Great essay. I bet you’d see the same trends here in Canada too, where we have a much worse housing bubble and unaffordability problem. Here it’s also exacerbated by enormous immigration rates (about 5x the US even accounting for US illegal immigration) but NIMBYism on multifamily is a huge part of it too.
You say it’d be difficult to quantify the financial impact of municipal restrictions on constructions — it may be difficult but it’d be enormously valuable academic work. One of our top political journalists in the country here (Paul Wells) published an article three days ago about how the current federal opposition party’s housing-incentives-for-cities plan won’t do anything because the payments are too small and cities don’t have much of a role in housing approvals anyway, that what’s mostly stopping new housing is the cost, not the permits.
Which of course is … mistaken. Piling on development charges and delays _is_ cost, as you point out here. Quantifying that link would be enormously valuable!
Anyway, as a card-carrying Georgist (as in Henry George) YIMBY, I conclude by saying: you almost get there in this essay, come join us on team Land Tax, the water is warm!
For any1 interested, here are my exceptionally accurate CPI estimates: https://open.substack.com/pub/arkominaresearch/p/jul-2024-cpi-estimate?r=1r1n6n&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Great essay. I bet you’d see the same trends here in Canada too, where we have a much worse housing bubble and unaffordability problem. Here it’s also exacerbated by enormous immigration rates (about 5x the US even accounting for US illegal immigration) but NIMBYism on multifamily is a huge part of it too.
You say it’d be difficult to quantify the financial impact of municipal restrictions on constructions — it may be difficult but it’d be enormously valuable academic work. One of our top political journalists in the country here (Paul Wells) published an article three days ago about how the current federal opposition party’s housing-incentives-for-cities plan won’t do anything because the payments are too small and cities don’t have much of a role in housing approvals anyway, that what’s mostly stopping new housing is the cost, not the permits.
https://open.substack.com/pub/paulwells/p/small-sticks
Which of course is … mistaken. Piling on development charges and delays _is_ cost, as you point out here. Quantifying that link would be enormously valuable!
Anyway, as a card-carrying Georgist (as in Henry George) YIMBY, I conclude by saying: you almost get there in this essay, come join us on team Land Tax, the water is warm!
Thanks!
As far as I can tell, Canada would benefit from higher property tax rates. In today’s conditions, property taxes are pretty Georgist, as is.
Describing this in terms of endowments and transfers makes a lot of sense. Great food for thought, thank you for sharing.
Btw, Singapore leaves rent out of core-inflation.
My impression is that Singapore has gotten a lot of things right on housing for decades--is that your experience?