fresh

joined 1 year ago
[–] fresh 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I don’t know about that. Twitter seemed like a pretty stable platform before the acquisition, not a platform on the decline. Lots of problems, but now it’s a whole different level.

[–] fresh 3 points 1 year ago

Landlords are already charging as much as they can possibly extract out of renters. They can’t charge more because their expenses go up; they charge what the market can bear.

[–] fresh 5 points 1 year ago

To be fair, the word “liberal” has two meanings. In the US and Canada, the word commonly means “vaguely leftish”, as when people say “the liberal media” or “college makes you liberal”. I think the person you’re responding to is using it this way. This usage is slowly phasing out I think.

The definition you cited is another totally correct usage of the term. It is close to the idea of libertarianism, and is associated with conservative economic policies. So it has the opposite meaning.

[–] fresh 1 points 1 year ago

It’s true that inflation presents an arbitrage opportunity, but I seriously doubt the average consumer is thinking with anything close to that level of sophistication. I mean, most consumers leave debt sitting on their credit card instead of paying it off when they can.

[–] fresh 14 points 1 year ago

How about publicly owned non-market housing, like they have in Scandinavian countries and Japan, etc.?

[–] fresh 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Could you expand on that? I would’ve naively thought all jobs are subject to federal labour law.

[–] fresh 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Another person already noted that you are not required to run the air conditioner, just have the option to.

Air conditioners are also not a major factor in housing affordability. Very affordable places in the US and around the world have AC. This is more akin to having proper heating in the winter so that you can function. Just like winter heat regulation, without this sort of cooling regulation, people will suffer and some will even die. It’s not like renters have a lot of power in this market to shop for alternative housing.

[–] fresh 19 points 1 year ago

I’m really strongly against saying “both sides” or “all sides”. It’s not only factually incorrect but it breeds apathy. If you want things to change, you need to notice when the parties are trying to appeal to you.

In the last election, the NDP were the only ones to seriously bring up housing affordability. Singh said he thinks even current homeowners understand that people are suffering and are OK with lower prices, and the debate moderator grilled him for it. She “called him out” for supposedly hurting people who are relying on their home value as their retirement. I was shocked.

Meanwhile, the Liberals and Conservatives explicitly supported high home prices and “free market” solutions (except don’t mention zoning!). That makes sense given that they (especially the conservatives) get their voteshare from older homeowners.

[–] fresh 30 points 1 year ago

Blame the laws and three decades of Borkian precedent.

[–] fresh 4 points 1 year ago

If you think all the tenets of good urbanism from the academic and progressive community are just “buzzwords of the developer community”, then you are in the grips of an ideological NIMBYism.

Low supply is an empirical fact. Vacancies are low throughout the country, and we have less housing per capita than almost all of our peers. Views like yours do not take the lack of housing seriously enough.

[–] fresh 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It’s because public housing in the US is a ghetto to segregate poor people and undesirables. On the Scandinavian model, non-market and market housing are mixed together. Rich and poor live next to each other. These are highly successful.

Are you a NIMBY? Our zoning is horrible. It is mathematically impossible to reach our climate goals if we maintain the terrible zoning laws that we have.

You also totally misunderstand why we build tall expensive towers. It’s BECAUSE we don’t allow middle density in SFH areas. Please read about the “missing middle”. Both tall towers and SFH are symptoms of the same disease.

You might want to actually read about the last housing bubble. When the bubble finally burst, people couldn’t sell their homes and vacancies were high. That’s also why the government stopped building non-market housing. They thought we had built too much. 

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