Juno News - Why is Canadian housing so expensive？

00:00:00.000 i know you're a tech guy you're heavily involved in this sort of tech community as a founder

00:00:04.240 and i'm wondering if you see anything like that happening in canada where people are moving to

00:00:08.560 places that are more affordable like maybe someplace like saskatoon or somewhere even

00:00:13.760 ontario that's outside of the gta because they're just getting priced out of the expensive markets

00:00:18.000 there yeah i i think i think that's right i think so so kind of like the way i approach this is

00:00:23.280 thinking of cities as primarily labor markets people move to cities for access to the jobs

00:00:27.600 that those cities offer and typically the larger the city the greater the opportunity to specialize

00:00:31.680 in trade and this is why you have kind of really niche jobs in cities which you might not have in

00:00:36.480 smaller towns or rural areas and also why productivity rates and wages are higher in cities and yeah what

00:00:41.840 you're seeing in the us is um people kind of leaving some cities for other cities but they typically still

00:00:47.520 go to cities there are these agglomeration effects and if you look at the tech community i mean a lot

00:00:51.840 of them are going to austin or miami because more of their peers and other tech workers are going to

00:00:56.880 austin miami so they're still trying to like establish this critical mass of people in these

00:01:00.880 areas and i think this kind of this reflects a general approach that you have when you're faced

00:01:06.240 with bad governments right you could you could exercise your voice you could try to vote for

00:01:09.520 change or lobby for change or you could exercise your right to exit and to kind of go somewhere

00:01:13.760 that's a little bit um a little bit better maybe it's easier to move from san francisco to austin

00:01:18.240 than it is to upend san francisco's municipal government i think the challenge that we have in

00:01:22.560 canada is that we don't have as many options in terms of like better governed cities that still

00:01:27.760 have a dense enough agglomeration of you know workers in whatever sector is interesting to you

00:01:33.440 um to make it this kind of like laboratory of democracy or or like menu or this like menu long

00:01:39.840 menu of options to choose from most of our cities where most of our big cities are extremely expensive

00:01:46.720 and the small cities that aren't yet expensive are typically the cities that haven't seen great

00:01:50.560 employment prospects so you have a lot of people for example in toronto moving to hamilton hamilton's

00:01:55.040 no longer affordable so now they're moving out to halifax and halifax is a bit more affordable but

00:01:59.760 you don't have the same job opportunities that you might have in the gta so i think it's a bit of

00:02:03.920 both i think that you put pressure on municipal politicians by showing them that they're going to

00:02:08.400 lose the opportunity to benefit from you know young productive tax paying workers but i think

00:02:13.440 there's still something to be said for trying to improve governance

00:02:19.920 you

Juno News - April 13, 2022