"Affordability crisis" in urban housing

It's all part of the plan.

The urban left has long had its crosshairs on home ownership as a concept. People living in single-family homes who are free to move around by car are the most difficult to perform social experimentation on. And the biggest problem the urban left has had with social housing is that not enough of us are living in it. They want to minimize personal space, personal possessions and personal mobility, so as (they believe) to make the population more communal in orientation and more vulnerable to social engineering.

So they use "anti-sprawl" policies, portrayed as being mechanisms for combatting global warming, to choke off housing supply and justify aggressive infill and intensification. They turn affordable working class neighbourhoods in the urban core into gentrified yuppie havens, and encourage the construction of massive condo towers targeted to offshore speculators. All of this makes home ownership increasingly untenable, creating a vacuum into which state-owned (well, city-state owned) housing will be inserted.

And it is in this way that the urbanist left will bring about the modern equivalent of the old Soviet housing model, using manipulation of markets to achieve what has previously required a totalitarian state.

I wonder what Jane Jacobs would have actually thought of the authoritarian planning cult that has arisen in her name.

Urban and suburban suck. Urban involves living in a hamster cage and suburbs are made up of cookie cutter houses jammed together. I'd rather be rural than either of those.

The last eight years of these "sustainability" pricks running city hall has pretty much ruined living in Calgary, both in the suburbs and the core. The sooner I can get out of here to some tiny place on the prairie or coastline the better. There's a lot more to living than putting up for an entire lifetime with the nonsense that goes on in cities.

This is the future of housing, an affordable minimalist lifestyle.

Grab one while you can because there's probably enough schemers in the works to make those things unaffordable to anyone who isn't rich just like they've already done with detached houses and the better kind of condos that aren't built like cookie-cutter shit. This fuckin' world sometimes..... :evil:

In Leduc an affordable condo complex was built with prices ranging between $180.000 - $215.000 with two units on one lot. A 2 bedroom 1 bathroom basement suite on the bottom and a regular 2-3 bedroom, 1-2 bathroom unit on the top.

That Penhorwood condo disaster up in McMurray said it all about how little the governments care about home buyers, in Alberta anyway. Demolish the place after it's condemned overnight in case of a full building collapse, and the poor suckers that got rooked into paying $300K for a one-bedroom unit still have to make their mortgage payments on it. Too few Mike Holmes' out there and far too many of the kind of thieving bastards and fly-by-night incompetents that the Mike Holmes of the world have to go cleaning up after.

Quebec's new home Guarantee Plan

Upon the purchase of a new house or a co-ownership that is covered, the Guarantee Plan for new Residential Buildings automatically applies. This plan guarantees the fulfillment of certain legal obligations of your contractor. Its conditions are established in the Regulation respecting the guarantee plan for new residential buildings. Also note that the plan is mandatory: it is not possible to waive it, even if a document is signed in this sense.

https://www.rbq.gouv.qc.ca/en/guarantee ... -plan.html