Memo To Gregor Robertson: More Housing Is The Silver Bullet
On How To Solve Many Problems
There’s a tendency for people to overstate how important their pet issue is to a broader coalition, and namely to treat those issues as silver bullets. The One Weird Trick approach to politics is usually wrong, and reflective of people’s desire for their main issue to be the main issue. But, in this one case, there is a decent argument that housing is actually the silver bullet that everything else - or at least a lot of things - flows downstream from. Put another way, the answer to a lot of the government’s problems on jobs, encampments, sluggish economic growth, and cost of living can be solved through housing solutions.
The government, and Gregor Robertson especially, need to internalize a message here, and internalize it fast - going too far and too fast on housing is eminently more preferable than going too slow. The Liberal housing agenda features a lot of component parts, but in totality they represent a large ambition to increase supply. The thing is, there’s been talk about the consequences of a potential glut of supply - falling prices - without realizing that this is a problem we will be lucky to have, and one whose negative consequentials we will easily be able to handle.
The government talks about using pre-fab and modular housing on supportive and transitional housing, to lower the cost of building shelters and housing the homeless. It’s a great idea if we can pull it off at scale, one that could clear cities of encampments without bulldozing, both literally and figuratively, people’s lives. But think about the “consequence” of building too much of this housing in major cities - we’d have usable housing stock either as excess for cold winters or the next economic downturn, or we can use it in other ways. I’m sure there’s no chance our universities would have any interest in excess housing capacity in cities, especially when it would benefit both them and the Feds? Nah, no way that’s true.
If cutting municipal development charges is too much of a success, we might see substantial real terms price declines, which would act functionally as wage increases for renters and new buyers. The ability to pay less in rent and mortgage costs would be transformational for the Canadian economy, increasing after-housing costs household budgets and giving people the money to take that trip, renovate that basement, get those sports tickets, or whatever else. It would be a significant boost to an economy that’s been stagnant by GDP per capita for nearly a decade.
If we airquotes “overbuild” then we’ll be able to increase immigration levels faster or sell the land to charities and non-profits for 90 cents on the dollar or do any number of things that would immensely help the material conditions of Canadians. We would have options in a way we haven’t had in fucking decades, optionality that extends beyond bad and fucking worse. The consequences of over aggression are similar to the consequences of having abs that are too defined or of a face that’s too handsome - respectfully, you’ll figure it out.
“Oh, but what about property values?” I can already hear the chorus shouting, to which I say bring it on. Please God put us in a situation where we have to bail out some people with equity. I could not be more excited about the prospect of spending 2028 arguing about the correct mechanism to ensure that people who bought at or near peak don’t end up underwater. You know why? Because it means prices will have come down and we will have made life significantly more affordable moving forward.
Gregor Robertson’s fears about what significant declines in prices look like for existing homeowners aren’t unreasonable, and it’s unfair to characterize this as protecting the equity of the boomer class. There are people who bought in 2021 and 2022 who face serious challenges, and it’s not unreasonable to look at people, especially young couples who thought it was better to get on the ladder in any form than not get on at all, and say that they don’t deserve to be screwed by the government finally changing the incentive structure.
What any form of bailout and subsidy looks like, if this is successful, is obviously for debate. I’m not an expert in this and there are serious issues to placate while others will argue to protect the last quarter million in equity from the boomer who already stands to net out $1.6M. Getting the balance right will be crucial, but we can and must worry about those issues after we reset this market in full. If we can achieve that reset in prices, the economy will be booming to such an extent from all of the added cash that’s not paying ever higher rent and mortgage costs that can do productive things. It will be the definition of a good problem to have.
We need to be incredibly aggressive in using more housing as a means of achieving more outcomes than merely lowering rents. If more people have secure housing, we can make cities safer places to live. If we have stable addresses for people, we can more easily get them the supports they need without them falling through the cracks of the system.
If we can lower housing costs we can spur innovation and business creation, if it doesn’t take the entirety of two incomes to meet a mortgage payment in the GTA. We can enable young people to have more fun by not making them choose between living at home or spending all their money on essentials leaving no room for fun. We can stop the massive outflows from big cities to the secondary ones, end the Toronto to London or Niagara or Windsor pipelines that made my grandparents rich but fucked the housing markets in smaller cities across the country. And we can do all of this while making more money for the taxpayers, as the workers building the homes, the companies profiting from the sale of the homes, and the increased GST revenue from boosted non-housing spending flow back to the coffers. It’s a win win, and it’s a growth strategy at a time when governments have been worried about who gets what share of the pie and not enough about growing it.
We talk about the challenges that face us, from the Americans to the general stagnation much of the west faces, a lot. We talk about managed decline and the idea that things are headed in one inalienable direction far too much. We talk about the fuckups of Trudeau a lot, because it’s important. But it’s also important to view the opportunities in front of us.
The problem with focusing on whether Canada is broken is that we allow the fight to get into abstractions. Whether Canada’s problems stem from the failed state region of Brokelandia or is it more a case of Sparkling Inertia holding us back is a fun academic debate but it doesn’t help build any homes or ensuring an encampment can be but a memory, and it’s the kind of anti-woke virtue signalling that Conservatives allegedly hate but actually love. We need to move past the debate about language and rush solutions.
Housing is the skeleton key to solving problems across the broad suite of public policy problems. More and faster building of all kinds of housing will have positive knock-on consequences that will reverberate across the whole public sphere. And the few negatives can be easily overcome. Let’s take advantage.
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