I would like to remind everyone, as I did on a podcast this week, that there was a time when the private market was able to house most people. How? 1. Zero building standards. They built crap. (See: New York tenements, workers shacks around Vancouver.)

2. People were more spread out. Manufacturing moved to mid-sized cities and built there. Now, there's been this huge migration to a cluster of key job-rich cities.

3. There was a ton of cheap peripheral land in cities, where subdivision developers could put up piles of cheapo bungalows. (Like the one I grew up in in north Regina.)

But, guess what. That world is gone, people. There's not a builder in the world, even non-profits getting free land, who thinks they can build something cheap enough in a major city for people on service-worker wages.