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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

What’s the solution? When a story about suburbs appears, the ideas promoted by the Strong Towns group are mentioned. Is there a similar set of ideas for fixing cities?

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Land value tax. Makes speculation infeasible and low-density development uneconomical and eliminates a lot of the incentives that drive restrictive zoning.

Also allows the public to capture the financial upside of public infrastructure projects (e.g. building a billion dollar subway today produces a huge amount of wealth for the landowners who happen to be near that project, in the form of increased rent — that can and should be captured by the public who paid for it).

A simple starting point is changing local zoning that implicitly or explicitly requires single-family homes in most places. Even just allowing rowhouses would make for significantly higher density in some places.

There’s a place for that but one of the reasons many places are desirable is precisely because there isn’t so much density and that everyone owns their properties. It stops becoming nice when you change that too much.

And there’s infrastructure. Places that weren’t designed for the density don’t have the water/sewer, electrical, etc capacity. Traffic too - now there’s more traffic making a place not as nice. So that needs to be sorted out too.

The answer is to sort all those problems out and let the space evolve, rather than turn whatever crop of assholes who coincidentally happened to buy houses there 30 years ago into a permanent landed gentry

Who pays for those problems to be resolved? It’s literally what property taxes fund. Why would property owners pay to solve a problem they don’t have to make their town a worse place to live?

Make the Canadian populace less timid and less risk averse.

Maybe those traits you give the Canadian populace are there for some reasons you have yet to learn about.

Anyway, no population in this world have ever changed any of their traits because some random douche said they should, quite the contrary.

That would help the startup scene (at least in the form of less risky VC), but real estate I'm not sure. Canadians are mortgaged up to their eyeballs. That 5y due date is coming up for a many folks with 2-3% mortgages, and will add a $1000-1500/mo drain to their budgets. Canada is not a place where you can easily capture a 12k/y raise.

I wish Canadians would chime in on what exactly they do when that scenario comes. Is there going to be a flood of people selling homes that have become too expensive to make mortgage payments on? Or will they just eat shit because they have no choice?

We will just eat shit because we have no choice.

Same reason our telecom prices are higher than almost anywhere in the world. Canada isn't as great a county as a lot of people think.

Banks have the ability to do "negative amortization" on mortgages in canada. Which means instead of raising the monthly payment on a mortgage the owner is essentially just paying off the raised interest, and in some cases aren't even paying off the interest so the total owed is actually increasing.

Idk seems like a scary scenario.

Wow so you could just be paying a bank forever.

Let it burn I guess. If people move out and the city suffers, property values and rents will come back down.

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