The parallel housing journeys Mexico and Canada have been on since the 1990s are now diverging. Claudia Sheinbaum’s government has shown that another path is possible. Canada’s misguided strategies, built around supporting financial and real estate industries, are not our only option. We can draw inspiration from Mexico’s decision to actively restructure its housing system.
  • BlameThePeacock@lemmy.caEnglish
    122·
    4 days ago

    Are they actually solving their housing crisis though?

    This plan was announced in 2024, so far they have delivered only about 30k units. They have another 270k under construction, and supposedly contracts for 600k more. That puts them on pace to… not hit their targets at all.

    Then Mexico has 133 million residents, building 1.2 million government homes over 6 years is ambitious, but the market was already building 140k new units a year anyways, which would be 800k units over 6 years.

    Even with years of prep, you can’t just double the amount of units produced per year. The number of skilled workers needed can’t be trained that fast.

    At the end of the day, even if they succeed, they will have spent an absolutely egregious amount of money and built about 2% more total homes in the country. Does anyone think that’s realistically going to drive prices down significantly?

    Don’t get me wrong, building houses is important, but the government should not be building them with tax money and then using a lottery to give them away to a few lucky low-income people.

      • BlameThePeacock@lemmy.caEnglish
        11·
        3 days ago

        Would you rather live in a world where 1 in 2 low-income people have adequate housing provided by the government at an affordable rate, and the rest wait on a list for someone to die just barely scraping by. Or a world where the housing is affordable for everyone?

        Housing some people is great, but housing everyone is preferrable and achievable.

        We do not lack houses in Canada (or pretty much anywhere that housing prices are the issue), it’s the distribution that’s the problem. There are more bedrooms in Canada than people, I did the math.

        Land Value Taxes would solve the distribution issue, remove speculation, and reduce overall prices for everyone who isn’t living in a massive single detached house with too few people to be considered reasonable (Cough My parents Cough)

        • naught101@lemmy.world
          3·
          3 days ago

          We’re not talking about 1 or 2 though, are we? We’re talking about hundreds of thousands (and also presumably most of the private development will continue).

          • BlameThePeacock@lemmy.caEnglish
            11·
            2 days ago

            I said 1 in 2 (50%) not 1 or 2.

            Flip a coin,

            • Heads you get an affordable unit
            • Tails you get to live with 5 family members in a 1 bedroom apartment while watching the lucky 50% get nice units

            Or… we could just reduce the price for everyone by simply changing how we tax land.