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The Conservative Party Has No Real Solutions For The Affordability Crisis
(www.readthemaple.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
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People keep saying this but it rings hollow to me. There are plenty of ways to attack the CPC, but this meme is not one of them.
Poilievre has specific plans on how to force cities to get more housing built. Now, obviously, if you don't believe in market solutions this sounds dumb, but most people with even the most basic, minimal centrist respect for economics will believe that more housing will help with prices.
So if you keep saying "he has no plan", what those voters hear is "leftist media is lying about Poilievre".
The LPC could very easily disarm him on this one issue: steal his plan and implement it. Bring out the stick. Start threatening cities that do not greenlight enough housing with cuts to their gas-tax funds. Because while Poilievre's policy is generally horrifying on a lot of fronts (LGBTQ issues, environment, poverty) his plan on this issue is better than anything anybody else has offered (to be fair, the bar is very low).
Progressive YIMBY activists and affordable-housing builders have been saying for decades: slow-walking approvals and restrictive zoning are driving up the costs of urban housing. Thid is a spot where PP is on the same side of the issue as Alexandria freaking Ocasio Cortez!
Yes, there are many publicly-funded ways we should also be fighting the housing crisis, things that PP is not going to do. But on this one specific issue: PP is talking sense, you look stupid to swing voters when you say he isn't, and you can disarm him by just stealing the idea wholesale. It works against the NDP every time, just do it here to the Conservatives.
edit: I just took another look and realized that TFA was written by Nora Loreto. Now it all adds up. The woman is a troll. People just get confused because this style of political trolling is almost exclusively conservative chuds, so seeing this kind of over-the-top hot-take nonsense is unfamiliar when it comes from this side of the aisle.
Correct.
But we're going to disagree on whether the government should - and whether that government would - help regular people. Trending shows his party does not in any case.
So while there are emany ways the gov could and maybe should address housing as well as the environment, science and the social contract, I don't expect his bunch will suddenly start caring about any of it when that's not how they vote and it's not how theyre funded.
PP's biggest donor is a massive property developer, right?
Nice hair though.
I haven't heard of these plans to force municipalities to build housing, but am curious how that is supposed to work.
Municipalities don't have their own construction crews, housing is built by private contractors and land developers.
Are municipalities supposed to buy up land and hire contractors to build housing themselves? Then sell it once completed? Or rent it out for little to no profit?
Force cities to allow housing to be built, technjcally. Basically, the YIMBY argument is that the private sector and non-profit sector are lining up to build housing that will help the housing crisis by both attacking the supply/demand problem with more market supply at large and also there are specialized affordable housing builders that will directly target renters needing affordable rent.
These people are being directly blocked by municipal zoning rules like height limits and ambiguous planning guidelines, and indirectly blocked by long and slow approval processes that are costing them millions in carrying costs owning expensive property they can't build on while they fight city halls.
I downloaded this great video from Xitter of an affordable housing builder giving a deputation to the city of Toronto about this -- it's posted on my Mastodon.
https://mastodon.social/@Pxtl/110300343308877005
A choice quote:
"$20 billion dollar intersection in Forest Hill; somebody said that should be a 7-storey and 70-unit building in 2018. How...where did that number come from? Somebody picked that number. Because it "conformed to the current planning policy for Forest Hill" and somebody adjacent to the site had a backyard swimming pool. That can't be our priority in 2023."
Relevant to this, PP's housing plan includes forcing cities to upzone such transit hubs.
To me that really only seems like half a solution.
The BC government already implemented a rule that any single home lot can have buildings which contain up to 4 separate dwellings to be built no matter the local zoning, which I find can have many issues down the road with providing infrastructure to areas with 4x more people than was planned for.
But you still need developers to buy that land and take the risk of funding the construction of houses and apartments and hire work crews which are already limited and can only build so fast. Developers are not willing to take out as many loans to fund these contractions which interest rates as high as they are.
We need to have low interest rate loans for home construction and some sort of incentive to get residential construction crews to expand or new construction companies to start up and the trades to train on more apprentices.
After seeing this I completely agree with you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvFFGoAVeDY
They should just steal like you said
Well, in the case of "reward cities for fixing their processes" actually that's literally the Housing Generator Fund, which Hussen touted so much as the thing that would fix housing that he completely destroyed its utility as something they could celebrate. The entire media circuit started rolling their eyes at "housing generator fund". Beyond policy problems, the man had buffoonish political instincts.
But one thing that Poilievre's vicious political style works with here is that he wants sticks, not just carrots.
Municipal governments deserve that stick.