Urban Boundary Expansion

Vincent J. Curtis

9 Dec 20

Does the Spectator’s left temporal lobe know what its far-left temporal lobe is thinking?  Apparently not, and a lobotomy is indicated.

Let’s start with two simply propositions: a housing crisis is always and everywhere created by government policies; and this pandemic spreads through too intense social interactions.  The homelessness crisis in Hamilton can allegedly be solved by defunding the police and the city council putting the savings into the construction of cheap, or even free, housing.  This is what the Defund encampment wanted, and the Spectator editorially supported their aims.

The reason house pricing are soaring in Hamilton and Toronto is that government policies have restricted the building of new homes.  Since home builders can’t make money building moderately priced homes, they’re going to build expensive homes.  Sure, you can get government to pay for new construction, but these houses aren’t free.  It takes materials and labour to build and land to put them on.  How do you sell these, even at below market prices, to people who can’t and don’t work?  And what about depressing the value of the homes of people who bought at the peak of the market?  It’s their property taxes that pay for selling houses below market; that’s not fair.

Boundary expansion is about making room for more moderately priced housing.  Take it away, and you’ll get more price inflation.  We want more single family dwellings if we are to maintain a healthy social distancing.  The pandemic spreads most quickly where people live closely together.  There are good points to urban “sprawl.”  All the worst places of COVID spread are where people are jammed together.  

Someone’s going to provide municipal services to these new neighborhoods; it might as well be Hamilton.  The opposition to urban sprawl is about progressivism’s hatred of successful western economies: about driving cars and building roads, and having space to live and breathe in.  The evils of sprawl is all you hear about; nothing about real benefits of life in massive apartment complexes living cheek-by-jowl like 1970s Moscow.

On a deeper note, all this theory of defunding police and using government power to create government housing to solve an alleged homelessness crisis is simply another manifestation of Marxism-Anarchism-Nihilism.  Marxism is the economics of fools and tyrants, but it always boasted that it was “scientific,” as in “scientific socialism.”  The Defund movement is discrediting the economics system it believes in.  In a way, science is knowledge of that which occurs naturally.  Yet, the Defund movement is all about forcing something that isn’t happening naturally, namely, a resolution of an alleged homelessness crisis.  Defunders are about forcing a reluctant government to reallocate its budget in a specific way that will force an end to the crisis de jure.  Defunders won’t hear of simply greater spending to solve their problem, the money has to come out of the police budget.  It gets complicated, but one can see that the Defunders are more about defunding the police rather than solving a homelessness crisis by any means possible.  This goes to the Anarchism-Nihilism part of their political agenda.

Elected politicians are intellectually at sea.  When the Defunders began their protest on city hall grounds, the council issued a press release in which the council “encouraged the demonstration.”  What?? They’re demonstrating against you, city council, and you say you encourage it?  Where are your resignations?  They ought to be expressing indifference to the demonstration, as distinct from the alleged reason for it.

The truly scientific way to solve a housing crisis is to ease restrictions and let the free market work it out.  That is more nature’s way than even greater doses of the planning that led to the crisis in the first place.

With the left, the issue is never the real issue; the real issue is power.

-30-