Good. Housing should not be treated as an investment.
If you have the means buy a cheap SFH lot in Portland while you can.
If we really actually want to make housing not an investment then we need to empower our government to fund the development of publicly owned housing for everyone.
If you occupy a publicly funded housing unit, I can't - it's not a public good. And there are always developers and builders willing to stump up cash to build new housing.
Seems to me that there's a market failure here where the market cannot create affordable housing. It's not regulations alone that have made it so that developers can't make affordable housing. The construction costs are simply too high for a for-profit developer to be able to do it.
Housing these homeless people, thus reducing health costs and emergency worker costs is of course a public good. I would like to be able to use that park again.
But aside from all that I don't agree with your narrow thesis of what public dollars should be spent on anyway. If I'm a renter I'd rather have my monthly rent go to back into the public purse to be re-invested in more public works than to some S&P500 listed REIT to pad some wealthy investors' dividends. If housing development is such a good investment then of course the public should get in on it.
I don't know about Vancouver's specific problems. Why are the construction costs so high there?
In the Bay Area regulations, and tax laws that incentivize holding on to old housing, are largely to blame for the lack of housing supply.
> If I'm a renter I'd rather have my monthly rent go to back into the public purse to be re-invested in more public works than to some S&P500 listed REIT to pad some wealthy investors' dividends
Who in turn pay taxes on those dividends. Maybe increase those taxes, and taxes on the property itself.
> If housing development is such a good investment then of course the public should get in on it.
Lots of businesses are a good investment. That's not a good reason for the public sector to get into it.
There's no real reason why construction costs are high. As the amount of construction increases, the available labour pool decreases, and labour costs accordingly increase. There is always lots of construction going on. More highly trained trades would help, but easier said than done.
If anything it's more that construction costs are artificially low in the USA since there is a class of illegal immigrant labour which can be exploited and paid low. That does not exist in Canada.
It might be worth digging into why Vancouver has so much housing demand. It's a stunningly beautiful city, but the local economy doesn't seem to correlate with the price of real estate. There are no FAANGs paying senior engineers $400k, so why are people spending so much money?
So as I said it actually becomes more difficult to build the more you build.
Vis a vis labour demand there's also competition from non-residential construction projects (eg. Amazon building a big warehouse somewhere, dam construction, bridge construction etc).
As an investment a house is a place including neighborhood to live for a long time. You should be friends with the neighbors. When you get old it is a cheap place to live (you have it paid for). It is a place to save your memories (little Bobby tables bit the rail there...). A place to make what fits your life.
It isn't a savings account to get cash out of when you want some.