Submitting for this truly astonishing quote:
" Landlords in Quebec, however, feel they need to catch up to other provinces as Quebec is still one of the most affordable places to live in the country, said Jean-Olivier Reed, a spokesperson for the Quebec Landlord Association (APQ)."
Your comparison has no relevance. What does total available landmass have to do with anything related to the policies in question?
Sorry but any analysis of real estate economics that does not take into account the scarcity or abundance of …land is just pointless.
Singapore does not have a Brossard to connect with a REM to build a new urban core. Even more, it does not have multiple options for different places to develop and densify, like Montreal has, just based on the current plans for the REM, and without taking into account future transit projects or the idea of, oh I don’t know, creating an Ottawa-Montreal megacity with HSR.
Again, what does having abundance of land have to do with policies like Walkability, Speculation, or Social housing?
Explain why they don’t because to me it’s obvious.
You don’t improve walkability by spreading things out, you actually want the exact opposite.
Speculation is harder if there’s more of something available.
Social housing… I fail to see any connection to the amount of land in a country.
Yes but we are not talking generally about the correlations, we are specifically talking about Singapore which you brought up as a place where many policies are implemented and there is still a housing crisis. My response is that the Singapore scenario suffers from extreme scarcity of land which would explain a lot of Singapore’s problems and is therefore not a good counterargument for the Canadian context which is very very difficult.
Their population hasn’t increased at all in the last 6 years, so how does a lack of land explain the cost increases of housing they’re seeing over that period?
You misrepresent what I’m saying. I’m saying that the constraints in one vs the other country are so vastly different that you can’t draw direct conclusions.
I have no idea how the Singaporean society and economy functions. Maybe they need more space for factories and vertical farms. Maybe the previous situation was too crowded to begin with and they are taking up more space. I don’t know. Do you?
And regardless, it’s up to you to explain why the real estate market of a tiny island city state is a useful paradigm from which to learn policy lessons in the second largest country on earth. It’s a counter-intuitive position, so the maxim that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence applies.
You’re using the “no true scotsman” defence right now. There is no other country comparable to the size of Canada in the world other than Russia, so does that mean we can only look at them for policy?
“I don’t know about this place so I’m not going to be able to even consider it’s policies” - That’s an ignorance argument.
Where’s your proof that any of the policies you’re suggesting will work? Do you have a single example of them working elsewhere?