The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - August 07, 2024


Canadian Leftist has no clue how housing works

Topics
BC housing regulations and affordability housing costs in BC
Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
Steve Boots Steve Booth
Trudeau's Liberals are horribly inauthentic Liberal Media attacks Poilievre to distract from Trudeau failures

Episode Stats


Length

14 minutes

Words per minute

181.93

Word count

2,592

Sentence count

164

Harmful content

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I cover another video from our least favourite leftist, Steve Boots, who thinks that he's an expert on pretty much everything. In fact, he doesn't even know what he's talking about, and he thinks that government is the solution to affordable housing.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Today, I want to wade into the incredibly frustrating and depressing world of Canadian 1.00
00:00:06.400 political videos on TikTok, because I think that you should all know what kind of poor
00:00:12.660 quality content many young Canadians are consuming about Canadian politics.
00:00:18.340 And today, I'm going to be covering another video from our least favorite leftist, Steve
00:00:24.320 Boots, who thinks that he's an expert on pretty much everything.
00:00:27.920 I think the most frustrating thing when dealing with a specific person in politics, especially
00:00:33.940 when they're a content creator, is just the level of smugness that people get from talking
00:00:39.020 about issues, because apparently talking about issues means that you know a lot about them.
00:00:43.900 That's the kind of attitude many of these people put on.
00:00:46.600 And you notice that they literally don't even have basic concepts, right?
00:00:51.340 Everything is completely backwards.
00:00:53.780 And there's no exception today when it comes to this video.
00:00:57.720 So if you guys want to go follow Steve Boots, if you're super interested in what his content
00:01:02.560 looks like, I want to break down this video he has here today about housing, where he doesn't
00:01:07.300 understand anything, he doesn't understand the market at all, and he thinks that government
00:01:12.080 is the solution to affordable housing.
00:01:14.700 But before I get into that, I just quickly want to plug my legal fund in the description
00:01:19.500 of this video below.
00:01:20.420 If you can contribute anything to it, it really helps me out.
00:01:23.300 We got sued, specifically myself and the National Telegraph, got sued by a Chinese billionaire
00:01:28.880 for defamation.
00:01:30.540 And in over two and a half years, he hasn't actually provided any evidence that we defamed
00:01:34.420 him, said anything wrong, or even caused him any damage.
00:01:38.040 But we are $32,000 down the road in paying for legal costs.
00:01:42.440 So anything you can do there helps us out a lot.
00:01:44.680 And then if you live in BC, there's also a donation link if you guys want to contribute
00:01:48.340 to the Fraser Valley area.
00:01:49.980 We're trying to beat the NDP and put in a conservative government provincially.
00:01:54.120 So if you live in BC, make sure to donate $100.
00:01:56.760 It only costs you $25 after your 75% tax credit.
00:02:01.340 But without further ado, here is Steve Booth trying to educate us on how housing works.
00:02:06.440 I'm just going to keep it zoomed in like this, because for some reason, when these guys on
00:02:09.880 TikTok upload their videos to X, it puts it up like a small postage stamp.
00:02:14.780 I have a quick question for Canadian governments.
00:02:17.000 If you're not a Canadian government, you can keep scrolling.
00:02:19.760 Or stick around, I'm not your dad.
00:02:21.200 Because Canadian governments have insisted that they're going to do everything they can
00:02:24.600 to lower housing prices.
00:02:25.900 And they are failing tremendously.
00:02:28.580 There are literally only two provinces in Canada where housing prices fell.
00:02:32.300 Ontario and PEI.
00:02:33.880 And in Ontario, they fell from impossibly high to unreasonably high.
00:02:38.080 Now, he is correct with this so far.
00:02:40.500 But I will point out, and I hope he would notice, that one of the places that housing prices
00:02:46.240 have fallen has been Ontario, where they do a lot of the things that Steve Booth likes.
00:02:54.160 They have done blanket rezoning.
00:02:56.120 They have done a lot of bloated government programs.
00:02:59.860 And he even is pointing out the fact that housing prices have not really come down that much.
00:03:04.660 And that with inflation, they are still going up.
00:03:08.020 But all these provinces also have extremely restrictive building codes still.
00:03:13.200 And that's never been taken care of.
00:03:14.900 But he's going to miss that and then try and blame capitalism for the fact that more homes
00:03:19.800 have not been built.
00:03:20.720 They fell less in inflation.
00:03:21.980 So they still technically went up.
00:03:23.520 But in most provinces, the real estate prices went up at least 3%.
00:03:26.820 Prices have just peaked in the most expensive markets.
00:03:29.660 The reason why is very simple.
00:03:31.380 As long as we keep expecting the free market to fix the housing problems, it's not going to happen.
00:03:36.200 Because why would they devalue their own assets?
00:03:39.080 Does this man not think that governments in these different jurisdictions have not done anything?
00:03:46.600 It's like socialists don't believe that governments intervened until they do the exact thing they want them to do.
00:03:53.560 Governments intervene all over Canada.
00:03:55.760 There's literally a debate going on that he has covered over opening up the green belt in Ontario to build more homes.
00:04:02.340 And he has attacked the Ford government for being deeply corrupt.
00:04:05.400 And I would actually say they had to act in corrupt fashion when it came to trying to sell parts of the green belt.
00:04:10.600 I think they should in order to build more homes.
00:04:12.840 But the way Ford was doing it is not okay.
00:04:14.880 That he backs the idea that we need more houses.
00:04:18.480 But we can't build where Steve Boots doesn't want it to be built.
00:04:23.320 So he also backs other housing restrictions in places like BC where certain places to protect green space you can't build on or at very least you have to go through seven layers of environmental, you know, like there's seven like environmental surveys you have to do on the land before you can build anything.
00:04:42.000 But he's going to say that, well, simply the government just didn't start putting up affordable housing.
00:04:46.640 For a housing developer, why would you build more houses?
00:04:49.040 The profit margins are way better if you keep the number of houses down and the costs of those houses high.
00:04:55.020 That's not how the free market works.
00:04:57.220 No housing developer doesn't want to build houses because, well, if we build a house, the last house we built is relatively less, you know, it was worth less relatively.
00:05:09.660 Okay.
00:05:10.840 But people are in the business of raw profit.
00:05:17.200 They want to make a raw profit, a higher profit.
00:05:20.200 They don't care that by building one house, the last one you built is technically relatively lower in value.
00:05:27.880 They don't care if they have a 50% profit margin on a single unit's sale, if they could sell 10,000 units of something at 2% profit, but the profit is more at the end of the day.
00:05:40.400 It's like he doesn't understand the economy of scale.
00:05:43.820 And also, who are these shadowy capitalists that Steve Boots is referring to that want to keep the housing price, who wants to restrict housing, house building in order to boost up their own profits?
00:05:58.360 Yes, there are some people who have enjoyed the benefits of restrictions on new developments through high immigration because now their assets are worth more.
00:06:07.920 But that's usually the individual who owns a house, who don't control developers unless Steve is now going to blame the government, which he never would.
00:06:17.640 Obviously, spoiler alert, he never blames the government.
00:06:19.840 If he's going to blame the government and people who are preventing new houses from being built, if he was to do that, that's not the free market doing that.
00:06:28.100 That would be government.
00:06:29.620 Housing developers are in the business of developing housing.
00:06:33.840 They'd make less money when they build less units because, again, economies of scale matter.
00:06:40.240 You make more money by selling more, even if, per unit, you make a lower percentage profit.
00:06:47.260 The incentives are all screwed up.
00:06:49.040 And the Canadian governments are doing nothing to deal with it at federal, municipal, or provincial levels.
00:06:53.260 Like, yeah, the federal government's using their housing accelerator fund, and that is helping.
00:06:56.940 But until...
00:06:57.500 It actually really isn't helping.
00:06:59.360 Do you know how we can tell it's not helping?
00:07:01.980 Look at all the different provinces here.
00:07:04.020 They have not.
00:07:04.800 All the provinces have different housing prices on average.
00:07:09.840 And that points to the fact that the...
00:07:12.460 Or all the, as he said, all the provinces, their house costs are going up.
00:07:17.760 And also, when you actually look at...
00:07:19.780 I can bring it up on screen right here to prove it.
00:07:22.380 When you actually look at the different provinces, and this was somebody trying to prove me wrong,
00:07:26.320 the amount of houses being built in different provinces, some provinces, new starts are going up.
00:07:31.540 In other provinces, it's going down.
00:07:33.520 So even this chart, the one he's showing, showing that Ontario prices are going down,
00:07:38.600 I really doubt it, considering that this year, in 2024, the amount of new houses started has gone down by 14%.
00:07:45.340 But the reason that these are not uniform numbers, it's not uniformly going up or uniformly going down across the country,
00:07:51.680 is because the National Housing Accelerator Fund doesn't work.
00:07:55.300 Because it has inconsistent results because provincial housing policy matters more than federal policy.
00:08:01.860 The biggest effect that the federal government has on the housing market is through immigration.
00:08:08.240 That is the big kahuna when it comes to the federal government's responsibility.
00:08:14.000 Make sure not to inject artificial demand into the housing market as well as the jobs market.
00:08:19.060 Till we tackle the financialization of housing, how does this get better?
00:08:23.640 But more than that, I think this makes it very clear just how much we need the provinces to step up.
00:08:28.780 Like, look at the massive range of average home prices across provinces.
00:08:32.640 How can any one national policy address that diverse of a problem? 1.00
00:08:37.040 We need the province.
00:08:37.920 It's just not a diverse problem.
00:08:39.920 Does your province restrict house building or not?
00:08:44.180 Does your province have a massive immigration influx or not?
00:08:49.400 It's actually a pretty easy problem to solve.
00:08:52.420 It's more so that government has to get out of the way.
00:08:54.400 And it doesn't have to go the way in terms of blanket rezoning.
00:08:56.980 Just build whatever you want, wherever you want.
00:08:59.100 That's a Band-Aid solution to the real problem, which doesn't matter what you build.
00:09:04.240 It takes forever to get it approved.
00:09:06.120 So what the government did, because it doesn't want to reduce the size of its own bureaucracy,
00:09:10.200 because its interest is having being as big as possible.
00:09:13.240 They merely are trying to bribe developers by saying, OK, it will still take an entire year and a half
00:09:19.100 to get a single home built because of all the waiting for inspections,
00:09:22.680 all the different ridiculous regulations you have to follow.
00:09:26.020 But you can at least get a sixplex out of it, not just a single family detached house.
00:09:30.720 That's what they're trying to do there.
00:09:32.360 This is to step up.
00:09:33.540 It's that simple.
00:09:34.760 The federal government is doing some work, yes.
00:09:37.180 And they need to be doing much, much more, in particular when it comes to public housing.
00:09:40.320 But how can any level of Canadian government look at this chart and think that they have
00:09:43.520 any degree of credibility when it comes to housing prices?
00:09:45.780 I haven't said, but why is it that BC has the highest prices?
00:09:51.000 BC has had the most interventionist government when it comes to housing on the planet, both
00:09:56.540 British Columbia provincially as well as on the municipal level.
00:10:01.620 They have been the most restrictive on house building.
00:10:04.080 They have the toughest regulations.
00:10:06.060 It takes three years to get a housing permit, building permit approved.
00:10:10.380 Is that not a problem?
00:10:11.700 Does he not take that into account?
00:10:13.200 But really, what Steve just wants is the government to open up its wallet.
00:10:17.480 The government should just be merely paying for people's houses, putting up more affordable
00:10:21.840 housing, even though government affordable housing is not actually affordable, because
00:10:26.480 whenever the government and its layer of contractors builds housing, it's always more expensive
00:10:32.020 than a developer just independently building it itself.
00:10:35.680 We have the ridiculous situation now here in the Metro Vancouver area.
00:10:40.040 The BC NDP out here built an affordable apartment building with just like pure affordable units.
00:10:46.180 And those affordable units cost more than the market average, because after the government
00:10:50.900 put up the building, they realized that they spent so much money and it went so over budget
00:10:57.880 and over time that they had to, because even they have to face some market realities at some
00:11:03.120 point, that they had to up the cost of the units to recoup the way overspending that they did.
00:11:09.860 You can't make it up that this is actually how bad the government is at doing things.
00:11:15.220 But Steve, like you saw in that video, legitimately thinks that housing developers themselves are
00:11:22.120 the ones who are preventing the rise in supply of housing.
00:11:25.740 This is why the left can't function properly in government.
00:11:30.160 Their policies don't work.
00:11:32.720 Their solutions don't work because they can't see reality.
00:11:36.120 Capitalists like producing products to be sold.
00:11:39.960 Socialists like controlling what has already been made in order so that they can use it for
00:11:45.420 their own functions.
00:11:46.340 He doesn't understand that other people actually want to create things because he comes from a 0.78
00:11:51.420 political mindset of controlling things.
00:11:53.320 So when he sees not a lot of buildings are going up, his bias is, well, capitalists must have
00:11:59.060 prevented it from going up.
00:12:00.740 Not the fact that we have to struggle and jump through all the hoops that he endorses and it
00:12:05.800 makes it take longer and cost more to build something.
00:12:09.440 In British Columbia right now, 40% of a house's cost when it's first built is government costs.
00:12:17.000 It's extra tax that you have to pay.
00:12:19.240 It is the building codes, environmental surveys that you have to do where you're basically
00:12:23.260 paying workers to sit around a site doing nothing while the government surveys a piece
00:12:28.740 of property.
00:12:29.640 40% of a new house's cost has nothing to do with the actual cost to buy the land, buy the
00:12:35.560 materials, pay for the labor and all this.
00:12:37.540 It's all government costs.
00:12:40.180 All things incurred by the government or from the government.
00:12:43.220 But it's capitalism's fault still because socialists are inherently conspiracy theorists and everything
00:12:50.900 must be a dirty, shadowy capitalist behind the scenes pulling the strings to hurt other
00:12:55.340 people and make costs go up.
00:12:56.760 Even though we used to be a more free market country 30, 40 years ago and houses cost less
00:13:02.100 to build, they cost less to buy, everything was better.
00:13:05.240 But for some reason in our more socialistic times where everything is more government controlled,
00:13:09.780 I know back in the day there were certain provinces that everything was technically government
00:13:13.760 run, but outside of services, it was much more free market.
00:13:17.940 But everything is much more government involved these days.
00:13:20.740 Everything is, there's bigger bureaucracies.
00:13:23.540 And somehow prices are higher.
00:13:25.960 Somehow when the government basically incentivizes a ton of extra immigrants to move to this country,
00:13:30.820 1.3 million in the year 2023, everything became higher priced.
00:13:35.180 But if you challenge that, somebody like Steve Boots will put his finger in your chest and
00:13:39.120 call you xenophobic or something.
00:13:40.840 Even though literally I've been at several meetings this week with a lot of South Asian
00:13:45.260 Canadians who are wondering when the federal government is finally going to put restrictions
00:13:49.380 on immigration because it has nothing to do with where you came from.
00:13:52.820 It has to do with the math not lining up.
00:13:55.220 There are not enough houses for the people coming into the country. 1.00
00:13:58.880 Anyways, that should be it for me today, guys.
00:14:01.200 If you want to contribute to the legal fund, it's in the description of the video below.
00:14:05.440 And I'll see you guys in my next video.
00:14:07.760 Hopefully you don't mind these response videos.
00:14:09.840 They're a little bit more rough, but they're also a lot of fun for me to do.
00:14:13.460 Anyways, see you guys later.