Does Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow read my blog?

Don’t know if that’s actually true, but it’s curious that finally a politician picks up on something I’ve been ranting about for years; the only way we’re ever going to get affordable housing is by governments building it. It is self-evident that the housing crisis isn’t about housing, it’s about affordability. If you’ve got a million bucks to spend, there’s lots of options for you clear across the land. The private sector can provide housing for everyone who can afford it. It’s the people who can’t afford it who are experiencing a crisis. It’s ludicrous to expect for-profit real estate developers to build housing for people with no money! Between the three levels of government, they have all the ingredients for practically unlimited construction of social housing, public housing that provides a roof over your head and caps rent at 30% of your gross income. They have the land and they control the approval process. With full buy-in across all levels of government, financing shouldn’t be a problem. If this country can commit to 84 obsolete fighter jets at 100 million per, surely we can afford to put up as many three storey walk-ups as required to house everybody homeless and the million immigrants, temporary foreign workers, foreign students, and refugees our government wants to import every year. Three-storey walk-ups aren’t rocket science. Various native tribes were building them thousands of years ago. The construction unions will be on board because a full-on building program will create thousands of new jobs. Your social justice types will buy in because thousands of apprenticeships for marginalized youth will be created. Of course, you’ve already got your usual knobs at The Globe and Mail rubbishing the idea. It’ll be a complete debacle and end Chow’s career… Maybe. If that’s the case, at least she’ll have gone down getting something done. By and large our political class today is full of people who want studies and more studies and never get anything done. Go Olivia!