A Real Solution to the Housing Crisis!

Too bad the 'professional' reporters for the legacy news were too busy trolling for a 'gotcha' that they couldn't be bothered looking into the first realistic proposal for ending the housing crisis.
- It's actually kind of bullshit this isn't on the front pages of CBC or The Globe.
  In fact, if you click into the politics section of both it's all about the circus and has almost nothing about policy updates.
  
  It's the first thing that shows up for me on cbc, posted 4 hours after your comment. I think this might have been more that it takes time to research, interview, get responses from the opposition and fact check.

Carney sounds like a man with a solid plan. I'm much more hopeful about housing than I've been in maybe a dozen years?
Edit: After listening to the speech in its entirety, I'm pretty impressed.
- Don't worry: the cons will find mud to sling, as normal. Brown suits, theatre make-up, traditional clothing, the ability to not sound like a whinier Trump; all these are apparently indictable offenses.

Remember when the Liberals also promised the 2015 election would also be the last under FPTP?
- Quite right.
  But what I'm excited about is a major party actually saying that the govt can actually solve the housing crisis, a reference to when the govt did this in the past, and describes a practical way of doing it.
  If we won't reward a party that actually comes up with a plan because we don't trust them, when is any party going to actually do it?
  And don't forget, Trudeau actually did do some of the things he promised---like legalizing cannabis. And that was something that I heard nothing but hand-wringing about from other politicians my entire life!
  
  You make fair points about housing and cannabis legalization. The Liberals do occasionally follow through on promises, especially when they align with both political opportunity and public pressure.
  However, electoral reform is more fundamental than any single policy area. When Liberals promised that 2015 would be "the last election under first-past-the-post", they weren't just offering another policy - they were promising to fix the democratic foundation upon which all other policies rest. According to the opposition, Trudeau repeated this commitment to "make every vote count" more than 1,800 times, clearly understanding how much it resonated with voters.
  The Electoral Reform Committee recommended proportional representation after extensive consultation, but Trudeau abandoned it when he couldn't get his preferred system. More recently, 68.6% of Liberal MPs voted against even creating a Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform.
  This matters because in a proper democracy, citizens are entitled to meaningful representation. A housing program (however needed) can be implemented and cancelled with each election cycle under our current system - what experts call policy lurch. But proportional representation would fundamentally reshape how all policies are developed, ensuring they better reflect what Canadians actually vote for.
  I'm not saying we should dismiss other policies - housing is critically important. But it's worth noting that the same party repeatedly promising electoral reform for over a century (since Mackenzie King in 1919) while never delivering it suggests a deeply entrenched pattern that voters should question.
- [something Justin didn't do on time]
  P a n d e m i c

I'm so fucking jazzed about this. This is what I've been going on about for years. It's such an obvious part of the solution. I'll wait to see if they can pull it off, but everything I've seen so far is fantastic.

If affordability is the problem.
And you build more houses.
Rich people buy them.
- It’s not that simple though. Sure, they can buy new properties, but they can only buy so much. We’re talking 500k new homes per year.
  You could aggressively tax people who own multiple homes, but it doesn’t address the fact that there’s a clear lack of housing for the population. Property investors are just one part of the equation.
  And if the rich does snag up a lot of these units, we can then talk about taxing these people, or perhaps limiting purchases of affordable houses only to first-time buyers or low-to-medium income households, creating a sort of loose air gap between the two markets (luxury and affordable). In any case, your worries are without solutions, but those houses need to be built regardless.

A real solution?
No.
Neither is the Conservative or NDP ideas either though.
How much will all house prices drop if we build X?
If the answer isn't "the entire housing market will drop by greater than 50%" then you don't have a solution.
If the answer is "house prices will stay the same, or even keep going up" then you actually haven't done a fucking thing.
- I'm not saying that this proposal will definitely solve the housing crisis. But this is the third housing bubble I've seen in my lifetime. If it bursts like the first two, then housing will drop in price. (I bought my home when the 2nd bubble burst.)
  The problem all over the world with housing is enough stock hasn't been built for decades. And Carney's proposal is the first one I've ever seen that actually deals with this problem and on the scale needed. It also identifies two things: that Canada has faced this problem in the past and fixed it, and, there has been a problem with govts not being willing to act decisively and fast enough to really make a difference.
  
  A) Even if the housing market dropped as much as it did in the 90s (about 30% in the toronto area) it STILL wouldn't be affordable. That's the problem here, the situation is so bad that even a massive crash isn't enough to fix it. It has to be completely ruined before we restore that tag.
  B) There are more bedrooms in Canada than people, and given that a lot of people share bedrooms (couples and small children) that means there's actually a significant excess of housing. If you go back through my comment history you can actually find where I did the math and linked sources on this one. The problem is not the lack of housing, it's the distribution and allocation of housing. This problem can be fixed without building a single new home.