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Canadians Unable to Afford Safe Housing Are Turning to Medically-Assisted Death

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Re: Canadians Unable to Afford Safe Housing Are Turning to Medically-Assisted Death

#61

Post by csande17 »

djbusby wrote: post #22
thinkingkong wrote: post #4

Whats wild about affordable housing in Canada is that for every newly built unit we lose 15. Yet almost nobody is talking about that part. You cant build your way out of the problem before you plug the leak. But there are obvious misaligned incentives to do that. The value system of our economy and culture seems to be obsessed with making basic needs a profit center, at all costs, regardless of the consequence.

Where do the 15 go? Destroyed?

I'm not the original commentor, but I tracked this claim back to the reporting of a paper by Steve Pomeroy, who tracked the number of housing units with rent under $750 CAD a month between 2011 and 2016.

So I expect the answer to your question to be "they are still available, but at a rent higher than $750".

Re: Canadians Unable to Afford Safe Housing Are Turning to Medically-Assisted Death

#62

Post by ZoomerCretin »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #53
ZoomerCretin wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem with encouraging builders to go hard with few restrictions is you end up with a low-density urban sprawl Low-density sprawl is a result of local governments banning medium and high density building, not the free market. 80% of Austin is still single family homes despite a massive influx to the area. This is not because single-family homes are the most profitable to build, but because they are the only t…

So you are of the belief that, if it weren't for the regulations, the suburbs would be full of high density housing?

...yes? If I can buy four adjacent $1,000,000 homes and put up a mid-rise with 25 units at $400,000/each, I've just made $9,000,000 minus construction expenses.

Re: Canadians Unable to Afford Safe Housing Are Turning to Medically-Assisted Death

#63

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #47
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with encouraging builders to go hard with few restrictions is you end up with a low-density urban sprawl that introduces a ton of its own issues. You end up with massively long commutes and a ton of infrastructure that now needs to be maintained, and none of that cost falls on the builder so they happily build fields of new homes miles away from work places or services.

In Canada, exclusionary zoning rules prohibited the construction of mid-rise housing in most cities. Developers would build it if the system wasn’t set up to stop them from doing so. They want to sell more units of housing per acre of land.

As I asked another user - so you belief that the suburban sprawl would be high density housing instead? We'd have giant apartment buildings on the edge of the city?

Re: Canadians Unable to Afford Safe Housing Are Turning to Medically-Assisted Death

#64

Post by milkey_mouse »

frostwarrior wrote: post #40
nostromo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not attacking you, your heart is in the right place, but your comment illustrates the problem. Housing absolutely should be a profit center. Home and multifamily builders should be unleashed to build as much housing as they can. Let them be greedy; let them get rich. It’ll make housing more affordable for everyone. High housing costs aren’t a failure of the free market - they’re a failure of central planning at e…

By the free market alone, letting everyone get a home sounds like a terrible decision. There's a finite number of people that need a home and by the point everyone gets their own home, your business is doomed. On the other side, letting housing to be crazy expensive, with few people capable of getting a new house, will always be profitable.

If the free market were one entity that could coordinate and say "nobody build more housing, let's squeeze as much money from what we have already", sure, that would be pretty profitable. But if there are enough participants in the marketplace (which depends on the barriers to entry to homebuilding, like regulatory capture, knowledge, capital, and permits) one will want to undercut the others and build houses marginally cheaper than the competition until their marginal profit is zero. Having everyone agree not to build houses and keep prices high is like the "nobody snitch" outcome of a prisoner's dilemma: it's not a stable state/Nash equilibrium. At least this is what I heard in Econ 101, I'm sure I'm missing much nuance here.

Re: Canadians Unable to Afford Safe Housing Are Turning to Medically-Assisted Death

#65

Post by nostrademons »

beiller wrote: post #8
epicureanideal wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the real estate value bubble has expanded beyond all reasonable limits. I'm very interested to find out how this ends...

It will end in either a correction of the price of housing, or a correction on the currency those houses are priced in to bring it back in line with the rest of the world, because from my understanding the economics when adjusted for wages in Canada is the number that is way out of whack. Place your bets!

Or feudalism. No guarantee that the majority of the population will be able to afford houses at all; in many societies, you have a small landowning class (< 10% of the population) that owns literally all the land, and then a large number of serfs who must work for survival.

Re: Canadians Unable to Afford Safe Housing Are Turning to Medically-Assisted Death

#66

Post by antiverse »

> “The government sees me as expendable trash, a complainer, useless and a pain in the a*," the woman said in a video filmed on February 14th, eight days before her death.

HN would be wise to keep in mind that, as a general rule, governments think this about majority of their citizenry (those who are not in power). You might think someone in there is looking out for your best interests because you're an upstanding citizen working a tie-and-suit job making revenue for IRS, CRA or whoever, but don't be fooled, you're one foot in the grave from their perspective and they will not give it a second's worth of thought to push the other one in there for you.

The rising costs/inflation, real estate, and a multitude of other problems that are coming to fore serve as examples. But it's what isn't being said, or talked about, that you should be on the look out for.

Re: Canadians Unable to Afford Safe Housing Are Turning to Medically-Assisted Death

#67

Post by random_upvoter »

This is a fine example of the unintended but perverse side-effects that are created by state-assisted suicide. We basically offer death as a "solution" to a housing problem. The system settles into a new equilibrium that depends on a certain percentage of the population killing themselves because their situation is too miserable to cope with, thus creating just enough space for other people -- which then reduces the pressure on politicians to actually solve the housing problem. See also: abortion among poor people.

Re: Canadians Unable to Afford Safe Housing Are Turning to Medically-Assisted Death

#68

Post by ZoomerCretin »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #63
fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Canada, exclusionary zoning rules prohibited the construction of mid-rise housing in most cities. Developers would build it if the system wasn’t set up to stop them from doing so. They want to sell more units of housing per acre of land.

As I asked another user - so you belief that the suburban sprawl would be high density housing instead? We'd have giant apartment buildings on the edge of the city?

> We'd have giant apartment buildings on the edge of the city?

Not necessarily high rises, but certainly apartment buildings, yes. This is the development pattern you see in places like Austin, Texas.

Re: Canadians Unable to Afford Safe Housing Are Turning to Medically-Assisted Death

#69

Post by Enginerrrd »

frostwarrior wrote: post #40
nostromo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not attacking you, your heart is in the right place, but your comment illustrates the problem. Housing absolutely should be a profit center. Home and multifamily builders should be unleashed to build as much housing as they can. Let them be greedy; let them get rich. It’ll make housing more affordable for everyone. High housing costs aren’t a failure of the free market - they’re a failure of central planning at e…

By the free market alone, letting everyone get a home sounds like a terrible decision. There's a finite number of people that need a home and by the point everyone gets their own home, your business is doomed. On the other side, letting housing to be crazy expensive, with few people capable of getting a new house, will always be profitable.

>By the free market alone, letting everyone get a home sounds like a terrible decision

Ah, but that's the thing about the free market. It doesn't care, for better or worse. If the barriers to building new houses are low and demand is high, new houses will get built and prices will drop until an equilibrium is reached.

>On the other side, letting housing to be crazy expensive, with few people capable of getting a new house, will always be profitable.

You seem to have conflated a free market with one consisting of too few people with a great deal of regulatory capture, where the criticisms you've mentioned here apply.

Re: Canadians Unable to Afford Safe Housing Are Turning to Medically-Assisted Death

#70

Post by jlawson »

frostwarrior wrote: post #40
nostromo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not attacking you, your heart is in the right place, but your comment illustrates the problem. Housing absolutely should be a profit center. Home and multifamily builders should be unleashed to build as much housing as they can. Let them be greedy; let them get rich. It’ll make housing more affordable for everyone. High housing costs aren’t a failure of the free market - they’re a failure of central planning at e…

By the free market alone, letting everyone get a home sounds like a terrible decision. There's a finite number of people that need a home and by the point everyone gets their own home, your business is doomed. On the other side, letting housing to be crazy expensive, with few people capable of getting a new house, will always be profitable.

In a free market, no actor has the ability to 'let housing be crazy expensive'. If you don't build, someone else will and they capture whatever profit is there. This is the core of how the free market works.

People can only 'let housing be crazy expensive' when they can prevent others from supplying the market, which is only possible by wielding power, usually through the government. Which is what we have now.

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