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this post was submitted on 12 May 2024
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In the middle of a housing crisis, this is just good news.
But frankly, the developers themselves don't deserve too much hate. They are just local optimizers and ultimately if we want to build more housing they are the ones that know how to do it.
If anyone deserves hate and schadenfreude here it is the Canadian banking sector. They are the global optimizers that turbocharged the bubble. They created and made insane amounts of money off of the bubble. And they are in an oligopolistic position and with enough political pull that if this turns into a crunch they would be getting bailed out at the taxpayers' expense.
In the US, and I'm guessing most everywhere else, developers are part of the problem. They buy properties that may currently have affordable housing on them and redevelop to more expensive units. They're also responsible for the disappearance of ownable housing - over there past decades, they've been buying houses that have come on the market and turned them into rentals, or torn them down and put in denser rental units. They're responsible for urban sprawl, turning farmland into suburbs.
Some of this is supply and demand, but don't discount marketing and encouraging growth in demand for suburb housing over more sustainable urban housing.
Finally, when articles like this talk about "developers," they don't mean the people who know how to build buildings: they mean the mega corporations who are purchasing property to own indefinitely, removing properties from ever being able to be purchased by families. Even in cases as in the article, "condos" are just fancy rentals. You "buy" it, but the developer (who is also usually the ultimate property manager) gets maintenance and other fees - they're for-profit HOAs.
"Developers" provide little benefit, and such is vastly outweighed by the damage they've caused in contributing to the current housing crisis: the inability of younger generations to afford to buy houses, or afford rent, and the increase in homelessness in western countries.
One of the larger Nordic cities - Stockholm, Helsinki, something like that - passed laws a few years ago to restrict property developers in order to preserve affordable housing and prevent gentrification.
Property developers are not our friends.
That, and they also either renovate in pseudo-luxery or build fairly luxurious condos in a world of HOAs going absolutely out of control and making sure you can't actually live in there even if you could afford it because your next door karen will file a noise complaint every time you flush the toilet.
Number of constructions I've seen actually designed to be affordable in the last couple years: zero. None. They all target rich people that could afford a normal house anyway.
Even new apartment buildings, the thing that people that can't get a mortgage get, is now also all designed for 3000+ monthly rents.
Property developers are greedy pigs.
Once upon a time, but most of their work (in Ontario) was put onto the Municipalities to make things cheaper, in exchange there were development charges put in place to offset some of the cost. Now they removed those but kept the municipalities doing the work. Developers serve no purpose anymore
I'm not sure what you mean when you say that developers serve no purpose. Maybe there is a definitional problem here. Maybe you are thinking of planners rather than developers. Developers organize, design, finance, and gain approvals for housing projects. Often they are also the general contractor for the building phase. Planners, on the other hand, ensure that projects meet the requirements of municipal Official Plans and the Planning Act (in Ontario).
It is true, though, that a lot of developers submit shitty plans that municipal planners have to fix. That's because the average developer doesn't give a single shit about the public good and only seeks to maximize personal profit. So, they treat the Planning Act as an obstacle to work around rather than making a good faith effort to follow the principles of good city planning.
Governments and banks finance
We have housing blueprints from the governments
Approval from the government
Governments already contract out work, even in construction
Their existence is a legacy component
We don't need to hate on the developers, but neither should we respect them. They were taking advantage of a bubble, knowing full well it wasn't sustainable, and if they get burned by it, meh.
I'm perfectly fine with hating and even blaming developers. These are people who have decided that making money is a good enough excuse to cause suffering.
I find it hard to blame people for doing what they are incentivized to do. Sure, I would love if everyone is morals first but given the open to build a "luxury" condo that gets N% return on investment or a "basic" condo that gets %M return on investment they are going to build whatever one is higher.
Most of the blame should lie on the government for not creating the correct rules and incentives.
Nah. We can hate both. They both deserve it.