The federal government says it will build more than 2,800 homes on its properties, putting it on track to build nearly 30,000 homes on public lands over the next six years.
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?
"Homes on public lands" is very different from "public housing". Public housing would work towards fixing the problem, what they seem to be suggesting only makes it worse.
That’s right. Most likely this is only going to be a sale of public land wholesale on the premise that the buyer will build homes on it. No way anybody short of one of the huge corporations can afford to buy a thousand pieces of land at a time. The land’ll be resold at an exorbitant price once they’re done in the end.
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