Blind spot - I thought there wouldn't be much of a homeless/housing problem here because this is a pretty transient town (oilfield) and most people would just leave. This was confirmed when oil collapsed in 2015, 3 families I knew just sold up and moved away. I wanted to leave on retirement but our home devalued by 25%, which it has barely recovered 10 years later, while the places we wanted to move skyrocketed in value. Not homeless but immobile.
Now that I've been retired for awhile I've started volunteering. Did you know volunteering is a great way to meet likeminded people AND find out about issues you have strong feelings about? Like affordable housing and homelessness. My eyes were opened - people do stay here or are from around here! We have at least 250 unhoused people (pop~ 30,000). Like everywhere, 5% prefer to be unhoused but for the rest - there's nowhere for them to go other than the streets. There are months to years of waiting lists for affordable housing. People come out of rehab with nowhere to go and - surprise - relapse more easily. NIMBY is strong along with the rumours that homeless are being bussed in to take advantage of ... what, volunteer served free meals? I'm still in the information collecting phase where I participate in fundraiser but I do want to commit time as well.
Naturally, with a federal election coming up, I'm interested in proposed solutions by the 2 major parties.
One wants to remove GST on housing costing under $1 million. The other wants to build A LOT (500,000) of new low cost housing to flood the started home market enough to stabilize housing prices rather than push them down and open up existing rental units.
The latter seems like a reasonable solution. I was working in construction surveying in the early 80s when the Feds had their last housing push. The crew I was on surveyed 500 homes in 3 months and there were several apartments and condos built at the same time in one small city so the goal seems doable if the capital is opened up. The Feds have released crown land, in cities, for housing so there's somewhere to build. They are talking modular housing which is quite common where I am. A wide range of houses are built on a common site then moved to their final location. When we were looking to move, one of our "problems" was we couldn't agree on how much we were willing to downgrade to enter a new housing market - it turned out to be very little and I'm sure we're not outliers.
I would like to see some caveats like a 99 year land lease or coop purchase structure and purchasers cannot own or co-own any other property in Canada and limited ownership in their home country. Futureproofing utility costs with good insulation, 3 pane windows, heat pumps and solar panels on all units. If more rentals are built, they should be rent controlled. If I can think of all these things, I would expect policy makers serious about increasing affordable housing stock to do even better.
The key is flooding the market with low cost housing with investors prohibited. What do you think?
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