Jagmeet Singh: no to market housing
We need a massive amount of market housing; non-market housing is not a panacea
For the last three months, Sean Fraser has been using the Housing Accelerator Fund to persuade municipalities to legalize more housing. It’s a long list:
Pierre Poilievre has attacked the Housing Accelerator Fund as a “travelling circus” (despite having correctly identified “municipal gatekeepers” as a key bottleneck). Conservative premiers like Doug Ford have attacked the fund for bypassing the provinces, when they have full power to override municipalities and legalize more housing themselves, and they’re failing to do so.
Now Jagmeet Singh has weighed in:
“Liberals and their luxury condos leave you with nothing.” “With Trudeau’s plan, developers get rich, you get gouged.”
It turns out that the federal NDP position on the housing shortage is: no market housing, only social housing. (Singh dismisses market housing as “unaffordable luxury condos” that makes developers rich.) In Vancouver, I think of this as Jean Swanson’s position.
Meanwhile, the BC NDP is pushing hard for both market housing and non-market housing, introducing legislation in the last couple of weeks to make multiplexes and laneway homes legal across the province, and to legalize high-rises near rapid transit stations and designated bus exchanges.
Federal NDP vs. BC NDP:
Non-market housing is not a panacea
Why we need a massive amount of market housing, not just non-market housing:
Scale. As Alex Usher points out, even during the heyday of social housing back in the 1970s, we were building 16,000 homes per year. We're facing a problem of an entirely different scale: We need 350,000 additional homes per year! At $500K each, that’s about $2 trillion over 10 years.
Political sustainability. The massive housing shortage doesn’t just affect lower-income households, it affects younger people all the way up the income scale. They’re boiling mad. In this situation, it’s politically unsustainable to just focus on non-market housing for lower-income households. (Jean Swanson lost her seat in the 2022 municipal elections.)
Housing is a ladder, it’s all connected. When we reject market housing, the people who would have lived there don’t disappear - they move down the ladder and we get trickle-down evictions. Conversely, new housing frees up older housing. I don’t know if Singh understands this.
Non-market housing runs into exactly the same barriers as market housing:
Approval. Frances Bula on the obstacles faced by non-market housing in Vancouver, May 2021. Hamilton non-profits face 'infuriating' delays to build affordable housing, as city looks to change, April 2023.
Economic viability. A non-market rental project or co-op may benefit from free land or from capital contributions, but the basic calculation is the same as for market housing: the stream of future rental income has to cover the costs of constructing the building. The cost bottleneck. Mixed-income developments.
I agree with the "ladder" metaphor, but it's also a *distribution*, like the income distribution graph: some people need $100K dwellings, some $300K, some $900K. You have to build at every point in the distribution, to it's needs. Maybe we need 100,000 cheap and 200,000 mid-price - that's what should be built.
The free market normally does exactly this! You get the right number of small and large cars, big and small TV sets. When the free market is broken (and OMG, it clearly is), you have to fake up its effects by finding out how many dwellings of different sizes and conveniences, etc, are needed, and then just do those numbers by fiat.
Or, at least, we have to come as close to that as we can, as a functional free market would.