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Comment by likenesstheft | Hacker News Reader

How come you construe more housing as being a government responsibility? That is strange, especially when your government is causing these issues in the first place. Housing supply normally gets built to satisfy demand. If the regulations are too stifling for construction to be profitable for builders and workers, you won’t have houses. Period. Magic funny money only works for so long before the house of cards comes crashing down.

Interesting that some in Canada respond to the problem by expecting the government to do something all the time. They serve the poison and you want their antidote too? Canada’s leaders are doing a pretty great job of setting the stage for a housing takeover so they can conveniently come up with a solution that makes them more central and more powerful.

Do they overly regulate construction and make it hard to do business?

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Can't speak to Canada's situation specifically, For your comment on housing as a government responsibility. You're correct that housing, for the most part, is privately financed and constructed.

However the limiting agent in this environment is governments willingness to zone and permit new housing construction. The aggregate supply of housing is mostly a function of government policy. One issue is that while it may be popular at federal level to boost housing supply, housing policy is mostly enacted through local government.

> However the limiting agent in this environment is governments willingness to zone and permit new housing construction.

Yep. So they cause the problem in order to be the ones who conveniently have the solution. One that has the added benefit of keeping them more and more central and overreaching over your lives.

Though the government has lots of influence on this.

For example in most South East Asian countries it's impossible to buy land as a foreigner (basically a house).

Just this one rule alone would help the situation in Canada as there is alot of foreign ownership with as I understand it no restrictions.

Regulations favoring Canadian citizens wouldn't violate the spirit of the private market, and would certainly help Canada.

In addition to the point made by xienze that if its government policy causing increased need for housing it makes sense for them to also help with that issue, I'd add a more general point:

Many people (including me) believe it should be government's responsibility to make sure its citizens can have a reasonable standard of living, including housing, water, food, etc.

Whether that's by directly providing it (building and managing social housing, state-run energy provider, etc.) or by managing policies that enable private companies to offer stuff to a satisfactory level, both can work and it's debatable (and the debate varies depending on the specific areas).

But if private companies aren't doing as much as is needed then it should be the government's job to fix that, regardless of whether the fix is providing services directly to the people who need it or providing support to private companies so that they can do so.

> it makes sense for them to also help with that issue

They can help.. by getting the hell out of the way. Let people build and the problem will solve itself.

When the government “helps” we end up with situations like college tuition prices 10x-ing.

If "getting the hell out of the way" means removing red tape that was previously a case of the government causing there to be less housing then, then yes that's one way they can help.

If they're already at an ideal low of red tape (keeping in mind we probably don't want to get rid of laws that require things like making sure buildings are safe both for the occupants and for the builders), and aren't restricting the market in any foolish ways, but the market still isn't providing enough housing, then I disagree that the government shouldn't actively try to improve the situation.

Citing an example of a government apparently doing a bad job doesn't mean that every job a government does has to be bad. Otherwise seeing a private building company doing a bad job leads to also thinking private businesses shouldn't be allowed either.

At the end of the day both companies and governments are run by humans, who are capable of doing great things and terrible things, and of doing them both well and badly.

The response should be to argue about what a good government initiative could consist of, not to say that if there's a problem they should just throw their hands up in the air and pray that it improves by itself.

> How come you construe more housing as being a government responsibility?

Well, official government policy is creating immense housing demand and adversely affecting citizens. If you want population growth via infinity immigration, you as the government need to do something about creating additional housing, simple as that.

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