This story is fake and the Democrats' media allies knew that, but reported it as if it was factual.
SMF - Just Installed!
This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.
Show posts MenuQuoteNot so long ago, house prices tended to be around three times household incomes in most housing markets in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. But over the past half-century, many local and provincial governments have tried to stop the expansion of urban areas (so-called "sprawl") by means of urban growth boundaries, greenbelts and other containment strategies.https://finance.yahoo.com/news/opinion-zealand-housing-free-more-100043001.html?fr=yhssrp_catchall
Though pleasing to planners, the results have been disastrous for middle- and lower-income households, sending housing prices through the roof, lowering living standards and even increasing poverty. International research has associated urban containment with escalating the underlying price of land, not only on the urban fringe where the city meets rural areas, but also throughout the contained area.
Canada's current housing affordability crisis is centred in "census metropolitan areas" that have tried containment. Vancouver, which routinely places second or third least affordable of 94 major metropolitan areas in the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability report, has experienced a tripling of house prices compared to incomes. In the third quarter of last year, the median house price was 12.3 times median household income. In less than two decades, the Toronto CMA has experienced a doubling of its house price/income ratio, to 9.3.
Like Canada, New Zealand has seen its house prices grow much faster than household incomes, also mainly because of urban containment policies. Auckland routinely ranks as one of the world's least affordable markets. But in what may be a watershed moment for housing policy worldwide, New Zealand's recently elected coalition government is giving up on densification and instead, with its Going for Housing Growth program, is aiming at the heart of the issue by addressing the cost of land.
Under new proposals, local governments will be required to zone enough land for 30 years of projected growth and make it available for immediate development. According to the government, local governments' deliberate decision to restrain growth on their fringes has "driven up the price of land, which has flowed through to house prices," and it cites research indicating that "urban growth boundaries add NZ$600,000 (C$500,000) to the cost of land for houses in Auckland's fringes."
New Zealand's government believes guaranteeing plentiful access to land will result in an increased supply "inside and at the edge of our cities ... so that land prices are not inflated by artificial planning restrictions." The same strategy could help here. Unlike most urban planners, most Canadians do not want higher population density. A 2019 survey of younger Canadian households by the Mustel Group and Sotheby's found that on average across four metropolitan areas (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary) 83 per cent of such families preferred detached houses, though only 56 per cent had actually bought one.
Households that move from the big city to Kitchener-Waterloo, say, or Chilliwack not only want to save money, they also want more house and probably a yard. Detached housing predominates in these affordability sanctuaries, compared to the Vancouver and Toronto CMAs.
Urban planners continue to complain about urban expansion , but that is how organic urban growth occurs. Toronto and Vancouver show that the cost of taming expansion is unacceptably high: inflated house prices, higher rents and, for increasing numbers of people, poverty. It is time to prioritize the well-being of Canadian households, not urban planners.
QuoteThere's bad news and good news for those who want to see Joe Biden win in 2024 (or who really just want to see Donald Trump lose).
The bad news is that, in the era of modern polling, no president has ever won re-election with approval ratings as low at this point in their first term. For fairly obvious reasons, incumbent presidents generally need to get at least close to 50% favourability by election day to win. Biden's approval has been stubbornly low — around 40% in polling averages — despite an improving economy. Getting to 50% looks daunting, though hardly impossible.
The good news is that approval numbers may not matter.
You may have noticed that a lot of the old rules of politics have passed their expiration dates. It's important to note that none of them were ever "iron laws," so much as rules of thumb. Still, it's been a bad time to rely on those rules of thumb.
In a polarized electorate, most voters vote against the other party more than they vote for their own. A recent Quinnipiac poll finds that among voters who dislike both candidates, Biden has a commanding 13-point lead. If that holds, it could be all Biden needs.
A second reason why approval ratings might be unreliable is that Trump is essentially running as a Republican incumbent.
Normally, presidents who lose don't run again. And they certainly don't claim they didn't lose.
Presidential approval ratings have tended to be predictive because a re-election bid is a referendum on an incumbent's first term: Do voters want more of the same or change? But voters already know what a Trump presidency would be like — or they can be reminded with a barrage of negative ads the likes of which we've never seen. Trump left office with an approval rating of 34%. This is why Nikki Haley tends to do better than Trump in hypothetical match-ups with Biden: She's a change candidate in a way Trump can't be.
It's true that Trump is beating Biden in many hypothetical match-ups in battleground states. That should worry Democrats and anyone else who doesn't want Trump in the White House. But Trump's unfavourable ratings are still higher than Biden's. Indeed, Trump has always had a high floor of support — about 34% — but also a very low ceiling at about 48%.
Unlike Biden, Trump has never actually been popular.
In a general election, when partisans reluctantly "come home," basically to vote against the other party, Biden probably has a much larger pool of "hold your nose" voters to rely on.
The expiration — or temporary suspension — of other rules is relevant too. Republicans in 2022 were expecting a "Red Tsunami" given Biden's unpopularity and the struggling economy. Democrats did shockingly well because they ran, in effect, against Trump and Trumpism and for abortion rights.
Indeed, the old rule that the abortion issue helps Republicans got turned on its head after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. As recent state initiatives suggest, Biden could be carried by abortion rights voters alone.
Biden is already opening a massive gender gap with Trump. Abortion surely explains much of it, although his trials for assaulting and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll, and for allegedly paying hush money to a porn-star mistress, probably didn't help. Attacking Taylor Swift, as his most ardent supporters have done recently, won't fix that.
All of that said, if you believe a second Trump presidency would be a disaster for the country, re-running a very unpopular incumbent on the hunch that the old rules no longer apply seems like a risky bet.
Page created in 0.239 seconds with 21 queries.