Canada

These policies have abjectly failed with extremely harmful consequences.

Rent control is a very useful short-term bandage, to prevent a blip in the market from pricing people out of their homes.

What it isn’t, is a long-term solution inside a market system. After decades of rent control, developers have become largely disinterested in pursuing new rental units as it strictly limits the financial upside for them.

People who have been in these units get benefits, but with these benefits come serious drawbacks. Because rent control allows them to live beyond their means (relative to market prices), people in rent controlled units are stuck. They cannot find a comparable home if they want to move for a better job, to go to school or training elsewhere, to get out a bad domestic partnership situation, to find a different sized home because of life stage changes.

So yes I get that it feels good, and it absolutely helps in the short term. But it’s urgent that market prices come down as well. And while Carney is working on the market solution for this, the NDP or some other emergent group has ample room to come up with a comprehensive socialist alternative for this as well.

Capitalists do not have a monopoly on economic policies. Marx was an economist (amongst other things), for crying out loud. They can, they should, have a well-considered policy platform. For the love of gourd, NDP, don’t let a banker who works at a hedge fund have a better socialist policy on housing. It’s worse than embarrassing, it’s a goddamn travesty.