<story><title>How Not to Build a Country: Canada’s Late Soviet Pessimism</title><url>https://palladiummag.com/2019/09/19/how-not-to-build-a-country-canadas-late-soviet-pessimism/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>claudeganon</author><text>While the article is kind of slog in the beginning to establish its context, this struck me as especially true&amp;#x2F;relevant:&lt;p&gt;“When innovative companies begin making decent profits, landlords raise the rents to adjust for the new ability to pay. As a result, these additional wages are neither reinvested, nor reflected in the disposable income of employees. This is the dynamic behind the mystery of stagnant wages. When workers in a particularly well-paid sector begin pouring into a city, landlords likewise raise the rent to absorb these incomes. It isn’t gentrification, but absorption through monopoly power.”&lt;p&gt;The housing affordability crisis is really a crisis of land owner cartels, especially in major urban centers. Short of some massive investment in public housing, there’s not much that can be done to course correct.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>drawkbox</author><text>Solution: push remote work as a housing crisis solution.&lt;p&gt;Remote work allows the people to place themselves in better, affordable places, while helping companies get the best from all over, rather than bound to a physical location.&lt;p&gt;This works unless the companies&amp;#x2F;investors are doing a dual strategy of having real estate that they collect on while having their companies located in them that they are investing in.  So a big part of the investment never leaves the building.  I suspect a large part of Silicon Valley has a scheme like this, investors are usually real estate investors as well, they like people concentrated in areas and supply&amp;#x2F;demand to benefit them.&lt;p&gt;The other bigger wage absorber right now is healthcare tied to a job.  When healthcare goes up, wages are diverted into healthcare and healthcare and housing have teamed up to sap all wage growth in actual dollars in pockets of consumers,. &amp;#x27;Real compensation&amp;#x27; or &amp;#x27;total compensation&amp;#x27; doesn&amp;#x27;t go into cashflow&amp;#x2F;liquid assets at the individual level and means nothing to consumer spending power which needs to go to housing and life.</text></comment>
<story><title>How Not to Build a Country: Canada’s Late Soviet Pessimism</title><url>https://palladiummag.com/2019/09/19/how-not-to-build-a-country-canadas-late-soviet-pessimism/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>claudeganon</author><text>While the article is kind of slog in the beginning to establish its context, this struck me as especially true&amp;#x2F;relevant:&lt;p&gt;“When innovative companies begin making decent profits, landlords raise the rents to adjust for the new ability to pay. As a result, these additional wages are neither reinvested, nor reflected in the disposable income of employees. This is the dynamic behind the mystery of stagnant wages. When workers in a particularly well-paid sector begin pouring into a city, landlords likewise raise the rent to absorb these incomes. It isn’t gentrification, but absorption through monopoly power.”&lt;p&gt;The housing affordability crisis is really a crisis of land owner cartels, especially in major urban centers. Short of some massive investment in public housing, there’s not much that can be done to course correct.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>BurningFrog</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;The housing affordability crisis is really a crisis of land owner cartels&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you consider the city counsel a land owner cartel, I guess I can agree.&lt;p&gt;Cities where land owners can build what they want on their land does not have this problem. WHat a central government can do is ban most zoning, and make sure cities have incentives to welcome new inhabitants.&lt;p&gt;In California Prop 13 make cities lose money when people live inside them, with predictable result.</text></comment>