Housing prices have been rising very rapidly over the last couple of years:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-03/million-d...
You can still find tons of 1+1 units in the city for under $2000/month which is the same as it was 3-4 years ago.
I see a lot of people complaining about high prices in the most prime of areas. So what do you think would be a good solution to the problem? Everyone wants to live in area X but obviously they can't all fit there. How do you let them all live there and keep it affordable?
The centralization of most jobs to a handful of urban centers is the largest and most powerful force driving this spike in prices. Jobs are flying out of rural areas and less populated cities. It increases prices, making it very difficult for a newcomer to buy in the area, let alone rent. It creates pockets of areas that reap the benefits of globalization, creating a very stark contrast between areas that benefit from it and that don't. And all this is just so that the corporation benefits from the concentrated, highly technical labor pool.
The foreign investor cap should be easy to implement, but because our government is broken, it won't happen. There are lots of ways this could be addressed, with property taxes of unleased housing, taxing of a third home or beyond, and probably lots of other things smarter people could think of.
The artificially low housing inventory is difficult because that stems from local government more than anything else. Fixing this might take state laws to be passed since locals will have an incentive to not have new properties made.
Again, the centralization of the remaining jobs is the biggest factor in my opinion. It really needs to be addressed since it negatively hurts our society, but I don't know any other ideas on how to fix it without increasing demand for lower class labor via protectionism. That would drive companies to look to rural America for cheap labor vs Mexico or China which would weaken the requirement to live in an urban center, but obviously that would be very costly to our economy. If you have any other ideas on how to fix it, I'd definitely read it.
So how do you make the decentralization of jobs more appealing to employers? Say I own a tech business how do you convince me to move my company to Barrie for example? I now have the difficulty of finding local talent or convincing talent to relocate to me or deal with a very long commute. Where is the benefit for me? Network effects are real.
Besides this Toronto already essentially has a number of business cores that are distributed. You have the financial district, Young/Eg, Sauga, Markham, Vaughn and those are just the biggest ones.
None of that reduces demand for the core though because it is the most appealing place to live for most young people.
That's the tough thing. The only solution I can think of, protectionism, will be very rough on employers. The lower and middle classes would thrive, but corporations that previously had massive profit margins would see those almost disappear, especially after unions form again.
Obviously this would be very expensive, but I really fear that if we don't do something, our country will end up politically and socially unstable. A country with millions of minimum wage workers and a handful of rich-only cities is bound to have troubles.
As far as Toronto's housing inventory goes, I don't know enough about Toronto to comment.
Like what concrete actions would you take?
That's the hope anyway. If you see any blaring flaws beyond the fact that multinational corporations would suffer, please let me know.
Besides with the increase in automation the types of workers factories will need in the future will be high tech as well.
Thank you for this post. This is exactly the kind of reply I was hoping to get.
Thank you as well. It was a good one for thinking about stuff even if we disagree on the basic idea. :)
http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-...