Hayseed economics

Vincent J. Curtis

4 Aug 21

RE: Challenges come from GO train service expansion.  Torstar editorial published 4 Aug 21 in the Hamilton Spectator.

Dear Torstar;

Torstar, your editorial asks a very insightful question, “what impact will this have on Hamilton’s…affordable housing, or lack thereof?”  It then makes this excellent observation, “Hamilton’s growing popularity…has already made a serious affordable housing crisis even worse.”

Supply and demand.  Econ 101.  Prices go up when demand rises and supply is throttled. Eventually, the people in the low income brackets are squeezed out.

But you should read what those hayseeds running the Spectator have been up to!  They’re up to their carriage returns trying to halt the urban boundary expansion.  They don’t want more land made available to build more housing, the kind of housing people want.  They want to decide for next generation of Hamiltonians.

The hayseeds have visions of pricy imitations of Soviet-style housing blocks in “infill” projects to fit the growing masses.  They’ve pulled out those old chestnuts “saving farmland.”  “The environment!” Evidently, they’ve never plunked themselves down in the middle of Broadview and Gerrard and contemplated farmland and the environment. 

They’re so narrow-minded they can’t compare two ideas in their heads, that satisfying the needs of the middle class at a reasonable price satisfies indirectly the needs of the poor.  They love the poor so much, they want many more of them – impoverished by housing costs.

The creation of the greenbelt caused housing prices in Toronto to skyrocket.  So many people moved to popular Hamilton in response that hourly GO service is now justified.  Will the hayseeds learn from this?

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