Economic climate "extremely challenging."

Yet another explanation from within the for-profit housing development industry why that industry is not able to build affordable rental housing: "Economic climate 'extremely challenging,' rental-project developers say."

Of course the article makes no mention of what constitutes profitability for developers. If it is not worth constructing rental housing unless it yields millions of dollars in unearned income over the lifetime of a building, then the obvious question is: why are developers entitled to this kind of plunder in the first place? I mean, who the hell are they?

The parameters of the for-profit development model discussed in the article – equity, land, interest rates, and all the vampires lined up to add their demands to the rent end-users of a property must pay – make it clearer than ever that housing should be run as a public utility.

Developers treat housing as their private fiefdom and assert there is no alternative to financialization; but the fact is that developers and their enablers, all of whom assume they are entitled to make a killing exploiting people's need to live somewhere, are irrelevant to the mechanics of housing a population.

BOC is the only institution on Earth legally authorized to print Canadian dollars, and it can print as many of them as are necessary to finance at low or zero interest as much not-for-profit housing as there are people to build and organizations to manage it. If Ottawa is worried about injecting these dollars into the economy causing inflation, it can tax away windfall profits of profiteers who raise prices in response to the economic stimulus that would result from financing massive housing construction.

"Supply and demand" is always on the side of profiteers: demand for more product than is produced, increase price; so many dollars in circulation that as much product as can be produced is easily sold, increase price. "Supply and demand" is a scam.

Also, home ownership is completely unnecessary.

People want to own homes because landlords gouge them for rent and because banks, developers, and everybody who markets "luxury" and envy of other people's belongings convinces them they do. In the absence of emotionally manipulative marketing, most people would be happy to satisfy their basic human need for a structure in which to dwell with a practical, secure, stable, affordable unit in a housing complex adequate to their needs for privacy and space.

Let developers and everyone who manipulates money for a living find productive work to do – of which there is an abundance that is not being performed because 1 in 5 dollars spent in BC is swallowed by mortgages and rent – and stop living parasitically off of everybody else.