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phillipmeintzer.bsky.social
Settler on Treaty 7 Land Trying to build a future that's worth living. 🌿 https://phillipmeintzer.medium.com/
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Right back at you. It's amazing what polite discourse can accomplish! 🫡
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IMO nothing gets "fixed" under capitalism, we just come up with temporary band-aids. In the near term, you're right about adding supply, but we need non-market solutions too, like rent caps, banning real estate investment trusts, adding public/social housing, increase protection for tenants etc.
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I'm not talking about remotes areas. Estimates show that Vancouver alone has more than 20K empty units within city limits, yet people remain unhoused. The problem isn't a lack of supply, but the fact that we treat housing as a commodity in the first place. It's about use-value vs. exchange value.
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That's not always the case. For example, there are more vacant housing units across Canada than there are homeless/unhoused Canadians. That's because people with more wealth are able to hoard existing housing stock.
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I'm less concerned about making house prices fall than I am about making housing accessible to all. Availability is part of the solution for sure. But there are examples where publicly owned or social housing helps give people a non-market option. Home ownership itself is part of the problem.