Category Archives: Legislation

Housing Crisis

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I’m painfully aware of the cost of housing in Canada. I’m currently renting after the divorce, which required selling our house to pay for legal fees and equalization. Furthermore, renting for three teenagers requires more space for all our sanity.

I’ve heard several reasons why the crisis is as it is. Homeowners don’t want more houses built as it will slow the rise in home values, and they represent a substantial voting group. Politicians don’t want to upset them. The second is building affordable housing (30% of pre-tax income is spent on shelter) for those who need it. Housing affordable to less affluent groups isn’t as profitable as for those that are. There are further explanations for Australia that also apply to Canada here.

These aren’t solutions; they are just some ideas that came to mind that might spur actual solutions.

A percentage of housing built be ‘affordable’. I couldn’t find a definitive figure for anything like this, unfortunately.

New housing in an area gathers some of its funding from the community itself, and sales of units provide a return on that investment. This makes new housing an investment opportunity for the entire community.

A rough example could be: 5% of your property taxes go to investing in new housing in the community. The first two sales of each unit built with this investment provide a return to those investing based on the contribution percentage. Two sales as the first is not going to have much margin, but the second is more likely. Furthermore, there is a compelling interest to ensure people stay longer and are happy to prolong when that second sale occurs.

There would be challenging details to work out, such as insurance of the investments, transferring when a contributing homeowner moves (which could be reflected in the sale price), etc.

This could also give communities more leverage to drive further improvements, such as parks, schools, and other services.

We Got Schooled

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Welcome to Ontario, where we are in lock down again.

It is really unfortunate we are in this situation again. We didn’t need to be. We could have been substantially more rigorous about how we approached testing for COVID, constraining vectors of transmission, and minimizing spread of the virus.

This may sound odd, but sadly Ford’s Ontario government’s focus on the economy has missed extraordinary opportunities that existed. We could have done so much more for the economy AND constrained the spread of COVID.

What is interesting is these opportunities are STILL present. We can still implement these now, just without the same impact it would have had six months ago in the summer.

The first thing to note is now we have to up our game: COVID is mutating given the number of people infected and how we are fighting it. We need to be prepared for this by minimizing spread as much as possible to reduce opportunities to mutate and overcome our efforts to immunize.

First are all the notes we made in https://www.oneoddsock.com/2020/08/10/covid-19-and-the-ontario-education-guidelines/.

Since I posted this we have learned a lot about how effective school is at present. It is clear that it isn’t working effectively.

Students don’t reliably have effective spaces or resources for learning that school provides. So when learning remotely (as high school students are obligated to 3/4 of the time and now all students have to do ALL of the time), accommodations are needed to make education effective.

The following are additional recommendations:

Continue reading →

Minimum Wage & COVID

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I find it extremely disappointing that the frontline workers that have to deal with the substantially greater risk of contracting COVID are in many cases relying on minimum wage.

If they really are as valuable as we are saying (and I think they are), we should increase the minimum wage to reflect that.

I fully agree with paid sick leave, particularly for COVID to avoid further infections, but there is one more detail I would add to minimum wage requirements: Part-time workers should have a HIGHER minimum wage. The reason being is they are not working the full 40 hours per week and are substantially more likely to have multiple jobs to support themselves and their family. Working multiple jobs increases the likelihood of spreading COVID as it crosses (theoretical) bubbles. Increasing the minimum wage for part-time would ideally drive more employers to provide full-time work instead and reduce the number of jobs that a person has to maintain to support themselves and their family.