It really seems to me like government needs to be in the business of building rental housing. Print money; buy land; upzone; build; operate; achieve payback; reinvest; operate older assets as deeply subsidized units :).
If the most important bottleneck is municipal zoning restrictions, the provincial and federal governments have the power to simply bypass this bottleneck - as senior levels of government, they're not required to follow municipal bylaws. (They typically do, but as a courtesy.)
That said, I think it would take time to build up capacity within the provincial and federal governments to be able to do this. A comment from Paul E Williams on Twitter:
"Once again seeing some of you argue about whether housing programs should have budgets in the tens of millions, or in the billions. Meanwhile there is not a single jurisdiction in the US with the actual capacity to do large scale real estate development. Until then it’s all moot."
On what capacity means:
"Staff with experience doing large multifamily build-to-core development work; programs in place to facilitate moving projects through a pipeline; established financial tools to allow reliable deal execution."
I would guess that public agencies would also be quite risk-averse.
Well, there probably is nothing like (tens of) billions of dollars to attract talented people. I have been impressed by Mazzucato's work, and I believe it is possible to build up highly entrepreneurial state capacity (though absolutely not a given).
I hear you, I wouldn't argue to stifle private sector investment, but I also think it's a particularly neoliberal frame of mind to argue the state can't do it even better for society.
It really seems to me like government needs to be in the business of building rental housing. Print money; buy land; upzone; build; operate; achieve payback; reinvest; operate older assets as deeply subsidized units :).
If the most important bottleneck is municipal zoning restrictions, the provincial and federal governments have the power to simply bypass this bottleneck - as senior levels of government, they're not required to follow municipal bylaws. (They typically do, but as a courtesy.)
That said, I think it would take time to build up capacity within the provincial and federal governments to be able to do this. A comment from Paul E Williams on Twitter:
"Once again seeing some of you argue about whether housing programs should have budgets in the tens of millions, or in the billions. Meanwhile there is not a single jurisdiction in the US with the actual capacity to do large scale real estate development. Until then it’s all moot."
On what capacity means:
"Staff with experience doing large multifamily build-to-core development work; programs in place to facilitate moving projects through a pipeline; established financial tools to allow reliable deal execution."
I would guess that public agencies would also be quite risk-averse.
Well, there probably is nothing like (tens of) billions of dollars to attract talented people. I have been impressed by Mazzucato's work, and I believe it is possible to build up highly entrepreneurial state capacity (though absolutely not a given).
I hear you, I wouldn't argue to stifle private sector investment, but I also think it's a particularly neoliberal frame of mind to argue the state can't do it even better for society.
Alex Hemmingway has written about this a lot more lucidly than I could - https://theprovince.com/opinion/alex-hemingway-how-a-massive-expansion-of-public-rental-homes-can-pay-for-itself