What we need isn't thousands of detached single family homes, but hundreds of low and mid-rise buildings that each house dozens. There is no system in the world that'll make single detached homes viable for the entire population. Not to mention that suburbs cost the government more in taxes than they take in, whereas high density neighbourhoods with mixed use buildings are second in economic revenue to downtown cores while providing massive amounts of housing.

I work at a place that spends over a million a year in rent because it uses space from the mixed use first floor of a 30 floor condo. There's dozens of stores like mine that do the same in the area. Imagine how much property tax the city gets from this? How much money must pass through each and every store to be able to afford such rent? And how pretty much every store in the area is doing pretty well despite stores just a few blocks away are crumbling and dying off because there's almost no housing in the area unlike this neighbourhood.

People wanting detached homes is fine. But what about us that don't care about such things? Why don't we get an option for a small but low cost home?

Theoretically carbon capture can work, but just like you said, it takes additional energy to capture carbon, and that amount is more than what it takes to produce the needed electricity if you're using a carbon based energy source.

That said, if you go for something like nuclear, than you do get a clean source of energy that can be used to capture existing carbon. But we're already at the point where our energy infrastructure is inadequate for just electrifying what we currently have, and in a few years the Pickering plant is going to have to shut down due to being so old (though apparently the government is trying to delay it as there's no plans for building a new plant of any sort to replace the Pickering plant).

So even in the best case scenario, it'll be more than a decade before any sort of large scale carbon capture scheme can even be started, as that's how long it'll take to build enough new plants to cover existing demand, let alone accounting for future demand.

$300k for a house in downtown Tokyo on average. If they can do it simply by having good zoning laws, anybody can do it with a bit of real work.

Not to mention that Finland is known for having zero homeless thanks to public housing as well. Having a safe place to live is the first step to fixing up your life, as if you're always worried that your possessions can be taken the moment you look away or go do something, there's no way you can take the time to find a job.

Of course $7500 isn't nearly enough for pulling someone out of homelessness.

To be honest, I think it's far more efficient to give the homeless proper homes with locking doors and a respectable level of privacy as well as access to clean water and some sort of minimum level of food (like an infinite supply of rolled oats). It doesn't need to be a big home, even something little better than a capsule hotel room would be enough.

The homeless stay homeless because nobody can pull themselves together if they're constantly stressed trying to figure out how to even reach the next day. It's even worse when you don't have access to a shower to clean yourself up to be presentable enough to get through an interview at even the most unwanted jobs.

It's the single biggest reason why mental illness is so rampant amongst the homeless and few ever repair their lives.

The quality of potatoes feel like it's dropped quite a bit this year.

On top of that, corn's been pretty expensive lately too due to the US redirecting so much of it into biofuel.

On the other hand, mushrooms, vegetables, and fruits have been reasonably cheap, though a lot of the fruit haven't tasted very good.

Honestly, the government doesn't even need to subsidize public housing to fix the housing crisis, just create non-market housing. There's plenty of charity organizations that are able to build homes that are less than half of market prices. Hell, apparently even the YMCA does this.

We don't need to increase housing for those who are unable to work, just those who don't make 6+ figures. If charity organizations can fund these housing projects entirely off the back of bank loans that the renters are able to pay off themselves in addition to maintenance costs of their buildings, I don't see how the government can't do the same by using the subsidization funds.

We don't need a bunch of $200 apartments, we need lots of $1000-2000 apartments.

Seriously? Wasn't this Ford's idea? Wasn't this all Ford's decision? Wasn't this Ford who did everything? Isn't this about Ford doing political favours for his buddies in real-estate?

Sounds seriously like scapegoating.

A lot of people I know have noticed this. Not just in typical groceries, but in a lot of food products.

Usually they don't know what's going on, but I've heard plenty of complaints about the taste of things they buy. Even weird ones like one beer tasting like a cheaper brand.

I think it's not just the Liberals, but the Conservatives that are at fault. Neither parties have done much of anything when they were in power to help this and other significant stagnation issues over the least two or three decades.

At least for Toronto, the federal and provincial governments had to be punched in the sides to make public transit investments after being forgotten for most of a half century, and even then the new constructions are still quite inadequate and will require at least two more decades of consistent work before things reach a decent level, presuming that other areas don't get worse in the meantime.

It's unfair to just blame the Liberals. All our leading parties suck because they see themselves as invulnerable. They've gotten used to being an oligarchy, and the NPD is no longer scaring them, but instead have become a part of the oligarchy. Layton was great, Mulcair was okay, but Singh is just a puppy following Trudeau. Without someone new (it can be the Rhinoceros Party for all I care) getting a decent number of seats to become a legitimate threat to the oligarchy and make them actually move their asses for real and positive change, I think we're stuck with nothing but corrupt personal interests.

As a Torontonian, I support this.

As things stand, you can walk faster than drive the Gardiner during rush hour, and the thing's crumbling anyways. On top of that, most of it is completely surrounded by sky scrapers anyways, so it's perfect for high rises. The Greenbelt is only going to provide 50k homes, out in the middle of nowhere that also requires roads, electricity, water, sewage, and probably more infrastructure. Aparently that alone will take 25 years to install, not to mention the millions of dollars. All that is pretty much already there around the Gardiner.

And as for the number of housing, 50 floors with 30 units per floor means that you need 33 buildings to get the same number of homes, and each building can be put up in under a decade, if not five years. Not only is it far faster, but cheaper and easier. And the tax revenue would be massively higher. In fact, I imagine that greenbelt homes wouldn't even have a positive tax revenue due to all the infrastructure needed to be built first.

Greenbelt housing not only is low quality, expensive, and too far away to actually be able to reasonably commute to any sort of job, but actively harms the environment, risks doing lots of damage to nearby cities in the far more recently frequent major weather events, and can be done easier, fast, and cheaper by simple alternatives like the one proposed here.

Greenbelt housing is political corruption at its finest.

Yes, of course. The solution to the housing crisis is to just make more land in the middle of nowhere available for development so that the public has to pay for more extensions of electrical, water, sewage systems, and road networks for new land that produce absolutely nothing and make shitty neighbourhoods.

It's no surprise that the Greenbelt was influenced by the already rich. It was probably their idea as an easy way to get even richer, rather than actually make tangible improvements to the housing crisis, and instead redirect tax dollars into inflating their wallets.

This article goes in circles and repeatedly contradicts itself. Basically saying that it's not a failure of the markets, but one of exploitation.

Except, it is exactly a failure of the markets. It states that the exploitation comes from the ability of landowners to charge whatever they want, but they don't address the fact that they can only charge high prices because of the lack of those who are willing to charge low prices. And nobody should be expected to charge a low price if they can charge a high price and still sell/rent easily.

It's an issue of people treating homes as an investment, and that can only happen because the price of homes skyrocket far faster than inflation and wages. And that happens because of a lack of supply.

Sure, treating homes as an investment is fine for apartments and condos, but if the land itself ends up being worth a million for a single lot, there's no way anybody can afford it without both a high wage and putting themselves into debt for a half century. And if that happen, the entire spectrum of housing goes up in price as there is a lack of competition to lower prices.

The only real way to lower home prices (from houses to apartments and condos) is to significantly increase competition, and that can only happen if supply actually comes close to demand, not falling so far behind that people share a single place, even to the point that they bribe the local authorities to look the other way that they have too many people in a single unit.