Housing would be much better if we could get it to follow anything like the technology price value trend. Housing today is barely better in terms of quality or value from 50 years ago. To expect housing to improve as fast as handheld devices is unrealistic, but I think they should be improving at around the same rate as cars.
If you think the price of housing has anything to do with the craft and materials involved, versus zoning, mortgage policy, the race to get into “good” school districts…well, I have a bridge that goes to the newly available land in the Portlands area of Toronto to sell you.
(The absolute drama that involves building anything in Toronto would drive you mad. Gaze upon the NIMBYs fighting tooth and nail to prevent high-density housing on the Danforth and despair.)
>Housing would be much better if we could get it to follow anything like the technology price value trend.
Do you think people would be willing to buy a house for cheap with the trade off being that Google and Facebook get to collect data on everything you did inside the house, and then got to display ads inside the house?
If people wanted affordable housing, they are more likely to achieve it by letting some company monetize frankly meaningless, actually worthless data about urban living than by taxing people who don’t live there.
In the very least, the economic forces discounting the rents in the former scenario have a chance to scale massively, while tax funded public housing developments have been shrinking almost everywhere in market real estate cities.
The status quo of compelling developers to make below market housing while simultaneously reducing public housing units is on net reducing affordable housing units per capita everywhere.
Sidewalk Labs never advocated this though. They wanted to build essentially luxury developments. Maybe they would be a little cheaper than otherwise. People want to live in luxury apartments and not public housing!
The issue is not simple nor black and white. It’s just that the activists had an opportunity with Sidewalk Labs, who could have simply offered lower rents in exchange for data collection, that they will not have with any other alternative real estate developer, who have no positive ROI reason to offer below market housing.
> tax funded public housing developments have been shrinking almost everywhere
This is the main reason for the housing crisis. Toronto has one of the lowest property tax rates in Canada; by bringing it closer to that of other cities we could fund a lot of public housing.
Some people want to live in luxury apartments. Many people just want to live indoors. Building more luxury condos for speculators to keep empty as investments doesn't really help make the city affordable to live in.
