This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The Creeping Barrage
Canada is currently undergoing a soft awakening to many of the difficulties that are projected in the next fifty years. I have seen a change in the way many talk about the political issues facing our country that even four or five years ago I would have thought impossible.
Inflation hit Canada hard, and the cost of living is reaching unbelievable proportions. Although many have a picture of Canada as this rough outdoorsman like nation, most of the population of Canada live in urban centers. Cities which are becoming almost impossible to live in. In Toronto, the largest city in Canada, the costs of a family of four is $4,515 not including rent. Even people making over $100,000 annually are living paycheck to paycheck.
https://wowa.ca/cost-of-living-canada
Rent and the housing shortage is a compounding problem. The average cost of a home in Canada is $656,625. This is a bubble that has actually been developing since the early 2000’s but got increasingly worse over the lockdown. All attempts by the government to do anything substantial about this has been like putting a band-aid on a gunshot wound. There is now an understanding by anyone younger than 35 that we will essentially never be able to afford a home, and essentially be rent and debt slaves for the foreseeable future.
All in all, most Canadians have now become inexcusably aware that our country is in serious decline and will not have a greater living standard than our parents. While this isn’t a surprise to everyone (we have had people attempting to pull the brakes on many of the policies that caused this for many years) it seems that political opinions have changed dramatically over the course of what seems like overnight.
Trudeau and the liberal party have been in power for almost ten years, getting elected three times since 2015. His support began high and has steadily decreased until today. While his criticisms when he was first elected surrounded his unserious and dilettante demeanor, he has been plagued with a number of high-profile scandals that he somehow managed to evade, including the SNC Lavelin case, the blackface debacle and the RCMP investigation scandal following the 2020 Nova Scotia shootings.
Trudeau is now extremely unpopular. Recent polls indicate that over 72% of Canadians want him to step down, up 12% from just last month, and the liberal party is significantly trailing the conservative party for the first time in almost 15 years.
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/canadas-trudeau-far-behind-polls-remains-liberals-best-chance-2023-10-11/
https://www.ipsos.com/en-ca/growing-proportion-canadians-want-trudeau-step-down
One of the greatest issues that have cursed the liberal party is their policies regarding mass immigration. For those who don’t understand just how serious the problem is, we have brought in over 430,000 immigrants just in 2022 alone. If you compared the number of immigrants into the country on a per capita basis, it would be the equivalent of America taking in 20 million immigrants over the last two years. This doesn't even include the millions who are let into the country on student visas and then gain their permanent residency after they have graduated.
The opinions towards mass immigration have quickly turned, in a way that has left me equal parts shocked and ecstatic. One of the reasons housing prices are so unreasonable is simply because the demand for homes outweighs the supply we currently can sustain. Canadians are correct in assuming that immigration is a host of all sorts of problems that we are currently experiencing. All of our major social welfare systems are under heavy load, including our infrastructure, education, and health care system.
75% of Canadians are now against mass immigration.
https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/liberal-mismanagement-turns-canadians-against-immigration
This is not simply a quiet trend as it was before. Even two years ago you had to speak about these things quietly because accusations of prejudice and racism would be enthusiastically thrown out. They still are, but they simply don’t have the bite anymore. I have seen more real-life discussion about this in the last two months than I have in the last five years. Even on places like Reddit and twitter I’m seeing a lot of popular comments I never would have thought I would see on mainstream platforms, many of which are not simply against immigration for it's economic factor, but have taken a more racially charged approach than expected.
Here are some examples
But we are faced with a problem. The government has absolutely no plans to stop this. It has already been announced that Canada will take in another million immigrants in the next two years. In fact they are currently planning to have over 100 million people in Canada by the year 2100, a program they call the century initiative.
https://www.centuryinitiative.ca/about/who-we-are
Without immigration, Canadas economy would go though a historic collapse. 100% of our economic growth is dependent on immigrants, the housing bubble only keeps going because of this scarcity they bring, and they account for 75% of Canada's demographic growth. Now while obviously this collapse would be absolutely worth it, no politician in their right mind wants to be the one who is helming the ship as it goes down. They would be blamed for everything, and the moment a conservative or reactionary did the things necessary to remedy the situation the media conglomerates and leftist politicians would swarm in and poison everyone against him. He would be ousted from power, the government would be given back to some other flavor liberal, and the immigration would flow mightily on again, this time with growth numbers to boot. The conservative party which everyone is now sweet on is not going to stop it either.
That being said, I don’t see how the ruling class thinks they will be able to play this con for damn near 80 years when it is already becoming extremely unpopular and have legitimately no way to remedy the problems without drastically changing domestic policy. That's also not even mentioning things like the crime rate and wage stagnation. I have a nagging feeling in my head that this is all a slow-moving train to disaster in one way or another.
The point is I don’t see any option where Canada can remedy this democratically. We are in for a long time of political stress here in the great white north, and I don’t think anything is off the table at this point in time.
If Canada wants CoL to go down they should prioritize building a ton more housing. Seems like a very simple solution, but existing homeowners are a powerful bloc.
Not sure if Canada’s zoning problems are similar to the US but it legit takes years to get projects approved here. Certainly a big driver of lower housing supply.
Assuming that white Canadians are by and large believers of the climate change narrative, isn’t there any discussion of what to do with the massive endless expanses of northern Canada that will be transformed into pleasant liveable places by global warming?
Given that Canadians are a blue tribe suburb, they won’t question the narrative on climate change.
More options
Context Copy link
Get with the times. Global warming is out, it's just climate change now, which is implicitly always negative. Or even climate injustice, where the beneficiaries of global warming don't deserve it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Large parts of the Western world have embraced the idea of home ownership as an investment vehicle (IIRC Japan is an interesting exception). In the last few decades this has worked as prices have increased, but it creates crossed incentives between current owners and people who want to buy a house. IMO my house's value to me (beyond the sentimental) is almost exclusively as a dwelling, and day-to-day it's price doesn't impact me.
I don't know that the idea was completely wrong, but there does seem to be a theoretical limit of residential property values in terms of wage-adjusted incomes before the average family can't afford to own anything ("and be happy"?).
But actually unwinding the model (reducing prices) will probably hurt a bunch of middle-class voters pretty badly, which seems like political suicide so I expect it to be put off as long as possible and maybe an attempt at gradual deflating.
Really, for most owner-occupiers it would be a wash: the value of your home goes down, but the price of your next home goes down too. The people it really hurts are the elderly who are ready to give up home ownership and reap a windfall profit, or their heirs.
The price of your house going down is a really big problem if you:
People make 1) work with vehicles, and 2) is, well, not exactly a sympathetic example.
I don't understand what you mean with this: "People make 1) work with vehicles"
And yeah boomers living off housing wealth are not sympathetic but they are a massive solid one-issue voting bloc and it is almost impossible to form governments in the West without their approval.
People make it work that they lose money on their cars. Cars depreciate, they don't appreciate, you eventually have to buy a new one, and you won't turn a profit on it.
Cars cost 1-2 orders of magnitude less than real estate. They are fragile machinery produced en mass in gigantic heavily automated factories. They have lots of moving parts exposed to huge amounts of wear and tear. None of these things apply to houses. I don’t see a valid comparison here
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The situation is totally fucked and is not going to improve until this stops, because this is the description of a ponzi scheme. You can't have house prices going up all the time and have the remain affordable to entrants in the long run. The math simply is not mathing.
Unfortunately the hole is dug really really deep and there's very little appetite to stop digging. The situation in Canada seems even worse than in the US - at least here the market deflated after 2008 so people who had the good sense to be born in the 80s or earlier could pick up some nice deals. In Canada the market has just kept going up.
Australia is only slightly behind Canada with this same issue. /r/ausfinance practically became a single issue subreddit about housing affordability before the mods had to enforce a 'personal finance only' rule set.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yes, i agree. We currently build around 150,000 homes annually. However In order to keep up with immigration we would have to triple our current manufacturing efforts. It is also not a matter of resources but of manpower. There is a huge shortage of experienced blue collar workers and they simply can't keep up with the demand. The government has tried many ways to increase supply but none of them have seemed to work.
I thought people said they couldn't find a job?
A large amount of the labor required to build a modern house requires extensive training and certification.
If there were an untapped supply of skilled tradesmen, the going rates for them wouldn't be as high as they are now.
In theory this is true, in practice you don’t have to be a plumber to dig the sewer line, you have to be willing to work and able to follow directions.
Realistically allowing plumbers to use much cheaper non-plumbers to do the grunt work can solve the issue, if anyone wanted to solve it.
I think a lot of this actually has to do with the certification more than it does the training. I've been told, for instance, installing a septic tank requires an insane amount of paperwork when it used to be you just needed some prefab and a shovel.
Something with which my parents are dealing with respect to their plans to build their retirement home on our place out in the Bush, exacerbated by the issues that permafrost — and the assorted inspections, regulations, effects on the water table, et cetera — adds to things.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Build new cities, then. It is incredibly frustrating to me to hear any blame for all of this garbage placed on the people that currently live in the places people want to go. How are people unable to see that this is the exact same argument that allows for massive immigration in the first place?
No.
If having people living near you constitutes a reduction in your quality of life, city living might not be for you.
Interesting that you have to absolutely misrepresent what I’m saying in order to try and argue with it.
First of all: I do live in a city, next to a shit load of condos, and other than dealing with the violent schizophrenics being dumped in my neighborhood all the time, I love it.
The condos are on the edges of my neighborhood, built in former industrial districts which were turned into condos and shopping. GOOD. More coffee shops for me.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
To be fair, it's very easy to blame them when they hold that they have a right to monopolize both the commons and other people's property for the sake of their own preferences.
Are people allowed to have an interest in their own home?
I have an interest in my neighborhood being a place I like to live, my city being a place I like to live, and my country a place I like to live. I absolutely have a right to express my preferences in these matters via the state. Keeping me expressing them via elections instead of simply forcing things to look the way I want them to is very literally the foundational role of government.
This viewpoint would be significantly less obnoxious if fewer of the people expressing it also talked about freedom, self-reliance, the value of hard work and other libertarian-adjacent ideas. "You can't have my house, you should get your own, and if you try to build one I will send men with guns to demolish it" is still antisocial, but "You can't have my house, it's my property because I worked hard for it, go get your own just like I had to, and if you try to build one I will act on my God-given freedom to send men with guns to demolish it" is despicable.
I am an unapologetic nationalist at every level. Individuals, neigborhoods, towns, cities, states, and countries should all advocate for their own self interests. If a collection of people want their neighborhood to look the way it does, then that’s their right. Leave them (and me) alone.
If you support housing communism at every level, then you do you. But you will get the standard results of communism.
Can you please explain to us clueless readers of your exchange with firmamenti how the hell people advocating for their interests, such as electing representatives to enact preferable zoning policy, constitutes the government owning the means of production?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's such an entitled mindset to demand that the locals re-arrange their city to make things convenient for someone who showed up two weeks ago on a dodgy student visa. Not everyone wants to live like they're in the Kowloon walled city.
Note that "zoning reform" is not necessarily synonymous with "upzoning and densification". For example, Vancouver's housing could be made cheaper by allowing single-family houses to be built in the empty "Green Zone" (1 2).
More options
Context Copy link
And if you do want to live in Kowloon walled city, then good for you: go build it somewhere else where you don’t have to destroy the lives of the people living there.
Fully support building whatever configuration of city you can come up with, as long as the current residents are okay with it. If that means finding a place with no residents, then go do that. And by the way, I hope you power it with nuclear power, make cars illegal, ban Christians and whatever else you dream of. Go wild. Just leave me alone.
That's easy to say when every attempt at doing so is frustrated with extreme prejudice.
Turns out you've also made it illegal to build my libertarian paradise in the middle of a nowhere that I fully paid for. And people who try to do it despite this get evicted and shot by government goons. As they did in Kowloon.
"You can't build it anywhere near me and near me is the entire universe" is an interesting notion of being left alone.
Well what if I want you to leave me alone? What about that? Where can I go exactly that doesn't make it illegal for a man to build what he wants on his own property?
I'll go to the edge of the world, Mars if I have to, I just want to be away from the sort of people who think my property is their business but theirs isn't mine.
So is it spite or something? Some person won’t let you build Kowloon walled city so now you need to punish them by ruining their home?
I’m 100% on your side if you want to build a giant condo block out on the outskirts, out in the middle of nowhere, or even in the middle of the city if the residents want you to.
All I’m saying is: the people who live in a city have a right to have say in what their city looks like, just like the residents of a country have a right to say who immigrates into their county. The government should work on behalf of the people who currently live in their city/state/country, not on behalf of people who want to move there.
If me and my neighbors don’t want you to build condos here, then leave us alone.
The problem is of course, as soon as someone moves there, the government now should be representing their interests too no? If you and 30 neighbors don't want condos, then 50 people move in and decide condos would be just peachy, you are outvoted and the condos should be built. You don't get seniority for length of habitation. That seems to be the logical outcome of your position if it just based on the will of those who live there?
Yes exactly. If a bunch of people move into the neighborhood and then all collectively decide that they want to bulldoze the houses they own and build condos, that’s what they get to do.
And what a perfect analogy for immigration this is! And why limited, careful immigration policies are so important! An Irish Catholic with 3 kids and a mechanical engineering degree who wants to move to Texas and work at SpaceX to work on starship? Come on in, buddy!
A single 24 year old Muslim man from Somalia who thinks we should execute gay people, has no education whatsoever, and calls himself a refugee? No probably not, specifically because the first guy already shares the culture of the place he’s moving and won’t really change it, and the second guy doesn’t and will.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
How? Are you just going to pick a random spot and build from scratch? History has not been kind to people who've tried to do this...
Irvine, California and The Villages seem to be doing pretty ok?
The Villages is near-100% dependent on fiscal transfers from working-age Americans.
Irvine, California is almost certainly a huge creator of surplus value.
Planned cities often work brilliantly.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That’s what everybody who settled this continent did. That’s what my ancestors did, and unless your family moved here in the last 150 years then that’s what your family did too. They moved out west and founded new cities because they were unwelcome and unable to make a living in the existing ones.
If they did stay in the eastern coastal cities they experienced absolute hatred by the people who lived there and they settled/formed new neighborhoods in undesirable parts of town either in industrial areas where they worked, or on the far exurbs.
Maybe your city is different. In my city, nobody is demanding new high density housing be built on currently barren undesirable land, they’re demanding that nice neighborhoods bulldoze houses and build condos.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It is not the exact same argument; you are missing a scale factor.
Imagine that a collection of nation-states has free movement within each state, and restrictions on movements between states. What works best? A world with 8 huge countries, each with a billion inhabitants, or a world with 800 small countries, each with 10 million inhabitants? Scale matters and there is something real to discuss. It is not the exact same argument at the different scales. There may well be a right size for a country, with strong borders and free movement inside.
More options
Context Copy link
Fairly big difference between 'maybe relax the restrictions on building new dwellings a bit' and 'to reduce the housing shortage, we're moving three more people in with every domicile since 'cause'. I'd say your vibe is more against the latter.
More options
Context Copy link
Some of us have children and growth is great for a nation.
Unless you were on the Mayflower there is a pretty good chance you were not the first person to live in your city.
My ancestors settled in the absolutely barren unwanted land in South Dakota. None of them showed up in Manhattan and demanded that somebody build them a house.
The myth of consensual housing
Purchaser: I consent!
Developer: I consent!
South Dakotan: I don't!
The question being discussed is, can people build housing on their own land? It seems a bit rich to cosplay the rugged frontiersman at the city council meeting to prevent people from exercising their god-given property rights.
What are you talking about?
I'm saying that our system of government allows people to vote on things. If the people who live in a town vote not to allow single family zoned lots to be turned into multifamily zoned lots, then they get to do that.
Similarly if the people who want to build giant condos want to build them, literally all they have to do is build them somewhere else that wants them.
This idea that a collective of people can decide what to do with the collective land that they own is pretty old.
I was responding to this:
I don't live in South Dakota, and never did. Eventually my ancestors moved away from there into various cities.
If you want to build condos, then I'm begging you: do it, but stop complaining because the place you want to build them doesn't want you to.
The problem is that people keep seething when even marginal changes are made to zoning, and people who want to build not even condos but somewhat smaller houses have to fight tooth and nail to exercise their property rights.
They don't want the condos in their neighborhood. Go build them somewhere else, and make the glorious condo utopia that the condo people imagine.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Allowing individuals to built multi family on their private property is hardly demanding someone builds a house.
Happy for you that you have no desire to leave the land of your ancestors but many people do and we should have land use policies that allow for building.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
One of the implications of the housing crisis is that many people who do want children are never going to be able to have them. It is extremely expensive to live even by yourself, let alone to support and provide for any children you may have.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link