They’re now using that word to mean… What exactly?

California probably, if things keep going down the stupid path.

Florida if the pendulum swings back to sanity.

I’d bet it’s slow.

I will bet on that happening in my lifetime too.

Do you not understand percentages? Do you think there are only 1400 total two bedroom apartments in Calgary? The percentage change in available listings for sale does not in any way show you how many new units were created. Those are just how many people are currently trying to sell and don’t reflect net construction at all.

Calgary grew it’s population by 100,179 people in 2024 but it’s total housing completions were only 21,084 total units. Given that the average housing unit doesn’t even come close to having 5 people in it (the average is usually somewhere in the high 2s) that means the total supply per capita went down.

Those stats are from the city itself: https://www.calgary.ca/content/dam/www/cfod/finance/documents/corporate-economics/housing-review/Housing-Review-Q4-2024.pdf

I really don’t know how you’ve managed to get so far in life given how bad you are at understanding math. I suspect you’re just lying to be honest.

So how exactly can they solve the housing crisis?

We need Universal Basic Incomes, for everyone.

I don’t see how you think the current system is better. Plenty of people already have “nowhere legal” to go.

When someone who can’t afford a mortgage or rental right now, they really only have two options. Homeless shelters, if there is space that will take them, and then specific public parks at night (as allowed by the Supreme court of Canada when enough shelter space is not available). They can and are regularly locked up temporarily for trespassing on private property.

You act like the government would just start instantly kicking out everyone if they owned the land. Why would they do that? What’s the motive? How do the politicians benefit from such an action? I know and can explain exactly how capitalists benefit from owning the land.

The worst situation you’re going to see is specific people being displaced more easily for development, but that’s literally the point of this. Oh no, grandma and grandpa can’t keep living in a half acre lot 3 minutes from the downtown core anymore, they have to move into a condo or move further out to have a giant house. That’s not a problem, that’s a solution.

You bring up a boogeyman like ICE in the US, but how would that even apply to government ownership of land in Canada? We don’t have a large illegal immigrant population, and even the racial tensions we do have are mild as toast compared to what has existed in the US for a long time. Even if we took the current far-right conservatives, I don’t see any indication that this policy would be used to do… anything.

Explain to me against who, and how, a nazi government would use the government ownership of land in Canada against Canadians, that they couldn’t already do today if they were voted in.

You clearly don’t understand how demand works. If demand drops, it looks like there’s more supply.

If you look at the change in population (it increased) and total units in the province(it increased, but not as much) total units per capita has gone down (a decrease in supply)

I just looked for property in Alberta under 100k, and could only find a handful of places under 100k that were not inside mobile home parks (where you don’t own the land) most of them are court ordered sales and are also mobile homes(on private lots) that essentially need to be replaced entirely.

The only reasonable one I found in the entire province which wasn’t in terrible shape, had it’s own land, and was drivable to what I consider a city was in Elnora, which is about an hour outside red deer. Unfortunately it’s unlikely you could get even a minimum wage job there, because the population is only 288 people and they have only 18 total businesses in the town, and that includes some public places like the post office and library.

The thing to remember about this though, is that it can’t support a larger population choosing this option. A few people could move there, but the moment you get more than a few moving in the prices go way up since there isn’t just a million houses sitting empty in these small towns. There’s maybe hundreds, total in the province.

You’re right about disinformation and stupid voters.

However, you are not proving that’s worse than the current capitalists which are literally bleeding everyone dry right now.

There’s no way he’s getting 100M pounds a year in stipend, the King doesn’t even have that kind of money privately accessible. King Charles has probably got a couple of billion dollars that he privately controls separately from the crown, but the vast majority of that is tied up in real estate and jewels, and while the real estate does generate some yearly income, it’s on the order of tens of millions. The jewels generate no revenue.

Now, that being said, Andrew is probably going to get north of a million dollars a year, so it’s not going to be anything like a pauper’s life. However, it may come with strings attached that keep him from showing his face in public, so it’s unlikely we’ll see him jet-setting around the world with that money. Most of it will likely be spent on having help, a maid and a cook and butler so he never needs to actually do anything. His own private retirement home/jail.

You think Americans don’t starve to death?

https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2023-04-13/deaths-from-malnutrition-have-more-than-doubled-in-the-u-s

You have to remember that it’s not just “I was so hungry I died” but also “I didn’t eat properly and so I got sick and died” that count as starving to death.

City owned grocery stores don’t really solve the affordable food problem.

Grocery stores aren’t particularly profitable in the scheme of things. Neither are distributors, food processors, or farmers.

Each link takes a bit of profit of course, but for most non-luxury foods there’s just not a lot of profit along the line.

In order to solve it for real, you need to a) make farming cheaper, especially for certain labour intensive foods b) control the entire supply chain from farm to grocery store

However, this tends not to work well for any sort of non-commodity food item like say cookies or ice cream. There are just too many different preferences for that to work well. The government could produce 3 types of cookies really cheap, but if they tried to produce even 30 different types they’d just end up being worse than what we currently have and we currently have 300 types.

I’ve said this like a dozen times in the comments. A dictatorship can ALREADY take away your land if they wanted to. The Canadian government expropriates land from private citizens all the time.

BC.

Rent controls don’t work, I agree. As do most economists.

The rents in Calgary haven’t dropped because of new rental supply though, you have that idea wrong, the rents have dropped because the economy is down. Rents are down in Vancouver too by almost 7%. The supply has barely changed in either location.

Everyone keeps talking about supply solving the issue, but the market keeps actually changing because of demand, it’s impossible to build enough supply fast enough to impact the markets significantly, only by changing the demand can you have a significant impact.

Which is where the government owning the property comes in, the demand for housing isn’t actually coming from people needing places to live. It’s from investors who are buying up properties because they know that people HAVE to live somewhere. If the government owned the land, that speculation goes away almost entirely because it’s no longer profitable. The land values all drop off a cliff, and housing becomes affordable again.

If there’s one thing we don’t lack in Canada, it’s space. The problem is the allocation of it, when Bob and Jane own 3/4 of an acre downtown, and live in their 5 bedroom place by themselves now that the kids all left. That’s the problem. Fuck them, force them to either pay to have that privledge or give up the property so it can be redeveloped to fit 8 families. If they want 3/4 of an acre they can live outside the city.

but we can go somewhere else This is where you logic breaks down.

A) People tend to like to stay in the city they’re already in, and B) With the current system we have right now nobody who doesn’t already have a home can afford to do that

If the government owns the land, and you vote in some fucking nazis, then the people have decided that’s what they wanted. That’s how democracy works. It’s not some sort of Utopian system of government, it’s a popularity contest.

No small private group of people can “own” a piece of land and demand those on it to pay for it.

Yes they can, that’s literally what a landlord is. If the only options are Landlord A, Landlord B, or Landlord C… you have no options. At least with the government you can vote.

You sure as shit didn’t buy a property for $60k in Calgary or Edmonton, which is where most of the jobs are, and where people want to live.

And, on top of that, housing prices are STILL rising in those two cities compared to last year.

I will say it again, we CANNOT build ourselves out of the housing issue we’re in right now. It simply isn’t possible.

So you buying places where nobody wants to live and doing all the construction yourself is somehow proof that it’s possible to build affordable housing for everyone?

Give your head a shake.

There is land value, it’s reflected in the amount the government charges the lessee. A property downtown is not going to have the same monthly lease value as a property in the suburbs for the same land size. This changes over time as areas become more or less desirable.

I also don’t believe that the government is perfect, but I do think they’re still better than private landlords who are showing how un-trustworthy they are as we live and breath.

As for your “anarchic society”, you’re actually not correct in this assertion. Large-scale personal ownership of land was uncommon historically, though of course it depends on where and when you look.

The roman empire had private land ownership, but only for a small people. Very few people owned their own land or home.

England was the same, a bunch of lords and dukes and shit. Lots of peasants that didn’t own even the shit from the animals.

If you look at First Nations cultures in North America pre-European contact there was no private ownership at all, it was all collective for the tribes. The Aztec empire was the same, collective ownership by groups.

Tracking the ownership of a plot of land for a lot of people requires a lot of bureaucracy and centralized systems to track it, along with citizenship rights, which simply didn’t exist in most places.

It really isn’t more cognitive load, your payroll taxes go down, but your mortgage/rent goes up. For a lot of working class people, it would actually work out in their favour and they’d end up seeing more net money in their account.