Tag Archives: Mel Brooks

This is Aterm we use, sometimes correct, sometimes incorrect and sometimes literal. We all do it and I am no exception. Yesterday I had a detour and the detour kept on going in more and more directions, seeing more and more new ideas based on the old premise and that is not where it ended. In all honesty, part of the ideas flowed from the ideas of John Spilsbury (always look back to old masters when you get stuck) and he was no exception. There were more parts connected to this, but that is for another day. Whilst doing this my mind wandered towards the CBC article ‘Every developer has opted to pay Montreal instead of building affordable housing, under new bylaw’ (at https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/developers-pay-out-montreal-bylaw-diverse-metropolis-1.6941008), yes avoiding doing the right thing by paying the fine is the way the greed driven work. In the end it is always about the bottom dollar. I think the best quote comes from Mel Brooks in History of the world part 1 with “Leader of Senate – The Roman Empire: All fellow members of the Roman senate hear me. Shall we continue to build palace after palace for the rich? Or shall we aspire to a more noble purpose and build decent housing for the poor? How does the senate vote? – Entire Senate: Fuck the poor!” This pretty sums up the bulk of all real estate developers. And the picture isn’t pretty. Especially as the (a speculated view) the fines are so low that these developers will continue to ‘Fuck the poor!’. The article gives us “Two years after Valérie Plante’s administration said a new housing bylaw would lead to the construction of 600 new social housing units per year, the city hasn’t seen a single one. The Bylaw for a Diverse Metropolis forces developers to include social, family and, in some places, affordable housing units to any new projects larger than 4,843 square feet” and when you consider the added “Those fees (read: fines) have so far amounted to a total of $24.5 million — not enough to develop a single social housing project, according to housing experts”, as such I see the math as “there have been 150 new projects by private developers, creating a total of 7,100 housing units” giving us a fine of $3380 fine per housing unit and the housing units go well over a million each, sometimes well over 3 million, as such the fine is a joke and it is that yoke that hits Valérie Plante in the face. Now, normally I will not care. I do not live in Montreal, I am not Canadian, but this setting will be copied by developers towards the UK and Australia making their wealth a lot more and gained quicker. As an example I would like to raise the paperback setting of the London Administration with their Powerhouse. So how many became social housing? The answer is laughable and this will run over to Australia as well (perhaps it already has) and these administrations are seemingly a joke. I have been waiting for 10 years for a decent affordable apartment and the waiting list is nowhere in sight at present. So whilst the CBC presents us with “The city of Montreal had promised in 2021 to release the two-year results of the bylaw by early 2023, but hasn’t done so. Ensemble Montréal says it compiled the data itself, using the city’s open data. It is calling for Plante’s administration to disclose what it plans to do with the five new plots and $24.5 million.” As such I have no real hopes that anything will be achieved and I fear that a similar setting will make matters worse in the United Kingdom and Australia. New Zealand has a tight grip on exploding greed, as such they are in a much better position than any of the three others. Even as Australia might be in the least problem of the other two, it does have issues and the UK is in a really bad shape as it is allowing investment groups to buy out complete suburbs at present. CNBC gave us in February ‘Wall Street has purchased hundreds of thousands of single-family homes since the Great Recession. Here’s what that means for rental prices’ and it is not merely the US, as I wrote about it in the past, the UK (London Specifically) is a great way for these players to store their wealth and watch it safely mature, in the end we all need a roof over our heads and the boasted returns for London are too good to pass up and I personally believe that places like Toronto and Vancouver are about to meet those same returns, especially as we see events unfold now in Montreal. So how much longer until these places as well as Sydney are set in a similar stage? I will let you figure it out, but the numbers aren’t looking good if you are in a shifting position of housing. And matters are getting worse. In the last 10 years in Sydney things went from bad to disastrous and I reckon that more cities are on that list of shifting tides. And this amounts for the Commonwealth and the EU metropolitan pressure points. Munich, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Stockholm, Madrid and Rome being prime examples. Weirdly enough Paris escaped the stage. If Le Monde is to be believed with ‘‘Adapting the existing’: Paris’ plan to reach 40% affordable housing by 2035’ they could be ahead of the curve by a massive amount. I wonder if Australia, Canada and the UK have looked into this as a possible solution. Not sure if it is possible (as I am completely ignorant of building codes in these places) but it is a setting I had not seen before as far as I could tell.

So enjoy the week and consider your rent, and how much it could go up this year when it is owned by a Wall Street player, a fearful page turner is ever there was one.