On an October morning, a small army arrived to evict Rudy Ortega from his home in the Crash Zone, an encampment located near the end of the airport runway in San Jose, California, Silicon Valley’s largest city. As jets roared overhead, garbage trucks and police squad cars encircled Ortega’s hand-built shelter. Heavy machinery operators stood by for the signal to bulldoze Ortega’s camp.
As the workers closed in, Ortega grew increasingly upset.
But there’s no “Homeless Industrial Complex”.
John’s doctor just told him that he has high blood pressure, is seriously overweight and is on the verge of becoming a diabetic. This was not his first warning.
In response, John finally decided to do something. He promised to stop smoking. He promised to cut out junk food. He promised to eat more vegetables. And he drew up an exercise program, with a schedule of workouts mapped out to 2030.
If you listen to Canadian politicians, the solution to our housing crisis seems to be some combination of immigration reform and a herculean countrywide building effort.
But Paul Kershaw, a public policy professor at the University of British Columbia and founder of the affordability advocacy group Generation Squeeze, says the emphasis on increasing housing supply obscures an issue politicians are less likely to address.
Namely, that we, as a country, have become addicted to ever-rising home prices, largely because we’ve been conditioned to see our homes as financial assets.
This is a bit WEF’y for me.
The other dirty secret is that while Trudeau talks housing crisis he really doesn’t do anything that will decrease real estate prices as that would hurt his base of urban voters.
In 2015, Emily Wheedon bought a home: a modern, 1.5-bedroom condo in a midrise building in downtown Toronto. It wasn’t perfect — she gave her teen daughter the main bedroom and installed sliding glass doors to enclose her own room — but it was near her daughter’s school, and it was theirs.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau swept to power in 2015 with the help of younger Canadians captivated by his positive messaging and socially progressive views. That same group of voters may eventually be his undoing.
Trudeau’s chief rival, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, has been making huge gains with younger voters since he began attacking the prime minister forcefully on the cost of housing. In public opinion polling, the Conservatives now lead Trudeau’s Liberal Party by a 2-to-1 ratio among voters 18 to 29.
When the $86-million low-interest loan for SoHo Italia apartment tower in Ottawa was announced in the summer of 2020, the federal government press release led with the line: “Every Canadian deserves a safe and affordable place to call home.”
The project would provide housing for the middle class and “those working hard to join it,” said Ahmed Hussen, the cabinet minister then responsible for the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., which lent the money under the largest program in the Ottawa’s national housing strategy.
The Liberals are relentless scammers.
If they build it, they will come.
And, likely, never leave. Why would they? Drug addicts have everything they could ever want right here in the heart of the city.
Justin Trudeau is not going to solve the housing crisis.
He can’t do it on his own and he can’t seem to recruit the necessary collaborators among Canadian governments to get it done.
For several weeks culminating in an ambitious set of federal housing initiatives announced Friday the prime minister and his cabinet colleagues have crossed the country announcing housing initiatives.
When looking back on how the last few years have gone, Robert Quinn, 61, says he is full of gratitude and proudly pulls out his keychain.
You would not think a keychain could have so much significance, but for Quinn, it’s a constant reminder of how far he has come.
Quinn is quick to show off the tags he has collected, one for each of the agencies that helped him find housing — his ‘badges of gratitude,’ as he calls them and most importantly, two keys.
This is Trudeau’s Canada.
h/t Patti Jo
OTTAWA—The federal government is revamping its housing efforts with a new, multi-billion dollar plan based on a bold and politically-significant premise: this is how the Trudeau Liberals will help “solve” Canada’s housing crisis.
Released Friday, the new plan capped off the government’s pre-budget rollout of new housing measures over the past two weeks, and contained a suite of spending and policy changes aimed at spurring construction and helping those who are struggling to buy homes, pay rent, and find shelter from the streets.
Garbage. Canada lacks the capacity to build the number of homes needed and until and unless they turn off the immigration tap it’s just BS.
Canada needs a new approach to the housing crisis because we’re spinning our wheels in solving it.
For the next few years we must reduce our immigration intake, following the example of other immigration-friendly countries.
In doing so, we would finally address the demand side of the housing equation, after fixating with increased supply.
h/t PK who notes, the Star must had a mass fainting when this article appeared.
OTTAWA – The parliamentary budget officer says Canada would need to build 1.3 million additional homes by 2030 to eliminate the country’s housing gap.
The newly released report looks at how many more homes would need to be built restore Canada’s vacancy rate to the historical average.
The report by Yves Giroux also accounts for the number of additional households that would form if sufficient housing were available.
What they don’t tell you is that Canada lacks the capacity to build that many homes.
It was the tents at Rowntree Mills Park that caught the eye of veteran Toronto outreach worker Diana Chan McNally. She’d never seen an encampment here, by the banks of the Humber River north of Finch.
Yet, as of mid-March, at least three tents were erected in this riverside greenspace, deep in northwest Toronto. To Chan McNally, it’s yet another symptom of a ballooning crisis — as city data shows the number of tents in ravines, parks and under bridges is more than double last spring’s count.
Where workers counted 82 tents or other makeshift structures set up citywide on March 15, 2023, that shot up to 202 on the same date this year — edging closer to the 291-tent count seen in the mid-pandemic spring of 2021.
Given the amount of money that Toronto sucks in there should be no homeless beyond those who refuse shelter.
But homeless camps serve a greater purpose as a fundraising tool used to plead for ever more taxes that end up diverted to pet projects.
I am also beginning to suspect that they are used for block busting purposely allowed to fester in order to degrade real estate values for the profit of waiting vultures.
Gavin Newsom’s California put billions of tax dollars into a cannon, aimed it in the general direction of homeless “expert” NGOs, lit the fuse, and walked away. The BOOM came when someone started asking questions about where the $24 billion went. That day of reckoning is finally here. And we learn that Gavin Newsom and his Democrat super-majority in this one-party state have no idea where it went or whether it did any good whatsoever.
One of the most dominant topics in both the Canadian news media and politics is housing. The news features come out on a daily basis. Politicians at all levels of government voice their concerns and make announcements. Some of these announcements come with major cash infusions towards housing initiatives.
The consensus is broad and clear: Housing is too costly. There are too few units being built. The problem needs to be tackled with an all-hands-on-deck approach.
