Learning from practitioners
They have a strong incentive to get things right: they have more at stake
Whenever I speak at a public hearing, I note that I don’t work in real estate or development. I don’t have any direct financial interest in housing, other than being a homeowner. I just find it maddening that housing in Vancouver is so scarce and expensive, and that we make it so difficult to get permission to build, when we have people who want to live here and other people who want to build housing for them.
We live in a low-trust environment, and a lot of people are particularly suspicious of developers. For example, in November 2021, Helen Lui spoke at a public hearing on Vancouver’s Streamlining Rental Policy, noting that she was working for a non-profit developer. Colleen Hardwick seemed to find this suspicious. Michael Mortensen spoke next (“I am a developer”), and Colleen Hardwick was even more hostile.
This is unfortunate, because it’s people working in the industry who have real experience delivering projects. For them, the consequences of getting something wrong, of overlooking some important factor, are much more serious than they are for me. So I always appreciate it when practitioners (like Michael Mortensen, Richard Wittstock, Bryn Davidson, and Michael Geller, to name a few) take the time to try to persuade people and correct misconceptions (including mine).
I’ve also learned a lot from people working on non-market housing, like Helen Lui and Albert Huang. In particular, non-market housing runs into exactly the same barriers as market housing. Determining the economic viability of a project, based on the stream of future rents, is very similar for both market and non-market housing. And reducing costs (“there’s no free lunch”) is even more important for non-market housing.
Joseph Heath, The democracy deficit in Canada, January 2009:
In a modern mass democracy, politics is necessarily conducted on a vast scale. This means that the connection between individual action and its eventual consequence will be extraordinarily attenuated. This in turn encourages a sense of irresponsibility in the formation of political opinions. As Joseph Schumpeter observed, one need only compare the care and precision with which, say, a doctor studies a patient’s chart with the casual manner in which he reads the morning paper and forms his political opinions. In the former case, he brings the full force of his intellect to bear upon the task, precisely because the quality of his analysis has real consequences for his livelihood. In the latter case, the quality of his analysis has no tangible consequences, so unless he has some particular interest in politics he is unlikely to exercise much care in the formation of his opinions.