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Glen Brown's avatar

Great job Andrea! The existing incentives are all wrong. My 30-year-old trainer making around 90 K a year can't afford to buy a house. He lives with his parents. Yet he has the same mentality that my rich peers have when they sell their houses for 1.7 million- houses that they paid less than $90, 000 for in the late 80s early 90s. Both generations like the idea of owning a house as the best investment out there. House values should rise to keep up with inflation but not be a better investment than the stock market!! It's a shame we do not have leadership that says that this is all wrong. It's as bigger shame that young people like my trainer wanting to buy a house but can't get behind Generation Squeeze. Far from being an engaged citizen protesting for fairness, he like so many are passive consumers looking to get in on housing as the best investment out there. "The government should not interfere-that's socialism" says my trainer. No it's not, I say, its merely a matter of changing the incentivization...the rules to the game and seeing housing as an essential -basic need. That "merely" requires engaged citizens to have the will to actively speak out to make politicians take notice and address it.

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Valerie's avatar

"We don’t want to burden existing taxpayers for paying for infrastructure [...] to bring new people into the country," is honestly such an interesting comment on the part of the mayor. Population growth and the extra one-time infrastructure expansion costs that come with it genuinely are a little different than just factoring in infrastructure replacement appropriately (which as Terry notes municipalities also often don't collect enough revenue from existing taxpayers for in the first place). This link is about Australia but is also extremely relevant to Canada in terms of some of the ignored costs (some private, some public) of expanding capital stock. https://www.smh.com.au/opinion/the-huge-hidden-cost-of-population-growth-20160219-gmyddb.html

The very frustrating part is boomers themselves (who are not the only existing homeowners but I will pick on them anyway) were such enormous beneficiaries of public investment to accommodate them despite the claims they have paid their share. And, they will benefit from population growth both through increased housing demand and the economic growth to pay for services and benefits as they age. But there is a real difficulty for municipalities both because they don't have all the revenue sources other levels of government do (e.g., have more limited ability to benefit financially from growth) and also population growth might have diffuse benefits (say for the income tax base) but local infrastructure costs concentrated in municipalities that are growing faster than others. So definitely a tax shift makes sense, but I also think that it makes sense to acknowledge that the costs of growth are real costs (not just overspending) even while acknowledging new residents are not the only beneficiaries of growth. I saw "the beneficiaries of growth should pay for growth" once which is much less pithy than the original but also probably right.

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