this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
39 points (95.3% liked)

Canada

7210 readers
233 users here now

What's going on Canada?

Communities

🍁 Meta

πŸ—ΊοΈ Provinces / Territories

πŸ™οΈ Cities / Local Communities

πŸ’ SportsHockey

Football (NFL)

  • List of All Teams: unknown

Football (CFL)

  • List of All Teams: unknown

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer

πŸ’» Universities

πŸ’΅ Finance / Shopping

πŸ—£οΈ Politics

🍁 Social and Culture

Rules

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage:

https://lemmy.ca

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
39
CBC Opinion - There are no simple answers to the immigration and housing question (www.cbc.ca)
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
19 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

This was an eye-opener for me. Less temporary foreign workers do construction than the general population? Seriously?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Most suburban developmemts cost more to maintain than they generate in tax revenue

Ah, another easy solution: raise taxes to pay for stuff.

It's amazing how that works for just about everything that's broken in our society: Doctors and nurses quitting in a droves? Raise taxes to pay for them. Education system failing? Raise taxes. Housing unaffordable? Raise taxes.

You'd think we'd just raise taxes to pay for stuff, especially since cutting taxes since 1980 is why we can't afford to pay for stuff. I thought right-wingers were "good with money", but they don't seem to understand that "you need money to pay for stuff".

Maybe if I talked about it like a family budget, the way right-wing politicians do: you make $100K a year, and have $90K in expenses. Do you try to get a raise, or do you decide to take a $30K pay cut so that your boss can buy an extra yatcht and...trickle down..mumble..mumble.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

As simple as that sounds, some of these SFH neighborhoods cost as much or more to maintain than their owners bring in annually. You can't just tax someone their entire income. There is no simple solution to this as the problem has been slowly brewing since the initial development of the suburbs 70 years ago. Raising SFH taxes is a good idea but that alone will not dig the suburbs out of the hole they dug.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Oh, I agree, and I should have been clearer: this is why the tax rates should have gone up in general, not just property taxes on SFHs.

Of course, what we actually did--at least in Ontario--was eliminate the fees developers pay. Sounds great, right? It would mean markets would make low-density housing unprofitable, right? Nope, because it didn't come with any incentive to build higher-density housing at all, just a stick to beat municipalities with in hopes that they'd cut other services to make up the budget shortfall required to service these lands.

Again, this is a market failure, and we're continuing to look for market solutions for it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

We stopped building cities the way they were built for centuries in favor of rural style living with city amenities while simultaneously promoting car centric design to service that development. We started building cities for cars and not for people while ignoring the overall costs of that. There is no one single or simple solution to such a complex problem. Removing or reducing housing as a market force would be a step in the right direction. Housing isn't some luxury service someone can stop using if they can't afford it.