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Comment by ricardobayes | Hacker News Reader

There are 2k+ houses for sale in Nova Scotia under 200k right now. Canada is more than the GTA area. Actually as I know the same thing happened in the US at the turn of the century. People arriving to the country finding prices high in New York ventured further, settling in Ohio, for example. Ohio has the highest hungarian population out of all states, due to this. People always adapt, and overcome. It's really not up to the "state" to solve middle-class housing issues. It's not the soviet union.

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>It's really not up to the "state" to solve middle-class housing issues. It's not the soviet union.

Yes, it is. The state caused the housing issues because of their Soviet-like zoning laws.

In defense of the Soviet Union, these zoning laws don't come from there. They come from the US, as an effort in the early 20th century to keep undesirable people (jews, blacks, chinese, etc.) away from precious whites.

True, and I didn't mean to imply that Euclidean zoning was invented by the Soviets. Rather, the Soviets, having a planned economy and authoritarian system, planned urban development: they decided how housing would be built, where, and what type. Their choice gave them big apartment blocks, but it was because the State mandated this, not because any developers or private landowners wanted them.

In the US and Canada, it's very similar, though a bit different: the State has decided that only ridiculously inefficient single-family housing is allowed to be built.

Both of them are situations where the State has forced limits on what kind of housing is allowed, but the type of housing is obviously diametrically different. A better system is one where the State sets very few limits on housing, only very practical ones (no 50-story towers next to the airport, for instance), and lets landowners do what they want with their land, within reason.

That is an epic level of reach.

The Soviet union mandated single family housing?

The Soviet Union mandated certain types of housing, so yes, the situation is nearly the same.

The Soviet Union preferred to build a certain type of housing: Cheap and high density. The situation is almost the exact opposite.

No, it's not the exact opposite at all. You're being intentionally obtuse or intellectually dishonest. My point is clear.

Thr job market, and for that matter the internet quality, in most of those Nova Scotian locations is not going to support anything except the kindest full-remote position. Those houses are for sale at that rate because they were too bad to get swept up in the wave of transplants the province has been seeing basically since the pandemic started.

My family purchased a home in the province in 2007 for less than 100k. We had to repair the foundation and roof of our house multiple times, and the previous owner used seven layers of wallpaper instead of installing insulation. Cheap homes have their own problems, and two pensions was the only reason we could afford to fix it.

I'm in New Brunswick, replying to you over gigabit fibre, working full remote and getting paid in USD, so not really sure what you're on about.

Plus there's Starlink if you want to live way out in the sticks.

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