"At city council you can always just gum things up until its 2025 and then claim it's the business of the next council and not this one and thus the great circle turns forever. That's a lot of things but what it's not is crisis management"
"Canada has pivoted away from natural birth and shifted entirely to immigration for growth. Virtually all growth (97.6%) was due to international migration. Only a sliver—the remaining 2.4% growth was due to natural increases (births outpacing deaths). "
“In Dublin city last year, 94 per cent of all new housing was apartments, 98 per cent of which were for rent. First-time buyers there bought just 75 new houses. In Cork city just 3.5 per cent of all new housing was sold with first-time buyers buying 17 new houses.”
#NoFault#evictions like these — without any missed rent payments or damage to a unit — account for roughly 85% of the total in #BritishColumbia according to a 2023 #UBC study of the period between 2016 & 2021. During that interval, one-in-10 #BCrenters studied were #evicted.
These rates outpace the rest of #Canada in both total ousted #tenants & ones kicked out for no fault of their own.
That’s probably the real problem behind the #HousingCrisis , eh : employees are WAY too rich, am I right? Everybody’s complaining about that middle class just growing out of control, right?
It also says that competition enhances productivity: tell that to #boeing.
Seriously, I don’t think they know wtf they are talking about. Either that, or I am experiencing a parallel reality to theirs.
Glad to see many quotes from Maggie Helwig. She and the volunteers at St Stephens in Toronto have stepped in where the city has otherwise abandoned people.
Within the housing market data that is regularly reported hides an even more problematic trend.... new house inflation if higher that the general rise in house prices.
The new housing sector has enhanced profits, not least by (still) limiting supply of housing.
As Tom Archer & Ian Cole argue we need to diversify housebuilding to dilute the market power of large house builders.
The current sectoral arrangement benefits investors & few others!
“Britain’s #housing offers the worst value for money of any advanced economy, combining high prices with old, cramped, poorly insulated buildings and long commutes…” 🏚️😪
I'm too familiar with our awful housing, but was surprised to learn that we have less floorspace than not only other Western European nations, but also Japan and central NYC 🤯
🧵/1 It strikes me that #Nimby is an extraordinarily successful word in activism, so successful that popular culture is pushing us away from using it because it "offends" the very people it perfectly, irrefutably identifies who are irrefutably responsible for the crisis it creates #Climate#HousingCrisis
Climate movement doesn't really have a powerful word like #NIMBY for the folks steadily making it all worse but clearly there's a need. Think of all these twits wrestling for the mic to trash a #CarbonTax while NEVER having offered a solution & NEVER being held accountable for it #Climate#HousingCrisis
“gentrification”, in the 1960s, [was about] replacing the squalor of urban rented housing with a new class of younger owner-occupiers. Today it connotes the ritualistic slaughter of social housing and the elimination of the urban poor.
Early gentrification was offset by radical councils such as Lambeth aiming to achieve a surplus of high-quality social housing in order to abolish the need for waiting lists and qualification criteria.
"The feds are relying on neoliberal economic policies of letting the market decide to build affordable housing. Well, the market decided we should all be poor."
"Freeland appeared on CTV’s Your Morning just before Christmas, where she was asked what example she could give that would illustrate her understanding of the financial pain Canadians are experiencing. She responded by saying that her church has a food bank."
@chad we live in such a cold country, none of us would survive a winter in the elements. And misfortune can happen to anyone - I'm seeing that all around me in Toronto, where employment is precarious, the vacancy rate is 0.4% and rent is insanely high.
I thought we were a society that takes care of the ill and unfortunate. I'm disappointed and angry at these failures of basic human compassion 😢
This Youtube from Liberal Minister of Housing Sean Fraser about how Pierre Poillievre (a former Housing Minister himself) “doesn't care” is long, with lots of facts, but good.
And the tag line: “Pierre Doesn't Care" is gold that the Liberals should hammer away at for the next 2 years. Not only because it rhymes, but because it's true.
Here's another aspect of the housing crisis.... holiday park owners selling accommodation as fit for permanent occupation when the rules around the sites preclude/forbid full time occupation.
Unscrupulous agents & owners are taking advantage of the shortage of 'real' housing to mislead buyers!
There only hope is a lack of enforcement capacity at Local Councils... which may actually offer them (temporary) respite - councils may have bigger fish to fry!
"I’m not going to beat around the bush here. The housing market in Australia is an absolute disaster...
.... The federal government is growing the population massively at the same time as construction – the supply side – is collapsing.
And I think the question everybody needs to ask the Albanese government is: why have they brought in record numbers of people into Australia without a plan to house them and also to provide infrastructure for them.
I've posted a bit on the UK housing crisis & the major house builders role in the problem, but to be fair to them its worth appreciating that whatever their market-making limitations on housing supply, this is compounded by the energy bottleneck caused by the slowness (lack of capacity) of the National Grid to actually connect developments to power supplies.
This doesn't get the builders off the hook but it is a partial mitigation of sorts!
That some families in London have been in temporary accommodation for over a decade is a sad but clear indicator of the costs of a failure to (re)build the country's social housing... there is an appalling impact on children's development, but also a massive cost to Council budgets, money that would have been better spent on building homes.
Of course, the private providers of accommodation are laughing all the way the bank.