City launches affordable housing plan
The mayor launched an affordable housing plan Thursday, but I looked in vain for the leverage the city thinks it has against developers.
In the short term, the tent city on Notre-Dame East is slowly emptying by attrition as the season progresses.
Douglas 00:43 on 2020-11-06 Permalink
The city had leverage pre-covid when every project developers threw up sold right away at higher and higher prices each year. The city was also running massive surpluses.
Today the city doesn’t have that leverage anymore. The city is running deficits and developers are not as confident in new project developments right now in downtown core. Foreign investors and immigrants aren’t there to help absorb condo units, meanwhile unemployment rate is 12%.
The city can’t punish developers into building more social housing during a time when developers like Mondev have trouble renting out hundreds of their units. Developers will just wait on the sideline during rough times and that means deficits for the city.
david100 03:43 on 2020-11-06 Permalink
Funny that the harm in this one is so obvious (ie. increased costs will be passed on, and have an inflationary effect on housing, assuming continued demand), but that Lionel Perez somehow gets it all wrong:
“Since Montreal will be the only city to have these costs, promoters are going to go elsewhere because they’ll be able to build at a less expensive price, and then the cost will be cheaper off-island,” he told Global News.
Anyway, Plante played this one beautifully. She made a big show about this big new policy, which is terrible economics and won’t achieve her aims, but is very smart politics, because people just don’t understand how the housing market works. BUT the actual policy she’s rolling out is much more circumscribed than she describes, it doesn’t take effect for 5 more months (with the option of pushing it back further still), and it affects only Nun’s Island and Saint Laurent borough, which are opposition territory.
It’s a very very smart move. Get the press you want to help get the anti-growth/anti-capitalist base excited again, don’t antagonize the people who are busy building the homes and creating the jobs and city you want, (slightly) punish a couple opposition boroughs, and give yourself an out if there’s any blowback.
She’s back!
Raymond Lutz 07:38 on 2020-11-06 Permalink
“people just don’t understand how the housing market works” and you do, of course. As Alan Greenspan did…
Folks, Baroness Thatcher be damned, there’s no such things as “markets”, only egomaniacs struggling for power, virtue signalling to their peers. Markets are the spherical cows of the so called economic “science”. Pro tip: look for flag words to spot old world people, like referencing businesses as ‘job creators’.
Raymond Lutz 08:43 on 2020-11-06 Permalink
Pourquoi cette flèche décochée à Greenspan, ancien directeur de la FED? La notion qu’un marché est une entité “en soi”, dotée de mécanismes internes qui le régissent (le marché de l’emploi, le marché immobilier, etc… ) et qui résultent en une autonomie pérenne qu’idéalement on ne doit pas perturber est une fumisterie avouée par Greenspan lui-même: “I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organisations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms,”
Si vous désirez vous instruire sur ces sujets, consultez des économistes hétérodoxes, ou même marxistes! Il y en a (David Harvey, Richard Wolff, J.W. Mason, Frédéric Lordon) ou simplement réformistes comme Robert Reich.
Su 08:54 on 2020-11-06 Permalink
Raymond. Also Donut Economics by Kate Raworth. Lively user friendly reading on the important topic of Neoliberal growth economics and how to fix the damage it has caused as we head into a bleak future.
Douglas 08:57 on 2020-11-06 Permalink
Businesses are job creators.
Look at the aggregate number jobs created by businesses every year and people employed by business.
Raymond Lutz 09:01 on 2020-11-06 Permalink
Douglas, est-ce qu’un boulanger crée de la farine?
Raymond Lutz 09:08 on 2020-11-06 Permalink
Also, thanks Su for your reference… I’ll take a bite! Gnarf gnarf, should’ve fold this gag into my boulanger analogy 😎 . And sorry for this comments logorrhoea, Kate.
Douglas 09:37 on 2020-11-06 Permalink
Ah yes, the old trick of inventing an analogy to make an argument.
Kate 10:37 on 2020-11-06 Permalink
Raymond Lutz, no, this is fine. Please continue.
david100 11:58 on 2020-11-06 Permalink
Ah yes, the great wisdom the be gleaned from the likes of Robert Reich and Marxist economics.
I think, Raymond, you are precisely the voter Plante shooting to trick with this move. Though, in fairness, she likely held many of the same thoughts you do, until she was elected mayor and realized that what sounded good when she wasn’t in any sort of position of responsibility would end up inflicting disastrous and totally unnecessary pain on the population. And to what end?
And to your (borderline random) non-sequiturs about some years ago head of the US central bank and UK prime minister – we’re talking about basic supply and demand of housing units. If you think the cost of housing is skyrocketing on the Plateau or in Rosemont or Villeray because we’re building too much housing in Montreal, you’re drawing with crayons, man. I mean, obviously rates have a big impact, but that’s not something Montreal controls.
dwgs 13:04 on 2020-11-06 Permalink
su·per·cil·i·ous
/ˌso͞opərˈsilēəs/
adjective
behaving or looking as though one thinks one is superior to others.
david199 23:28 on 2020-11-06 Permalink
^ Another quality contribution.
dwgs 09:26 on 2020-11-07 Permalink
^ Quod erat demonstrandum