Supply, demand, and market rate housing.

A "comment" in my local daily newspaper urges that Victoria's human scale and livability – contemptuously dismissed as "charm" – be exchanged for giant housing installations shoulder to shoulder looming over every thoroughfare.

One must ask who will build and hold this housing and for what purpose.

Certainly the answer is not publicly financed coops and non-profits whose mission is to house people affordably, but real estate holding corporations, hedge funds, and other aggregators of big piles of money whose business is to make those piles bigger.

This statement: "The post-financial crisis era of ultra-low interest rates turbocharged demand for housing, and supply failed to adequately respond," is true from a particular perspective and is extremely misleading.

In an economy in which housing had already been reduced to financial assets, ultra-low interest rates – another way of saying abundant cheap money – did indeed turbo-charge demand for housing, not as houses or apartments for people to live in, but for so-called "investors" to snatch up in quantity and flip or rent out at inflated prices.

One must bear in mind that inadequate "supply" does not drive prices higher. Holders do, and the greater the monopoly power of (and the fewer) holders, the greater the prices they are able to demand.

This statement: "The weight of recent academic evidence shows that building more housing, critically including market-rate housing, is a powerful tool to improve affordability for everyone," is also questionable.

One must ask what research conducted by whom reached this conclusion because facts on the ground demonstrate that small holders are emboldened to demand more for their properties when large aggregators drive prices dramatically higher. No housing prices increase when not-for-profit housing is built.

This statement: "Despite popular but ill-informed claims to the contrary, the slow-burning crisis in housing prices really is at the end of the day about an insufficient supply to meet demand," assumes again that prices rise without human intervention.

Whether we live in a zero-sum world in which all-against-all wrest as much money from each other's hands as possible seems not to be up for popular debate. Holders of enormous sums apparently have made this decision for us.

Canada built hundreds of thousands of units of publicly financed purpose-built affordable workforce housing from the end of WWII to 1993. Then, as a matter of public policy, influenced no doubt by "investors" dreaming of gouging the public for a roof over its heads, it quit.

Now rents leapfrog as big holders plunder the public mercilessly. People doing the plundering, of course, tell us "supply and demand," not they, are responsible and the solution is to build more "market rate" housing.

If you believe this, I have a park with homeless people sleeping in it to sell you.