The fact that they’re creating a crown corporation to build homes on public and private land is huge. This includes prefab and modular homes too. They’re even committing to using Canadian lumber.

We cannot contunue to rely on capitulating to and deregulating private developers and expecting them to act in any way other than own self-interest. They have no incentive to bring down the cost of homes. It is now crystal clear that the neo-liberal solution does not work.

A crown corporation that exists to create housing rather than maximize shareholder value is a massive step in the right direction. Frankly, I’m surprised Carney is doing this but happy about it all the same.

I expect Carney to get pushback from Doug Ford who is firmly in the pocket of private real estate investors.

There is no significant amount of federal public land sitting unused where people want to live. Only 4% of the total land in the provinces are federally owned, and most of that is parks and military bases.

The provinces themselves have some public land, but even most of that isn’t in or near cities where people want to live. They could build entirely new cities from scratch in slightly less desirable locations, but that’s about it.

The cost to buy private land to do this would be impossibly expensive.

It’s a great concept, but it simply doesn’t work in reality.

Redeveloping public owned lands in cities should be a start. I’ve been to community meetings to discuss redeveloping federal land in Ottawa.

Ottawa has a significant amount of federal land. Transforming unused federal office space to mixed used residential will be a game changer.

There is a crown corp that now owns public federal land and is either redeveloping for mixed use or for tourism:

www.clc-sic.ca

They also own the CN Tower. Beefing this up would be great.