I would like it if they at least talked about the real solutions, or perhaps provided incentives for municipalities to institute the necessary changes. Instead, we get them talking about things like rent control (well-meaning but horrible policy) and banning boogeymen like foreign investors (as if native-born slumlords are any less predatory).

If absolutely nothing else, they oughta be using their bully pulpit to get a national conversation going about these things, rather than solution theater that maintains the status quo.

Of course, the biggest thing they could do would be a federal land value tax to replace some amount of income taxes and other federal taxes. Land value taxes are more economically efficient, progressive, basically impossible to evade, can’t be passed on to tenants, incentivize more and denser housing (and less sprawl), and reduce upward speculative pressure on housing prices. In theory, there is no limit to how many taxes can be replaced by land value taxes; it has been shown that land value taxes are capable of replacing all taxes at all levels of government.

At the federal level, it seems absolutely nobody cares about pushing the real solutions – abolishing our insane zoning codes that bake in inequality, abolishing other crazy land use regulations like parking minimums, and taxing land.

Canada has some of the most habitable land per capita in the world, so clearly it’s not a shortage of land or a “toO mAnY iMmiGrAnTs” problem (as some people would like to make it out to be). The problem is we have all collectively bought into the same delusion as America – that we can have government-mandated suburban sprawl for all, and that home values can go up in perpetuity.

But suburban sprawl is thoroughly unsustainable – both environmentally and economically – and the land use laws we use to artificially manufacture suburbia are artificially restricting housing supply, choking the economy, and driving inequality sky-high.

And those very same laws we use to mandate sprawl-for-all are responsible for maintaining housing-as-an-investment. But to be a good investment, housing has to appreciate faster than inflation, but if it’s outpacing inflation, it by definition cannot be affordable!

Plenty of desirable, high QoL cities have shown that upzoning can stabilize rents. Plenty of desirable, high-growth regions have shown that taxing land can stabilize housing prices. And any new housing – even market rate or “luxury” – improves overall affordability.

The housing crisis is a policy choice.

Edit: shoutouts for !yimby@lemmy.world and !justtaxland@lemmy.world

Exactly! Imagine if I said, “If we devalue my car, why did I spend years of toil to purchase it?” I’d look crazy. You buy a car for its innate utility, just like you buy housing for its innate utility. Cars ain’t an investment, and neither should housing be. Possession of artificially scarce property should not be the key to free money taken from those with the misfortune of being younger or later to market than you — that’s exactly the mechanism speculators and landlords exploit, driving up economic inequality and making life 100x harder for the rest of us.

I know the YIMBY movement has been growing tremendously across North America lately, but we still have a long way to go to actually eliminate the core problems manufacturing this housing crisis, e.g., mandatory parking minimums, exclusionary zoning, and rampant NIMBYism.

Housing ought to be a consumer good like any other – you buy it, use it, and it depreciates with use. Nobody expects a car to increase in value once you drive it off the lot. But somehow with housing, we’ve all bought into the delusion that housing is an investment. But to be a good investment, it has to appreciate faster than inflation, which means it cannot be affordable!

But this delusion is exactly why we have so much NIMBYism. If you manufacture an artificial scarcity to block out competition, suddenly the class of people who own homes or property can milk it for lots of money, at the expense of the rest of us. And almost all our politicians are homeowners.