| Are you under the misconception that "Abundance" is social democracy? It isn't. It is a defense of the neoliberal status quo. It doesn't challenge authority or the economic order at all. It argues the opposite: we need to do more capitalism, more deregulation and more wealth hoarding. That's why it gets attention from the mainstream media and the Democratic Party's donors and power brokers. It's Democratic Reaganism. I cannot stress this enough. Simple deregulation of building will not solve housing prices. Private developers will not build enough housing to meaningfully reduce housing costs. The "free market" (which isn't real) will not solve this problem. It takes government intervention. YIMBYism is well-intentioned and I'm all for more housing. My point is simply that it will not meaningfully solve the problem. I'm sorry if you're offended by the label "neoliberal" but objectively, if you believe that deregulation and capitalism will solve the housing crisis then you are definitionally and objectively a neoliberal. I'm not sure what Greens you refer to. You might be talking about Jill Stein, who is 100% a grifter. As for Carney, I had a look at the supposed plan [1] and I see a bunch of demand-side policies where the private development sector is being somehow tasked with lowering their own profits. Housing in Canada needs to be cheaper. That means existing house prices need to go down. Only government intervention in the market can make that happen. You want to see what a leftist housing policy looks like? Try this: 1. Massively increase property taxes on investment properties; 2. Tax worldwide income of anyone who owns property in Canada meaning the "beneficial owner" (so no hiding behidn LLCs and trusts). Property without a declared beneficial owner simply revert to government ownership; 3. Give the government the right of first refusal to buy any foreclosed property. Use it to build up housing stock. Banks can eat the loss; 4. Homeowners can walk away from properties that are underwater. They revert to government ownership as if they'd been foreclosed on. Again, banks eat the loss if there is one. The previous owners get to stay on essentially a perpetual lease paying affordable rent to the government; 5. A lot of development policies require a certain percentage to be "affordable" housing. There are a lot of games played with this. Ownership of all affordable units goes to the government. The government pays for these. If the price isn't agreeable, the property simply doesn't get approval to be built. This would tank the property market. As it should. The goal should be for the Canadian government to own 30-50% of all housing units within 10-15 years. [1]: https://economics.td.com/ca-federal-housing-plan |
Compare rental inflation in San Francisco which has effectively outlawed private construction with Austin Texas where construction is more deregulated and housing starts are allowed to track demand.
Get a dataset of American cities, do a scatter plot of rental inflation on the x-axis against the change in per capita housing starts on the y-axis and observe the high R-squared.
It's the left-wing parties and politicians that stand against supply-side policies informed by this reality.
I am not against a land tax and social housing as added measures but the inability to accept the efficacy of supply-side policies on purely ideological grounds will mean left-wing politicians like Dean Preston will continue to do more harm than good whenever they gain power. They don't know how damaging they are because they fail to grasp the basic facts of housing economics because accepting those facts violates the dishonest shibboleths they need to hold to (developers always bad, capital always bad, regulations always good, economics isn't real).