By a year!
More than a year ago I made the observation that the creatives, the innovators, the "disrupters" won't be moving to Toronto if they can't afford to live here. Jeff Gray tells you the same thing on page A17 of today's Globe and Mail.
The so-called "solutions" discussed in Gray's story don't fully address the problem, in part because any solution that relies on "developers" is asking the very people who have largely created the problem to remedy it. Incentivising for-profit developers to build affordable housing is another way of saying you're going to subsidize their profits. That's the wrong approach.
Putting up apartment blocks is not rocket science. It doesn't require "developers." The Romans were putting up multi-storey buildings well before the time of Jesus. Toronto should be cutting the for-profit developers out of the picture, not subsidizing them. What makes property development both risky and lucrative is the cost of land and the convoluted approval process. Since the city of Toronto already owns plenty of land and controls the approval process, what's holding them back from getting shovels in the ground?
You don't need "developers." You need young keeners with fresh Construction Technology diplomas in hand to work as project co-ordinators. The construction unions will be happy for the work whether the finished product is nonprofit or designed to further enrich Toronto's billionaire developers.
Elsewhere in the Globe, John Rapley offers a meditation on Canada's love affair with home ownership. He reports the imaginary conversation of a couple of his imaginary friends which segues into a philosophical treatise on the meaning of money.
That's just more BS that skirts around the fundamental problem causing our runaway real estate inflation and the crisis of affordability; supply and demand. When the federal government is fixated on continuously ramping up immigration while simultaneously washing their hands of any responsibility to provide housing, it's no wonder we are facing a crisis in housing affordability.
That's not the fault of the developers. They're folks who play by the rules we've made for them, and they wouldn't exist if they weren't profitable. We can't relegate housing to the private sector and then complain when market forces make the resulting product unaffordable to the majority of Canadians.
A robust policy of affordable public housing co-sponsored by all levels of government is long overdue.
No comments:
Post a Comment