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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • I don’t know, it just feels like we haven’t tried much of anything here.

    You’re absolutely correct in that. We’ve mostly just allowed for monopolies and oligopolies to take over industries in a way that only supports their bottom line.

    This is one place where I think the free market could have worked, given enough time and sufficient enforcement to prevent this sort of conflict of interest, but the time for that was a decade or two ago. Now we need strong interventions by multiple levels of government to fix this problem.


  • if you’re not increasing supply then you’re failing your free market duty

    I disagree. Brooks is correct in saying that it’s not their job and that its two separate industries. Affordable/social housing is the government’s job, not theirs.

    In theory, the free market should see this increase in rental prices and react by building more units. Why isn’t that happening? Largely it comes down to the fact that a lot of developers are also landlords, and thus have a huge conflict of interest in this area. This is where regulators need to step in. But landlords (on their own) do not, and should not, be responsible for building housing.