Financializing housing failed.

The housing targets Prime Minister Eby announced on August 21, 2025 seem entirely uninformed by the two decades of near-zero interest rates that have driven housing prices beyond the ability of Canadian households to pay more and that, limited or no upside remaining in housing, so-called "investors" are therefore abandoning residential real estate for greener pastures.

This exodus, potentially of the entire 30% of purchasers of Canadian housing whose purpose is not to dwell in it but to use it to extract wealth from households seeking shelter, threatens to leave developers devoid of sufficient financing to build new housing.

Hence Mr. Eby's government's rush to help for-profit housing developers build so-called "market-rate" housing.

Of the 40,000 units of new housing demanded by this plan, 15,000 are said to be "below market," how far "below market" not being specified.

What "below market" should mean (and what the price of all housing should be) is – in perpetuity – what it costs to build and maintain it, all parties performing useful work to build and maintain housing, obviously, being fairly compensated for their labour.

This, in addition to financing housing construction with no- or low-interest public loans, is the definition of housing managed as a public utility. Note that dollars loaned to construct, and in certain instances to help maintain, housing in this model are repaid in the form of monthly rents by the inhabitants of the dwellings concerned and are therefore available to be loaned again forever.

The 25,000 of the 40,000 units announced that will be "market-rate" present a bevy of unsolved, including some exacerbated, problems.

A two-decades long policy-rate driven inflation of housing prices in BC, across Canada, and throughout almost the entire neoliberal West has run to the point of exhaustion. Artificially propping up a deflating housing bubble to limit the losses of banks, other lenders, institutional holders, and myriad so-called "investors" who assumed housing prices would go up forever, is worse than bad policy. It is throwing good money after bad.

Everyone is a genius – many obnoxiously crowing that they are – when asset prices, in particular housing prices, are going up. All cry when the market tops and they, not the prey they gouge for a roof over their heads, are lucky to keep their noses above water.

Any scheme that spends public money in the from of renter subsidies, first-time buyer tax credits, or GST reductions, or extends public loans to for-profit developers, to prop up outrageously inflated housing prices amounts to a transfer of taxpayer dollars into the pockets, first of holders, and ultimately of banks and other lenders who extend the credit necessary to control "market rate" housing.

This is bad policy because "rules of the game" that privilege holders of financialized housing privatize profits at the expense of households who overpay for housing to produce those profits. The public, in other words, pays speculators today to be ripped off by them in the future.

This in a nutshell is the outcome of Margaret Thatcher's signature policy known as right to buy, which sold off millions of units of public housing (council houses) that had been built with public money and housed generations of British workers affordably.

Buyers profited handsomely from right to buy as these assets appreciated, while millions of workers who came of age in subsequent years wind up on millions-long waitlists for affordable housing as they are gouged mercilessly for "market rate" rental housing or continue to live, well into adulthood, in their parents' homes.