Jennifer 麻衣子 Bradshaw she/her/彼女🔰
@amoralorealis
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I'm a pansexual, feminist, renter, data analyst, cosplayer, pro-public transit, pro-housing activist of @ahvancouver . Day job is game dev 🎮
Vancouver, Canada
Joined March 2010
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Let me tell you a story about social housing.
I was born in Japan. Even after my family moved to Canada, my mother would bring me back to live in Japan for months at a time, because she wanted me and my siblings to stay fluent in Japanese. I stayed with my great aunt a lot.
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“Your retirement strategy is wrong”
4 tweets down
“Inherit property like I did”
every single time
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@jillreports
@CityofVancouver
wow how carbrained do you have to be to see this picture and think the safe street infrastructure is the problem and not the driver
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Please no more
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Begging “socialists” to understand that apartment bans are the worst for class and race segregation AND single family houses are so bad for city revenues that they need heavy subsidy. They will not ever fund social housing effectively.
End the apartment ban.
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Every single time I visit a city in Asia I get jealous of the plentiful, adequate housing.
Housing doesn’t have to be “creative”
Housing doesn’t have to pay for community amenities, housing is good
Housing doesn’t have to be architectural marvels or fit in
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General reminder that if I’m killed by a driver, to absolutely politicize my death.
Heavy car? Weight limit regulations.
Speeding car? Cars must be built with speed limiters.
Right turn on red? Ban it.
Regulate cars regulate cars regulate cars
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It’s very frustrating to me that people over-focus on cutting down a tree or two while building infill in a city, when we’re clear-cutting hundreds per home at the suburban fringe.
If you don’t build up, you’ll build out. And this is what that means. Razing forests.
People that say Vancouver is already building enough housing are climate arsonists responsible for this
This is what continuing Vancouver's current growth rate looks like
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I don’t know who needs to hear this
But if you really cared about the planet you’d be regulating cars, not straws
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Narrator: rich white settler landlords are upset they can’t veto local indigenous-led development of their own land anymore
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In honour of yet again being called Far Right for criticizing Inclusionary Zoning, let's talk about why IZ is not my favourite way to fund "affordable" housing.
Inclusionary Zoning is popular because people think that it's a way to "force developers" to pay for affordable units.
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I do not understand why some folks actually think us renters shouldering the biggest brunt of the pain of the housing crisis, are supposed to feel *sympathy* for the lucky homeowners who bought decades ago and have enjoyed millions in unearned equity. I’m bemused
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Hi, I live in a tall building. A neighbour just gave me a cat post, and I gave another neighbour flowers because her dog passed away. Tell me again how we have NO community, white male planner dude
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I’m a pretty far left soc dem but I’m constantly frustrated by my comrades when it comes to housing policy.
All rental housing is investor-owned housing (except for a tiny minority that’s nonprofit/public). Stopping investors from owning homes just reduces homes for renters.
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Like seriously, this is such a gigantic killer of a problem that North America is completely failing at regulating
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If you listen to anti-YIMBYs on People’s Park you’d think they’re building a luxury pencil tower on the lot. It’s actually supportive housing and below-market student housing??? And preserving most of the park.
I try to assume good faith but… 🤨
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There are many annoying, pernicious myths in housing, “apartments don’t house families” being one of them.
Every Vancouver neighborhood that’s densifying (yes, with apartments) have stable or growing children populations. It’s the luxury low density housing that’s losing kids.
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I think we should have massive towers of public housing near excellent public transit, I’d live in this happily, even if Jan Gehl thinks that makes me a bird
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Every first-time home buyer subsidy is a regressive transfer of wealth from poor renters to rich renters-turned-owners
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Every single time I talk about Asian cities, whether Seoul or Tokyo or Taipei or Singapore, I get an astounding amount of racism and classism.
“Asians are all unhappy because they live in apartments”
“Everybody in the West can afford a house and a yard”
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This pattern of defunding public housing is not at all isolated. There was basically a global wave of austerity; Reaganomics, Thatcherism, neoliberalism, call it what you want. At its core, it came down to reducing public budgets for the social safety net.
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A generation from now, people will think we are incredibly stupid for how much housing we are building right next to highways and major roads.
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Imagine a public park. Imagine that you had to pay $60 an hour to go into this park. It would be ridiculous, right? Only the richest would do that.
That’s literally what golf courses on 450 acres of public land is. A pay-for-access subsidy to rich golfers.
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I really wish the conversation around luxury housing and gentrification talked about this.
This is a brand new single detached Mcmansion, in East Van. A brand new Mercedes Benz sitting in the driveway. It replaced an old stucco bungalow like the ones around it.
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I always appreciate Dan Fumano for adding this very important context. People living in $3 million dollar detached houses concern-trolling about much less expensive market rental don’t deserve to be informing city policy.
Vancouver housing: Apartments coming to side streets (even Dunbar) | Vancouver Sun
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This is another great (awful) example of how European “gentle density” is getting weaponized by rich NIMBYs to oppose *checks notes* local indigenous-led development, with a heaping side dish of anti-Asian racism
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@oaksworn
yes ofc. The popular white jock who lived down the block threw eggs at the houses of the PoCs on the block, including mine. And made fun of the rice/nori lunches I brought.
What a weird question
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If I were the BCNDP right now, seeing how weak and divided the main opponents are, I’d seize this opportunity to get as many big, radical, politically risky policy changes in as I possibly could. Like big investments into housing, public transit, and climate.
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“oversupply” of housing lmao
*taps sign*
Geller, Ley, Hein, Condon et al - the largely white male older generation of planners that got us into this housing crisis - are much more concerned about preserving their legacy than lowering housing prices
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NIMBYs at both nonmarket and market housing hearings I’ve been to have:
-called renters transient, dangerous, criminal, violent
-called the unhoused poor even worse
-explicitly expressed their desire to keep them segregated or institutionalized away
-been openly Malthusian
"If YIMBYs want to nudge more Americans in their direction, they’d do well to hector less and listen more,"
@reihan
writes:
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.
@AdamPOlsen
continues master class on debating bill today, demanding socio-economic studies on impact, etc.
Draws in new Stats Can data showing children of existing homeowners more likely to be homeowners themselves. Says bill turns single those homeowners into multiplex owners.
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Just gonna reiterate - if you keep using Hong Kong/Shanghai/Singapore as “bad high density” strawmen, know that you sound suspiciously anti-Asian
Kinda like this
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Can we just, please, I don't care if you find NIMBYs uninteresting or whatever, acknowledge they exist and are causing serious harm to the rest of us?
100% affordable housing project. future residents robbed of windows because NIMBYs can't stomach people looking down on them 🤮
Taking away corner windows from an all-affordable housing project because whiny neighbors complained. Those windows had a gorgeous view of the mountains, but NIMBYs should be appeased.
<- Old New->
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@_strawbunnie_
@barringtonball5
@samhcarr0ll
Also plot twist law students in Canada ALL have weed. They just didn’t want to share with a classist
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It boggles my mind that certain people think further limiting the development of market-rate apartments is going to help with affordability. Tell me, what do you expect happens to a resource when it’s made more scarce???
Landlords raise prices on existing housing.
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So many problems in housing are caused by the dangerous assumption that all renters can be, and want to be, owners.
I truly wish we could all burn into our brains that we already vastly subsidize ownership, that we cannot solve the housing crisis without helping renters.
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So it apparently needs repeating. The housing system is completely backward.
1) suburban low rise costs cities way more than mid-high rise housing
2) govt charges way more fees/taxes on mid-high compared low rise
3) despite the fact that higher income people live in low rise
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Semi-regular reminder that shifting taxes toward people with land wealth, with appropriate protection for seniors (which already exists in Toronto and Vancouver), means shifting taxes away from much poorer renters with no land wealth.
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I always find people who try to downplay housing shortages annoying, especially when it comes from the left.
Heaven forbid we build so much dense housing in high demand metros that housing prices fall and way more of us live much lower-emission lifestyles
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Housing is treated as an investment.
By investors, companies, flippers, developers, and most commonly, by every single person buying a home to live in.
It’s the last group that has made the most money from housing. It’s the last group that’s the most politically powerful.
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If I hear one more rich white person living in luxury detached housing call condos “luxury” Im going to lose my mind
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The additional benefit of market and nonmarket mixed rent buildings, was what planners and academics in various fields call "social mix." You don't want to segregate poor people from average people from rich people. This really reduces access to opportunities and networking
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Your semi-regular reminder that the BC govt spends almost a billion dollars a year on a tax credit for homeowners with $1.6 million dollar houses
No such program exists for much less wealthy renters
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You cannot decouple housing from profits without a plan on how to erase or redistribute trillions of real estate equity from millions of homeowners.
Pretending that it’s just about Blackstone and bad REITs is both cowardly and selfish, especially if you’re a homeowner.
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It’s incredibly frustrating that the vast majority of people don’t realize that even nonmarket housing is illegal to build on most land, because all multifamily housing is banned on most land. Social housing? Illegal. Supportive housing? Illegal.
So yes, LEGALIZE HOUSING
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@mateosfo
I think every city need these sorts of infographics.
1) suburbs cost cities way more than urban built enviro
2) govt charges way more fees/taxes on mid-high rise compared to suburban low rise
3) despite the fact that high income people live in low rise
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Another factor why I’m frustrated with Inclusionary Zoning is because it’s created this framework under which city hall feels they need to extract $ from developers for getting rid of bad policies.
Parking minimums should just be abolished. It shouldn’t be contingent on anything
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It’s funny to me how some people still think a “little bungalow” is more of a “starter” home than a condo.
That sub-million “little bungalow” only exists 3 hours commute from work, while the condo is 30 min.
idk why people always pretend it’s the condos that’s luxury
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Yes, we do need more Hondas and fewer Ferraris. What Andy Yan gets wrong, as usual, is calling the new apartments Ferraris when the real Ferraris are the single family houses of Kits.
B.C. HousingHub program touting 'affordable rentals' under fire.
SFU housing expert
@Ayan604
with this zinger: “You can create a supply of Ferraris, but that fact is that people can only afford Hondas."
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Every time the rich west side homeowner associations complained about the 10k homes planned in Jericho, the Host Nations were literally like “k that’s +5% more homes.”
It’s now up to 13k homes.
Absolute legend.
“What chafes critics, even those who might consider themselves progressive, is that they expect reconciliation to instead look like a kind of reversal, rewinding the tape of history to some museum-diorama past.”
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@KateRoseBee
@DestinySugarB
omg so real, not needing to delay dental and eye care indefinitely feels incredible
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Going through the Arbutus/King Ed area of Vancouver and it’s just wild how giant the mansions are, how ridiculous the zoning is. It’s the same thing as Shaughnessy and West Point Grey and Dunbar.
It’s incredible how much of the city - the CITY - is reserved for mansions.
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I don’t get why this is confusing for some folks.
Getting rid of regressive, classist, segregationist land use laws is not right-wing/neoliberal.
Getting rid of land use laws that mandate emissions-heavy sprawl and lock people in car dependency is not right-wing/neoliberal.
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Happy to see this guy called out more lately - prime example of the rich white “new urbanist” types who promote class segregation and promotes pushing the poor masses toward polluted streets and edges of neighborhoods. Thank goodness the movement is outgrowing folks like him.
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Not mystifying at all unless you’re being willfully ignorant.
1)we downzoned and banned housing from being built up
2)we greenbelted and banned housing from being built out
3)we stopped building social housing
This was predictable and was predicted.
Kudos to
@globebusiness
for finding the right adjectives to describe Canada's
#HousingCrisis
. I might add "tragic" to the list as well.
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It’s honestly so sad how many average voters have no idea that apartments are legally banned to build on the vast majority of residential land. Yes, that makes them illegal.
Apartments being the housing form for a lot of poorer people, we do need to fix this.
By legalizing housing across Canada, we’re helping Canadians find the homes they need at prices they can afford. 🏗️
The agreement we've reached with Brampton is going to help create over 3,150 new homes over the next 3 years and 24,000 over 10 years.
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Single family home only zoning is a ban on cheaper and greener housing types like apartments and townhouses, and prevents and delays nonmarket housing like social housing and co-ops as well.
I don’t see how you can support it and still purport to be left/progressive.
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@DeanPreston
Hi, Japanese person here, internment destroyed the Japantown of my city.
This is absolutely 0 reason to delay desperately needed supportive housing. Do it. Not doing so is gonna erode any trust you might have had.
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Cut down 40 trees to build this and no one bats an eye
Cut down 1 tree to build 40 apartment homes and everyone loses their minds
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So what does the developer do? Easy if/then:
1) IF the market price is greater than $2400 per rental unit, then build
2) IF the market price is less than $2400 per rental unit, do not build
What Inclusionary Zoning does, is raise the floor price at which developers will build.
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What this means, is that someone like me, that can nowadays afford to pay market rents (e.g. $1800 a month for a 1 bedroom), well, instead of $500 of profit to a landlord, that $500 goes toward rents for a single lady like my great-aunt, who can only afford $800 a month.
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Just a general reminder that big cities like Tokyo and Taipei and Mexico City exist, they keep growing, yet without the extreme housing affordability problems that we have in Toronto or Vancouver.
It’s important to remember that we don’t have to keep people out, and we shouldn’t
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I don’t know if there’s anything more pernicious to leftist housing advocacy than obsession with the homeownership rate.
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There are many, many ways to get affordable housing - my preferred term is nonmarket housing - that isn’t regressive like this.
Public housing.
Social housing.
Supportive housing.
Co-ops.
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Again, this is NOT to suggest that public housing is bad, or that social housing is perfect. Far from it. But there is GOOD REASONS WHY IT EXISTS in the form that it does. Social housing is not "100% below-market, affordable for everyone, shelter rate or rent-geared-to-income."
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This is the problem with making hyperlocal neighborhoods have such direct say in every new development, whether it’s a daycare, social housing, or market rental. They don’t care about kids or their futures. They want nothing to change around them.
Critics said the infants and toddlers would cause “noise and environmental pollution”. Are you kidding me? WHAT IS HAPPENING TO OUR COMMUNITIES? Neighbours rally to nix planned daycare in north Port Coquitlam via
@TriCityNews
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I’ll admit, as much as I support “missing middle” initiatives, since it’s a decently big step in the right direction… oftentimes I’m annoyed with it too.
There is no good reason why we shouldn’t just allow mid and high rise apartments everywhere. Apartments are good.
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The thing about (largely older, whiter, conservative wealthy homeowner) folks like this is that they have absolutely no idea how much us younger folks have already come to terms with lower housing standards of living.
A house? most of us have given up buying a 600 sqft condo 🤷🏻♀️
No. Show me how many 24 yr olds own a “normal house” (what is that, exactly?) in New York City. Or San Francisco. Or London. Or any other world class city. My parents didn’t until they were in their 50’s. I didn’t until my 40’s. The difference is we didn’t complain about it.
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My great aunt was single, elderly and lived on a pretty small pension. She qualified for danchi apartments - fully subsidized, "100% affordable" public housing. It was great for her because as long as she lived frugally, she was able to save, even on her limited pension.
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does anyone else go to bed thinking about the trillions of $ we’ve spent subsidizing cars?
imagine what we could have done instead with all that public land. roads, highways, parking. so much land value subsidizing a fossil fuel industry. what my climate nightmares are made of
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Something I think about a lot is how every single shortage has meant prices go up and the poor go without. I don’t really understand why people think housing is any different.
Every shortage is an affordability problem.
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It’s pretty disheartening when otherwise reasonable left/progressives suddenly defend regressive multimillionaire landowner subsidies because their senior parents benefit from them.
Making property taxes less regressive is good actually
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Why, you ask? Because if needed services - like nonmarket housing for those that couldn't afford market housing - were under government control, they could be defunded on a conservative government's whim. That was (and still is) a serious threat to people's lives.
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It’s pretty funny when some of the wealthiest NIMBYs of the city look at a breathtakingly beautiful combo of walkable parks and indigenous-built housing that I would kill to live in, and call it “a joke” and “unlivable and unlovable” lmao
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So many NIMBYs say “we only oppose this apartment because it’s LUXURY” - then in their next breath oppose fully publicly subsidized supportive housing.
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In the meantime, IZ absolves those living in the most luxury, expensive single detached houses from helping to pay for affordable housing by making it solely dependent on multifamily housing projects.
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Apparently more people are interested in Inclusionary Zoning and problems associated with them than I thought. However, it's only one of *MANY* things we do that raise the floor price at which developers can build. Let's talk about some of them (and no it's not just zoning)
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homeowner: it’s not my fault that home values are so high, I shouldn’t have to pay more property taxes
me: totally! you didn’t do anything! so let’s tax your capital gains on that home, since you didn’t do anything to earn it
homeowner: actually I sacrificed everything
me: 🙃🙃🙃
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So, instead of someone like my great-aunt, completely analog, being isolated in a building full of poor aging seniors, could live close to someone tech savvy like me and my partner, when she needs someone to figure out why her email isn't working.
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I’m a giant fan of nonmarket, “decommodified” housing. I’d love if we had a much bigger % of rental housing built by public or nonprofit developers.
But that has to come from an increase in their output. Not from a decrease in for-profit development.
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Ah yes, love to see Asian cities used as a horror story villain to oppose *checks notes* indigenous-led development on their own lands.
White NIMBYs are so predictable
The next opponent has a video too. It's a professionally made video, probably from the Jericho Coalition, complete with spooky horror movie background music. It's amazing. "Three times denser than Hong Kong".
You come across anti-Asian city dog whistles like this a lot.
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@AlecStapp
@elonmusk
He keeps disparaging public transit while “inventing” shittier versions of them
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Since
@TheOrcaBC
is platforming another comfortably housed white male planner with extremely harmful perspective, let’s do a takedown thread to daylight some of them.
First, let’s reiterate the obvious: Senakw is Squamish reserve land. They get FULL say on what to do with it.
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Truly, I sure hope everyone using the poor old widow defence against slightly higher land wealth taxes on multimillionaires spend half that energy on poor renter seniors who are actually forced out of their homes all the time and don’t get a massive cash windfall for it
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I personally benefit from rent control and think rent stabilization is good. But I would like to remind fellow leftists that it DOES NOT help people who currently don’t have housing. Including those living on the streets. We absolutely need more new homes for them.
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“Socialists,” mansions for the richest on a beach, getting replaced by apartments is good actually
I truly do not know how you can call yourselves socialists
When high rises are constructed on a beach counter to the wishes of a national population or a state, this is a case of a minority population ruining a national asset for minority enjoyment.
Capitalism is fundamentally incapable of solving this dilemma. It requires socialism.
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Homelessness rates crept up a bit as the now stigmatized danchi stopped being built. Again, this is largely because public subsidies dried up.
My great aunt was able to use her savings to move to pretty nice seniors housing, but not all were so lucky.
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PSA: lower immigration rates is not a solution to the housing crisis.
Please do not throw racialized immigrants and refugees under the bus when they are decidedly not the cause of the problem. The root cause is our very own govt’s policies, we know this.
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Honestly, our household only recently got to the point where we don’t have to worry about the cost of food or rent. And it is a glorious feeling. An enormous layer of stress is just gone.
I just want a society where this is normal for everyone.
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Regular reminder that banning housing that’s not up to professional-urban-planner’s standards doesn’t get more people in better housing, it just means more people homeless.
Reality doesn’t care about your intentions
Its genuinely insane Single Room apartments are illegal basically everywhere in America
We basically decided homeless was more moral then bad housing
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Why do homeowners consistently pretend that HELOCs don’t exist, that home equity is completely illiquid?
Because they really want us to forget that they’re the main beneficiaries of the housing crisis. Because they don’t want us to tax that passively gained massive wealth.
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literally begging people to realize that “making wealth” from owning housing is stealing wealth from the next generation of buyers
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What I find particularly frustrating is when even academics completely ignore this source of gentrification and class segregation and focus on bike lanes and covered bus stops. Like for real, absolutely exhausting
Single family tear downs replaced by million dollar single family mansions are the true problem when it comes to affordability, gentrification, and displacement. But for some reason, it seems to be the only type of development the general public is okay with.
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Housing can be pretty straitforward in some ways (e.g. give housing to homeless to end homelessness). It can be somewhat counterintuitive in other ways.
One of those ways it can confuse some, is land value. Let's talk about land price, and how SO many people get it wrong.
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4-6 storey buildings are indeed fantastic, and they should be legalized everywhere, no exceptions, on residential land. But they’re NOT a reason not to build much taller buildings around rapid public transit. Stop using the former as an excuse to dunk on the latter.
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Social housing, as defined by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation and BC Housing and basically any other funding org - is allowed to and expected to have a mix of rents, including market. Because it's expected to be self-sustaining.
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It’s hilarious to see the same cadre of people who expressed consternation at legalizing duplexes across Vancouver as carpet-bombing density, suddenly express their support for Copenhagen-style 6 storey buildings the moment Jericho/Senakw projects propose taller towers
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