Imposed from above during an economic emergency, rent control played a significant role both in curbing out-of-control inflation and solving the housing crisis Canada was experiencing at the time. A combination of robust rent control and concurrent investments in public housing saw housing prices fall by as much as 30 percent in real terms between 1975 and 1978.
I don’t know much about georgism, only that people who advocate for it online tend to present it as a silver bullet for too many things and that makes me suspicious that it’s snake oil. Like I don’t know the band, but the fans are kinda sketchy.
Totally fair. I think it’s just terribly unlikely to ever happen, and the ramifications aren’t really understood.
It amounts to wealth redistribution at the end of the day. Tax the land at a really high rate and redistribute the tax to everyone equally. This is precisely why it won’t take hold. Too many people have invested in land speculation (which is where most real estate investment profits come from) and it would tank a lot of peoples savings and retirement plans - but so would anything that delivers on affordable housing at scale.
So I at least don’t think it is a silver bullet. The obvious downside is that a lot of retirees who were counting on using the proceeds of selling their house to fund their retirement or end of life care would be absolutely fucked by it. Retirement homes are really expensive. It’s a choice though. We either decide to hurt the retirees who can’t work anymore, or put the pressure onto the youth and others starting out who have the ability to dig out of this mess.
When I bought my house I paid $330k for everything. Now the land alone is worth more than that. We’ll never see affordable houses again until the cost of land goes down, and Georgism is the only path to that I’ve heard of. I am not sure if this is something we should do or not.
Why are things like housing coops and other kinds of off-market housing (eg council housing) not a solution to affordable housing? Georgism to me sounds like too many hoops jumped to protect private ownership, when social/municipal/public ownership is a more straightforward solution.
And on the other end, Canada is big. There is still a lot of space to go off into the boonies and construct new transit oriented towns.
If done at massive scale then yes that would also work, but I don’t believe the Canadian government is willing to go there either. It would truly need to be a huge scale to be able to bring housing back to affordable levels.
I think that is a second best solution, but would take a huge investment from our government.
It would still tank a lot of people’s retirements, because at its core more affordable housing means people can sell their houses for a lot less.
At its root I think Georgism is actually quite socialist. You are effectively saying nobody really owns land anymore, but instead have to rent it from the state for the value that you would get if you rented out just the land.