It’s hard not to be sensitive to the housing crisis and its consequences these days. Irreconcilable differences?
I’m inventing a story here, where on one side, I have a real estate developer friend and on the other, a politician friend. Impossible to bring them together in the same room, except at funerals.
We must deplore the fact that the things that stick out are never taken care of upstream, but that a crisis, each time, reveals the urgency of a situation.
We are not going to add to the heaviness of the debate. Municipalities lack resources and cry out for social injustice, and in this spirit, rely on Quebec. Quebec, for its part, blames Canada (and its CMHC) for the underfunding. We’re throwing the ball – and numbers – at each other, trying to convince those who don’t have housing, and voters, that it’s the other person’s fault. Always someone else’s fault. Never “accountability”. Except to make promoters, from time to time, useful villains.
Tsé, in a system where the economy serves as divine faith, reason also comes from profits. It’s a capitalist reflex. And it turns out that in reality, no one wants to build housing without profits.
We will not praise the good or the bad here. We have the ideals we deserve. Between social justice and profitability. Quite a lot is between these two poles. But explain yourself or hold conferences, write essays, further increase the administrative burden, exempt from GST, carry out and cite thousands of studies on the social fabric, shit statistics and other statistics, lyrical flights of fancy , Complaints ad nauseam or political speeches written by communications strategists do not so much build front doors and roofs for those who do not have them.
Like whining doesn’t pay the rent or the mortgage. This: in the United States there are something called Opportunity Zones. They concern habitable areas which have specifically become and are expected to become tools for economic development. This allows developers to invest differently in “distressed” places or under social pressure.
The role of this measure is to facilitate and increase economic growth and job creation in low-income communities with benefits, such as certain tax reductions for investors or other incentives for risks incurred.
Opportunity Zones were created under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Thousands of low-income communities now qualify for these zones in all 50 states, the District of Columbia (Washington DC) as well as the five territories. The entire country. And that facilitates the construction of housing and access to housing.
I’m not promoting the good guys or the bad guys here, but since I no longer believe in the tooth fairy, we’re looking for other stories to tell… As we’ve learned, the majority of promoters prefer to pay a penalty rather than building social housing. How else can we encourage them? Coercion has limits (no one will bid anymore, we can already see that). And in reality, no government or municipal power has the means to be a developer, that is not their role. But they can make it easier.
In childhood, when my sister and I bickered, my mother would sit us at the same table and force us to play together. We ended up finding common ground to get out of there.
Closer to us, there exists in Ontario a sort of mediating body (a Land Planning Tribunal), between the two ideologies mentioned above, which settles the debate for the benefit – magic, magic – of the people who have to find housing. . An organism which acts a bit like an arbiter and which finds a happy and socially useful environment. Or, at least, a way to get projects done. We quote here: the Ontario Land Planning Tribunal hears and decides appeals and matters relating to land use planning, protection of the environment, natural features and heritage, property assessment, land compensation, municipal finances and other related issues.
We notice that there are fewer ball returns. Let’s not be fooled, no party in this squabble comes out completely satisfied, but happily, we could build with the idea of giving houses, apartments, homes and a little pride to people who have it. need by softening, and finding some sort of medium. Because in the current situation, we see that ideologies are not putting anything into action.