Two years after Valérie Plante’s administration said a new housing bylaw would lead to the construction of 600 new social housing units per year, the city hasn’t seen a single one.
The Bylaw for a Diverse Metropolis forces developers to include social, family and, in some places, affordable housing units to any new projects larger than 4,843 square feet.
If they don’t, they must pay a fine or hand over land, buildings or individual units for the city to turn into affordable or social housing.
This has always been ridiculous. This kind of Inclusionary Zoning doesn’t apply to detached homes, only to highrise condos - that is, to small units that are for many people how they’re entering the housing market. Expecting builders to cover affordable housing raises costs for those buyers.
I firmly support affordable housing developments, but expecting housing for those most unable to afford it to be funded by the second-most-unable is insanity. Every other social project is funded by taxpayers, but somehow in a housing crisis where we’ve a massive shortage of housing, we expect to shove a boat-anchor onto the costs of the very people we expect to solve the crisis and let them bear the cost? That’s lunacy.
They were stupid to give the developers an out. It’s not hard to do some math and figure out what it would take to recoup the penalty in rent or sales compared to the much lower revenue stream of affordable housing.
Now the fine is just part of the cost of doing business. They’ll either eat the fine, or more likely spread it out across whatever they were gonna charge for whatever they’re building instead of the affordable housing.
You can’t give greedy assholes an inch, or they’ll take a mile and then bill you for it.
Housing really is one of those aspects of the market that needs to be demonetized and handled by governments.
We already got that. Municipal governments have control of the housing market. It’s called “zoning” and their opinion on housing is “no.”
🤔 I don’t think it would have to come to that. They could very well leave anyone who’s already there where they are, survey the neighborhood or otherwise figure out who’s renting and who’s not, turn over ownership to whoever’s renting, and seize all empty housing to distribute to individuals or families looking for a primary residence. It actually would be possible to do it humanely.
it is too late, it is already become rich people gold mine/golden egg that they wont let go no matter what because how stable the investment is, not to mention not taxable when empty
This is the thing with Lemmy - there’s all these veiled calls for violence which seem like an astroturfing campaign to foment social unrest from users on weird instances which should be banned.
You don’t need tanks - we live in a democracy - you can band together and form a political party to replace the government, and convince people to vote for you. That’s how it works.
Unfortunately the government has all the tanks. And historically people will tolerate nearly anything short of death - often via food scarcity - before they actually put their own necks on the line.
band together is just impossible now, they learn from french revolution so well. Make sure average joe will be out on the street if they cant receive their next wage, and what you can do against government who owns all the firearms, your whole data about you and your family so you can easily blackmailed while you marching with empty stomach without place to sleep ?
I agree in principle, though I have a hard time seeing it going any other way than real estate developers getting even richer because now they just need to bribe lobby whatever politician is in charge of it for all the best deals
I mean nationalize the industry so no one makes money. Only government constructs housing. All real estate development firms are nationalized and taken over by government, all equipment seized, all construction workers now under employ of the government.
It might be the only real way to solve the problem.
Given a significant portion of politicians own investment and rental properties, I’d be nervous about how well they would actually handle owning all the housing supply. I think there are corruption issues and policies to protect the public needed before the government should own significant amounts of housing.
Developers are the sleaziest slimmest sub-human peices of shit you will ever meet. I used to work in the industry, they are all the same. You could fine them half of the net revenue, and they would still pay the fine over doing anything to help society. It is so lucrative the fine would have to be absolutely enormous to make them not just pay the fine. The fine doesn’t really matter anyways because everything is done in credit leveraged against previous projects.
Fines are just the cost of doing business. Fines should be a percentage of gross revenue and at a significant rate. Until then corporations will continue to pay the fine and laugh to the bank.
