The issue is that the top parties feel secure in their oligarchy. It doesn’t really matter which one is in power as they’re always relevant and can squabble as they like.

They don’t feel threatened during elections anymore because it’s not about leading the country in a better direction according to their party principals, but it’s about what each person can personally gain by doing favours.

I’m worried that the only way to actually make positive change is to put one of the minor parties in charge. Maybe seeing the Green party or the Communist Party of Canada in charge for a few years’ll be what it takes to make the mainstream parties actually fix their crap. Of course, the level of a miracle for something like that to happen is so remote that it’s hard to see any hope in the government without some sort of major upheaval to happen.

Pretty much every city in the country needs like ten times that much before things’ll start getting better.

All these proposals are like trying to fight a forest fire with a squirt gun.

Gotta love the corporations targeting people before they’re old enough to think for themselves, thus preventing them from ever learning how to think for themselves. A part of me feels like children under 10 should be banned from fast food joints unless if the children’s menu is 100% made of proper and nutritious meals, but something like that is probably impossible to pass in the current political climate. Especially considering who our leaders are right now, and who the opposition are.

I keep forgetting just how entrenched the corporations’ propaganda are, all the way down to food pyramids.

Governments have done the work of providing housing in the past, and still do in limited numbers. There is no reason why they can’t just push the number of projects up until there is no housing crisis anymore.

I’ve heard some numbers here and there, and it seems like there’s plenty of organizations providing non-market housing that rent at below half the usual prices. Apparently the YMCA is one of them.

If the governments aren’t willing to do it themselves, they can just make it easier for corporations that are willing to provide non-market housing to get the property rights and loans needed to actually get this done.

Personally, I have no issues with things like summer homes, or having a second property you rent out for some money on the side.

The first is typically somewhere that having property is purely a luxury rather than a neccessity, so as long as it’s not being done in another large city or something, it’s not that much of a big deal. Especially so if the government isn’t on the hook for utilities.

For the latter, as long as the number of properties being rent out, and that the renting is done properly, it’s not a big deal either. The government already has regulations on rentals anyways, though I do wonder how well they’re enforced. Either way, while I do agree that excesses here is an issue, one or two properties utilized like this isn’t a problem, even if thousands of people do it in a single city.

Shit, when was such an exemption passed? That’s literally a law that turns housing into a non-productive investment.

Making a necessity to live in the modern world an investment is the way to turn a portion of the population resentful and unproductive.

I think personal ownership can go higher than just two properties without problems. The issue isn’t everybody owning five properties, but a small handful owning thousands.

Following that, limiting corporations’ ownership is definitely a top priority. Only owning housing with 30 units or more would probably help a lot. 10 units is just too little I think, as that’s just a conjoined townhouse, which can easily be personally owned and operated. 30 is more like a really small low rise.

AirBnB is definitely an issue as well, and is probably the hardest to regulate. Though definitely not the hardest to pass (that’s the corporations one). I’m not sure what can be done with it, as there’s already laws in place regarding hotels. Maybe force the company to register all BnB locations to a government database in real time? Though with enough housing, I think this will be an insignificant issue. Especially combined with the other changes. BnBing a spare room is quite a different thing compared to an entire unit/house on a permanent basis.

I’m not talking about individual houses. I’m talking about condos that easily cost more than the land they’re built on so they can maximize profits.

True. Those are probably some of the highest causes of deaths lately.

While medicinal advances should help with some of them, fixing your diet would do much more much faster.

And while the industrial design of modern processed foods is a problem, I think there the greater issue is a lack of education on healthy diets and habit formation.

I thought ones that shallow are only good if the ground doesn’t freeze much? I know there are horizontal ones about that deep or so, and vertical ones that are designed for places where the ground freezes, or if you have little space for a horizontal installation.

This is exactly how prices work. The minimum price of something is the price at which something costs to procure and produce, with anything added on top being profits. And this being typical western capitalism, they do what they can to increase profits as much as possible, and with housing being a requirement not a luxury, people pay whatever is asked.

About fifteen years ago, it was popularly believed within the science communities that the first bicentennial person had already been born, and some of the recent breakthroughs suggest that most of us under 50 might really be able to achieve that.

Of course, that’s presuming that the stuff we’re eating isn’t killing us on a timescale that only the advances of curing the major diseases of today will make relevant.

It will be sad if we manage to cure all the diseases that prevent most of us from reaching 100, only to find out that the food we’re eating is what’s preventing most of us from going much past that. And honesty, I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes something like that before money is directed towards properly studying all our additives and pesticides to check for which ones are doing us in.

About ten I think. Organic was still pretty niche before then, and only really started to come to mainstream about then, not just foodies and environmentalists.

I believe I’ve heard that heat pumps are good all the way down to -30 or so, though the efficiency at that point is pretty bad. That said, geological heat pumps can circumvent that as long as the ground doesn’t freeze too deep where you live. Dig far enough and heat pumps work anywhere that’s not permafrost, and I’m talking about 20-30 meters deep, not something insane like tapping underground magma.

As a Torontonian, I support this.

As things stand, you can walk faster than drive the Gardiner during rush hour, and the thing’s crumbling anyways. On top of that, most of it is completely surrounded by sky scrapers anyways, so it’s perfect for high rises. The Greenbelt is only going to provide 50k homes, out in the middle of nowhere that also requires roads, electricity, water, sewage, and probably more infrastructure. Aparently that alone will take 25 years to install, not to mention the millions of dollars. All that is pretty much already there around the Gardiner.

And as for the number of housing, 50 floors with 30 units per floor means that you need 33 buildings to get the same number of homes, and each building can be put up in under a decade, if not five years. Not only is it far faster, but cheaper and easier. And the tax revenue would be massively higher. In fact, I imagine that greenbelt homes wouldn’t even have a positive tax revenue due to all the infrastructure needed to be built first.

Greenbelt housing not only is low quality, expensive, and too far away to actually be able to reasonably commute to any sort of job, but actively harms the environment, risks doing lots of damage to nearby cities in the far more recently frequent major weather events, and can be done easier, fast, and cheaper by simple alternatives like the one proposed here.

Greenbelt housing is political corruption at its finest.

This is only a small part of the problem. The issue is that corporations are bidding on an extremely limited number of lots. Like a hundred firms on five lots kinda insane. By bidding on each other over and over, the prices inflate, and the end result ends up having to rake in more money just to recoup the costs.

It’s just plain illegal to build multiplexes on single lot residential. That’s why you can get several square km in the middle of downtown of only single family houses with front and back yards, with 50 story sky scrapers a few blocks down.

Doesn’t even have to be a mansion. Some broke-ass bungalow is still worth keeping a death grip on unless if policies change significantly. Even if it burns down, the land alone will be worth a good million now, and will keep on rising.

Hold on to any property, even if you have to live in a tent on some barren soil until you can save up enough to have something half decent built.

Only real policy change can fix this, as no amount of money will be enough to fix this housing crisis. Even if the federal government puts in a trillion into new housing in Toronto alone, it won’t fix this crisis until the laws themselves change.

Any solution, no matter how perfect, will take years to implement and have a real effect on housing prices.

That said, it’s either a half decade form now with a great policy, or several generations from now with bad policies, so don’t give up the fight to have good housing within our lifetimes, as it will transcend elections.

Kinda hoping it’s a combined shot or something. It’ll make it easier to do as long as the side effects aren’t any more severe, and most people will just forget to do one after doing the other otherwise.

I already have a hard enough time remembering to get the flu shot, so being asked to come again in a week to get the other is a sure way for me to forget one, if not both shots.

Wow. I’m on Teksavvy as well, but I don’t think they offer anything near that price in Toronto. Just goes to show that competition means a ton.