With commodification of housing in Canada, homes are treated as investment assets, not just shelter. Investor-led speculation has led to soaring prices, rental increases, and rising homelessness. Housing has been turned into a wealth-extraction tool, impacting low-income families and essential workers most severely…
Professor Patrick Condon compares Vancouver’s adverse housing policies to the highly successful public housing projects in Vienna.
Patrick Condon is a Professor at the University of British Columbia. With UBC law student Thomas Kroeker, he authored The 50 Year Vancouver Experience on Housing Affordability with Adding Housing Density. The paper is republished here with Prof. Condon’s permission.
Four months ago, BC Premier David Eby and Housing Minister Christine Boyle received a letter signed by 27 housing and urbanist experts. Text of the letter follows:
MPs, MLAs and council members seem to prioritize salaries, expense accounts, and pensions. If only they would have the same concern for action on homelessness. If they did, this would happen…
A couple of election promises caught my attention. Perhaps these define different priorities established by politicians who aim to lead Canada’s federal government. Maybe some of it is just useless theatre…
New analysis from Popular Democracy and the Institute for Policy Studies reveals how billionaire investors have become a major driver of the nationwide housing crisis – and several common-sense measures to help expand permanently and deeply affordable housing stock…
Marc Lee and Alex Hemingway of the Canadian Centre For Policy Alternatives issued a report on affordable housing. It is an analysis that is worth our attention. Some of the points made by the two economists who authored the report:
Failure to support the poorest and unhealthiest residents in our society is a form of collective violence. This is a choice that most of us would reject as individuals but we are more likely to accede to public policies, even if the result is cruelty…
I describe my own family’s move onto the property ladder many years ago. The costs are updated to 2024 dollars to demonstrate how out of control the housing industry has become. The only solution is strict regulation.
Among the special advantages granted to billionaires? They can create monopolies which politicians will both subsidize and protect. Are domestic…
You mention investing. Anybody remember Canada Savings Bonds? Seventy years ago it offered people worried about becoming destitute pensioners a…
A huge fan of long-eclipsed Russian military glory, Mr. Putin expected Ukraine to collapse in 3 days. Three years ago.…
One thing I think people forget is - it became a good idea to invest in real estate as an…
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Blair Fix at _Economics from the Top Down_ also wrote two very good papers on the converion of housing into…