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Roy Brander's avatar

Good lord, there are still cities just getting to universal? I was with Calgary Waterworks through our long period of getting people to switch. What a long game that was - decades.

Russil, misusing this for a question right to you. My anti-military-spending crank-issue got me into a very cranky post at fellow Canuck Dan Gardner this morn:

https://substack.com/profile/1998437-roy-brander/note/c-82252410

...and it crosses my mind to take that $40B "ask" for the military even further, as a housing comparison. I was about right to round out a "house" (well, decent dwelling, if not SFD) at $500K? I think that was the rough number for those boilerplate 6-unit plans you brought up a few weeks ago? And wouldn't they be cheaper if we built 80,000 of them a year?

Further, what would the uptake be if we built 160,000 and sold them for $250K each? Could we say "We could simply end the whole housing crisis for well under $40B a year" ?

I was actually thinking of about $10B - $2B on "remediating brownfields into developable land" and $8B on 32,000 of those half-million-dollar dwellings, sold at half price.

And, while I'm thinking big, has anybody suggested building cheap housing for people who cannot work - the mentally and physically disabled, old people wanting to age at home - in all those emptying-out small towns? Then they'd have jobs providing care services...

I know your blog is local, doesn't normally talk in tens of billions of direct government spending, because it's considered politically hopeless, but the military guys always get me going...

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