That is an excellent primer on how the housing crisis got started.
The free market won’t fix anything
You can’t have a free market with a product that is both limited, non-renewable, and necessary to live.
Canadian government and their corporate owners: … but we’re gonna spend the next five years trying.
How’s the Canadian government going to get around restrictive zoning? You’re blaming the wrong level of government. As long as that happens, all we’re going to get is half-assed programs and little results. Ferret Face can propose all sorts of things, knowing he’ll never have to deliver, “Courts struck down the program, sorry.”.
Housing continues to be the jurisdiction of the provinces. The article ignores the patriation of the constitution in 1982, which lead to the Feds withdrawing from a bunch of programs they formally funded.
It also ignores the fact that housing prices in the GTA (among other places) were stagnant through the 1990s, so there was little incentive to continue building projects that would only increase supply and add downward price pressure. Once Harris got in, any chance of social housing development went out the window.
We also have to recognize that average house sizes have doubled since the 1960s. We’re using more land and more material to build fewer houses. What the hell did people think was going to happen to house prices? The sub-1000sq.ft. “strawberry box” houses built in the thousands as post wartime housing can’t be built in large part due to lack of demand and restrictive covenants. The same for the three story walk ups.
but we’re gonna spend the next five years
tryingpretending to try
For almost 20 years after Jean Chrétien came to office, the market was still over-building McMansions relative to multi-family projects, and taking up huge amounts of space and resources that would soon be needed for a growing population.
The “market” wasn’t doing that; the zoning restrictions that prohibit density were forcing that. Blaming the proliferation of single-family housing at the expense of the “missing middle” on the “free market” is ridiculous disinformation.
The free market is incapable of existing. Human nature makes it an impossibility. So we should focus on desirable public housing to free people from the rigged markets, and keep human nature in check.
I’m not necessarily saying that appropriate regulations wouldn’t be better than no regulations at all, but I am saying that the current regulations are worse than nothing at all.
In the spectrum between requiring only single-family housing, allowing any kind of housing, and prohibiting single-family housing, we could argue about which of the latter two is best – but in either case, the first one is definitely wrong!
I mean, we can at least agree that before you fill in a hole you’ve got to quit digging, right?
Oh definitely. Honestly there should be no regulations or laws against any particular type of housing unless it’s due to safety. Any of this nimbi whining should be put down and ignored.
The real issue was the usage of the term free market. Having been proselytized to by free marketers constantly for basically 50 years. While personally witnessing its constant failure. Combined with how those of us in the Americas are reflexively conditioned to always refer to it reverently. It’s a big pain point. Because it’s simply is impossible to exist. Replacing the term free market in any sentence with fairy dust will either improve the sentence or at least make it no less accurate.
A fair market would be more achievable. But the only way to achieve something like that would be to make participation in that market as optional as possible. Shelter isn’t optional. Therefore leaving things like shelter to the whims of the market. Mean that the market can not only never be free. But never be fair.
However the ongoing trends of suburbanization in the United States, Canada and elsewhere are absolutely unsustainable. And the laws being used to perpetuate them. By blocking high density housing are absolutely part of the problem that needs to be solved.
The real issue was the usage of the term free market. Having been proselytized to by free marketers constantly for basically 50 years. While personally witnessing its constant failure. Combined with how those of us in the Americas are reflexively conditioned to always refer to it reverently. It’s a big pain point. Because it’s simply is impossible to exist.
Here’s the thing I’ve often noticed, as an urbanist who gets into arguments on this topic fairly often (both online and in IRL local politics): a lot of people are so used to the North American status-quo of the last 50+ years, and I guess so used to thinking of North America as “free,” that they just sort of assume that the way things are now is the result of a “free market.” Or maybe they think the only kind of housing that’s not a result of the “free market” is government-subsidized housing or government-owned housing (the proverbial “projects”).
But in reality, that couldn’t be farther from the truth: zoning law in the United States1 didn’t start until the Euclid v. Amber Supreme Court decision in 1928 and didn’t really become the widespread norm until the '40s or '50s, and the timeline in Canada was broadly similar. Before that point, there were basically no rules (i.e. a “free market” – or at least, a “free-ish” one2), and the result was traditional development: human-scaled design, walkable distances, and a fine-grained mix of uses. It was only after the widespread imposition of zoning regulations that the development patterns shifted to the low-density suburban sprawl we have today. And lest someone thinks it’s just correlation, nope: the entire point of the regulations was to impose that new development pattern by force. The car-dependent suburban sprawl we have today throughout North America is a direct result of laws (both US and Canadian) literally requiring it while prohibiting everything else.
The point is, so. many. people. will fervently claim that the reason such a huge percentage of housing in North America is single-family detached houses is due to the “free market” building what people want, but that’s blatant, Bizarro-world, pants-on-head-stupid, utter nonsense. Their entire lifestyle – their entire worldview – is shaped by zoning regulations and they don’t even realize it. And what’s worse, a lot of especially the right-wing ones think the “free market” entitles them and everybody else (with the possible exception of “those people”) to live in a single-family house, and can’t even see the inherent contradiction!
That’s my objection to this article: what we’ve been witnessing for the past 50 years isn’t an example of the constant failure of the free market; it’s an example of the almost complete absence of it. That doesn’t mean I’m so naive as to think repealing zoning laws without doing anything else would create some sort of housing utopia or that I’m a libertarian zealot completely opposed to public housing or other “socialist”-as-a-dirty-word ideas, but it does mean I think repealing the prohibition on traditional development would be a vast improvement over the current disastrous system that’s pretty much purpose-built to subsidize the wasteful lifestyles of upper-middle-class white people at the rest of society’s expense.
(1 Yeah, I’m a USian posting in a CA community; sue me. For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure Canadian and US zoning work similarly enough that it’s reasonable to argue about them collectively.)
(2 Point taken about housing being necessary, thus coercive, and thus impossible to really be a “free market.” Moreover, there’s also an argument to be made that the popular liassez-faire interpretation of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” is incorrect to begin with, and that the true “free market” Smith had in mind was one that is regulated to approach the conditions of perfect competition. So yeah, the term is definitely problematic.)
The free market didn’t do anything. As I said the free market doesn’t exist. Can’t exist. It would be like blaming the tooth fairy.
John Smith is an interesting guy. But much of what he wrote is irrelevant and out of date. He could not imagine the society and the world that exists today. Neither could Karl Marx. And the fact that so many people go to them as their primary source is part of the problem.
Zoning is a symptom not the problem. The problem is the people putting this system in place. The people who control, have controlled, and will always control the markets. As long as we let them, and as long as we let the markets control us.
Market regulation is fine. The best regulation is to take away its control. Markets that are completely optional are the only markets that could ever possibly be free or fair.
The main dependency for a particular type of housing should be supporting infrastructure for the given population expected by that type of housing, which should include:
- Basic utilities (water, gas, electric)
- Common technological infrastructure (internet, fibre etc and sufficient nodes)
- Sewer/waste, fire hydrants
- Sufficient emergency services within a reasonable distance for overall populations
- Green/recreation space (yes, this needs to be allocated and maintained for the mental well-being of humans)
- Transportation, roads, sidewalks AND the maintenance of such
- parking (unless you’ve got a really good 24hr transit infra, and even then some people with jobs requiring rapid response may need a personal vehicle)
