Swan Lake condos.

The recently reported Swan Lake 104-unit condo proposal is a case study in Canada's dysfunctional housing development model.

Housing prices in Canada supposedly reflect the dynamics of a "market", but the only market dynamic you hear about when it comes to housing is "supply and demand". No one mentions competition because parcels that developments are proposed to be built on are owned by developers whose job is to ram their proposals down the throats of communities that do not want them.

Did you know that in China, all urban land is owned by the state and all rural land is owned by rural collectives? Many here among us will howl "This is socialism!" and it is.

For the Swan Lake proposal, three parcels of land accumulated by a land speculator are proposed to be put to a particular use. The price of this land, which is a major factor in the prices end-occupants of whatever housing is built there will pay, was governed, of course, by our old friend "supply and demand".

But the gargantuan price of urban land in Canada would be zero if land were publicly owned, as it is in China, vastly reducing the cost to build a unit of housing.

Additionally, if urban land were publicly owned in Canada, competition, a key factor in the efficiency of markets that is glaringly absent from our housing development approval process, would be integral to it. Deliberations similar to Monday's meeting of the whole concerning the Swan Lake proposal would evaluate competing proposals as to what use this land will be put and at what price to end-occupants.

In the current approval process, end-occupant prices are never revealed, presumably because housing prices are governed by a "market" in which prices fluctuate by the millisecond.

In China, banks, which are also publicly owned, loaned too much money to for-profit housing developers, who leveraged those loans to start far more housing builds than they were able to presell and thus became unable to service their loans.

Publicly owning land here, in light of this is glitch in the Chinese system, would not necessarily result in loaning more money to builders than they can repay, particularly if loans to construct housing were only extended to not-for-profit organizations, in which case end-occupant housing prices would be governed only by the costs of constructing and maintaining those properties, not by speculative overreach.

BC has a Ministry of Housing, but its job seems to be facilitating plunder of BC's housing market by for-profit developers. Otherwise, it would be organized to present not-for-profit counterproposals, including end-occupant prices, for sites under consideration by municipal councils for housing projects.

Finally, a federal loan facility providing financing for truly (and forever) affordable housing, would put for-profit housing developers out of business. Which is the point. Massive overhead in the form of land speculators', developers', and the entire FIRE sector's (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate) profits has inflated housing prices to the entire economy's breaking point.

The minority of Canadians who insist that housing units are financial assets will never accept the fact that housing is physical infrastructure within which human beings reside.

But treating housing as such and managing it as a public utility would eliminate the exorbitant inflation of housing prices in Canada, thereby freeing for investment in training personnel in healthcare, education, trades, marine, social, and other vital work the surplus created by Canada's productive economy, the vast majority of which is currently being swallowed by the FIRE sector.