The actual solution was burried at the bottom of the article:
But here we can take another page from the wartime playbook: the massive construction of housing by the government. We don’t need to rely on profit-seeking developers to build our housing. The government could do it, like it did during the period around WWII.
Government-built and -run housing side-steps the profit requirement altogether. With that out of the way, the focus can return to building the kind of housing people need, in the places where they need it.
Rent controls are lazy policy used by negligent governments who have failed to act until a crisis is reached. If the problem is greedy landlords you don’t try to ban being greedy, you force them to compete. If they can’t, you just build until everyone is housed and congratulate yourself for being so efficient.
But that’s not even possible because we have terrible zoning practices in many places and lots of outdated legislation that adds too much cost to projects. Ever wonder why we don’t have any multi unit buildings beyond fourplexes and giant condo complexes? You can thank outdated, ineffective laws related to stairwells for that one.
Of course, the government would basically have to rebuild all the stuff that developers have from scratch, and then that department would be at risk of ossifying the way institutions with no competitors often do.
It’s not a doomed approach, but sometimes it’s made out to be more of a silver bullet than it is. In our current situation, the main obvious bottlenecks are zoning, labour shortages and NIMBYism.
Zoning and burdensome outdated (often copycats from US laws rather than EU) regulations are two of the worst barriers and represents a large reason we have so little innovation.
Good YT video from a Canadian creator on an example of this:
The actual solution was burried at the bottom of the article:
Rent controls are lazy policy used by negligent governments who have failed to act until a crisis is reached. If the problem is greedy landlords you don’t try to ban being greedy, you force them to compete. If they can’t, you just build until everyone is housed and congratulate yourself for being so efficient.
But that’s not even possible because we have terrible zoning practices in many places and lots of outdated legislation that adds too much cost to projects. Ever wonder why we don’t have any multi unit buildings beyond fourplexes and giant condo complexes? You can thank outdated, ineffective laws related to stairwells for that one.
Of course, the government would basically have to rebuild all the stuff that developers have from scratch, and then that department would be at risk of ossifying the way institutions with no competitors often do.
It’s not a doomed approach, but sometimes it’s made out to be more of a silver bullet than it is. In our current situation, the main obvious bottlenecks are zoning, labour shortages and NIMBYism.
Zoning and burdensome outdated (often copycats from US laws rather than EU) regulations are two of the worst barriers and represents a large reason we have so little innovation.
Good YT video from a Canadian creator on an example of this:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ozwkP9Zsi0Y
Shoutout to Calgary for abolishing single-family zoning. Housing starts are exploding as a result.