How to Create Affordable Housing

Reprinted from 2008

In 2006, almost 1.5 million households in Canada spent nearly half of their before-tax income on shelter and were deemed by CMHC to be in core housing need.

Rather than spending $75 billion to bailout Canada's chartered banks, the government could have used the money to completely eliminate the shortage of affordable housing in Canada. Not only would the investment in housing create new tangible assets actually worth $75 billion (rather than the worthless toxic debt that the government purchased from the banks), but it would stimulate the productive economy and create thousands of badly needed higher-paying jobs.

Consider the math.

The government puts out an initial tender to build 5,000 apartment buildings, each containing 100 apartments (that's 500,000 units in total). If each building costs $15 million to build, the total cost would equal $75 billion and the cost per unit would be $150,000.

Now here's the interesting part. The government finances the project interest-free using it's own central bank, the Bank of Canada. The rental cost to tenants is equal to the financing cost per unit ($150,000) divided by the expected depreciation period of the building (in months). If the buildings are designed to last for 50 years, then tenants would pay only $3,000 per year, or $250 per month. According to the CMHC figures, this amount of rent would be inline with what they could comfortably afford.

Since the tenants would pay back the full amount of the financing themselves, the cost of this solution to Canadian taxpayers would be zero. If the project was repeated 3 times, and staggered over perhaps 10 years, the entire 1.5 million shortage of affordable housing could be eliminated and the overall economy would prosper from the increase in real productivity.

I can't see any downside, can you?

Not only would the investment in affordable housing be self-financing, additional tax revenues would be generated by the housing production, so the program would actually be revenue positive to the government, at least in the short term. The cost of maintaining the buildings could be built into the rents. According to the CHMC figures, in 2006, the average shelter cost for households in core housing need was $756 per month. Even if building maintenance costs add another $50 (20%) to the $250 building costs, a $300 rent would still be affordable and well below the $756 needed now.

The whole point of this idea is to provide a simple example of how the government could use its sovereign right to create the money supply for the common good of the nation. The BoC is the most powerful tool that our government has to build the kind of Canada that most Canadians desire, a compassionate, caring and civil society that offers everyone a real chance to develop and contribute their human potential to the fullest. Yet it is this most powerful tool that the government refuses to use, except when it is needed to support the extortionists and looters in the private financial markets who have taken over the money creation function of governments around the world.

The general public has no idea about the possibilities that could be achieved by using the BoC creatively to finance the productive capacity of the nation. Most people don't even know that private banks and corporations create virtually all of the nation's money supply. And they haven't got a clue about how much our dependence on debt-based private money is really costing us.

Money is the mother of all our other problems, and it is urgent that we recognize this for time is running out. The globalists are accelerating their push for a one-world central bank digital currency and a North-American rollout is imminent. If we abandon the opportunity to use the BoC to build our country and protect our sovereignty we will be powerless to change anything in the new world order. Global government will make it totally impossible for "we the people" to have any meaningful influence or control over our rulers. Getting a majority of Canadians to agree on anything is hard enough. Getting them to care enough to unite and act together to challenge the federal government is nearly impossible. But with a global government, even controlling the Canadian government would not be nearly enough, for Canadian interests would only represent 1 vote in the world body. And influencing the policies of the central bank of the world would be totally out of the reach of ordinary citizens ...forever?