The bank app is telling me to "tap & pay like a boss😏" and "rally my crew". I am 37 years old and you are the bank. Don't talk to me this way.
Director - Housing policy | Directeur - Habitation, Vivre en Ville Montréal, Québec EN/FR
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The bank app is telling me to "tap & pay like a boss😏" and "rally my crew". I am 37 years old and you are the bank. Don't talk to me this way.
No solidarity in want
A coffin. They're building a coffin from the inside and trying to make it big enough to bury everyone with them.
This is why WIS can never be a dump stat
Help me out: who got it?
With every passing day, We Lived Happily During The War becomes louder. It's loud enough that I hear it in my dreams now.
do not give into thoughts like “nothing matters”, it’s not true. everything matters as long as we are all alive
If people want a reason why we shouldn’t embrace doomerism, this is it. A doomer society produces only this, the antithesis of life, as its productive signal.
I suspect this is very flattering to Bluesky users in particular but I also think it’s true. Of course I would think that, also being a flattered Bluesky user.
The corner store that sells Steam Whistle (not a given in Québec) also keeps its Kit Kats in a beer fridge. This is how they get you.
this is Worse, right? like capital W Worse.
Is it as dumb as trying to offset higher input prices from tariffs with lower debt service costs?
Yeah. When it became clear tariffs were happening I took all my savings out of stocks only to watch the indices going "it's just a flesh wound" time and time again like the guy from Monty Python.
I have found happiness in the city that my younger self could not have imagined. Literally, ontologically outside the realm of imagination.
End of August porch beer. I don’t know if people where there is no winter know what it is to hang on to t-shirt weather like Indiana Jones falling off the cliff.
We’re not doing housing for the houses’ sakes. The houses don’t know they exist.
I think housing makes more sense as a demographic problem than a real estate problem. You have the know the nuts and bolts of development and operation to do good housing policy but the reason we’re doing policy at all is the distribution and movement of populations. A controversial matter!
Most people are housed, so the most useful heuristic to understand the shape and trajectory of housing discourse is that it is a debate about proximity and familiarity with strangers. Even people who could or will move, eventually, to a newly built home, rarely think of themselves as beneficiaries.
Please do not. If this works it will make my job a thousand times more annoying.
The world of transphobia is tiny and it hates women, it can’t imagine them, it can’t love them, it can’t see them. What a mess.
And you know, in one of my social playing groups there actually is a trans woman! She shows up and she plays with men and women and like most of us at this level she kinda sucks. She has won precisely zero matches on account of her transness! And nobody cares! We actually like sports!
What other reason could there be to suspect that talented female athletes are trans other than your tiny and withered imagination? What is this if not dumb and humiliating sexism?
Do you have any idea how good women can get at sports? I don’t think we’re having this maddening fucking debate with any appreciable level of sports expertise - in every sport you can find women athletes who would humiliate top quintile male practitioners.
In his first matchup, he was against a girl on the national circuit. She was *crushing* him, up to the point that to win his matches he had to only play on the other player - the man - who was much weaker.
So keep that in mind when I tell you that today I was an friendly amateur tournament, playing the in the weakest division, and my coach was also there, playing in the strongest. He was playing mixed doubles, so with a female partner.
I am not even a provincial C player. I do mostly amateur stuff and hope to one day win a title against people who don’t play on the provincial circuit.
Like there is a provincial org that runs tournaments sorting players in A, B, and C categories. Good players in the A division can move on to national tournaments. Good national players move on to international tournaments.
Now you have to know: I train 4 hours a week and I do 8 to 10 tournaments every year and believe you me I suck at badminton. There are levels to this which you can’t know about unless you’re invested.
For instance I play a lot of badminton and I take it pretty seriously. Here is me in my super fresh team t-shirt at last season’s interclub championship.
I have additional thoughts about this because I am reasonably sporty 38 years old. Yes a 38 year old on Bluesky whoda thunk.
If you can’t read French, good for you. It’s still time to look away! This is a bit of news about a kid’s soccer team being DQ’d from a major tournament because parents were asking 9 and 10 year old girls to prove they were girls by pulling down their pants. www.lapresse.ca/sports/socce...
Posting my twelfth "good times create weak men" meme right before I post several times about how terrified I am of public transit.
I don’t know if this is still the case but when I was a flight attendant for Sunwing (Canadian sun line), the boarding music was an album of crooner standards by the CEO. This felt like we were conscripted to be part of the plot of his revenge on the music industry.
This is downstream from Foucault’s admission that about 10% of your writing needs to be incomprehensible nonsense for the French intelligentsia to take you seriously
I like to think I'm reasonably insightful and knowledgeable within my field but I don't think I ever sound as smart or as convincing as this is.
really clean taste
This joke is perfect, I love it so much. In ten years I will be talking about local media with offline friends and I will try to say it’s important to pay for local journalism but not like this
It’s important to pay for local journalism but not like this. www.thecity.nyc/2025/08/20/w...
I’m sorry: what?
I was scouted be Radio-Canada to comment on this and they reneged when it became clear that I, too, would have Thoughts about housing supply
listen, they have lived experiences,
Tell me more
how many followers do we think he has on his alt
how silly of me, to assume that my VIA train from Montreal to Québec City would not be more than one hour late
I’m proofreading the English translation of our report on housing and I don’t want to spoil it for you guys but I agree with all of it.
You say this but this is the top post in my Popular with friends feed
Yeah. I got tired of The Expanse books because a bunch of people were dying all the time and I didn't have the heart to care for all the adventures that were happening on the margins of all that horror.
i gotta be straight with you i think im in the wrong chat
are you in my house are your kids my kids
Flying is majestic and great and wonderful. It’s so cool. The amount of human ingenuity that went into making air travel safe and efficient and convenient is breathtaking. This is what it means to stand on the shoulders of giants. ‘Should labour be paid?’ is an easier problem to solve.
This is why a lot of them keep doing it. For whatever reason this is the job they want and they would rather do that and eat shit than anything else.
When I quit I told people that the other flight attendants that stay are the ones who *want* to be flight attendants. Like, they’ve meant to have this job forever. They love it.
There are other problems - flying is scary, shifts are whack, you get sick all the time because the air is so dry and statistically at least one of your passengers is sick on every flight. But the unpaid labor problems is the most surreal.
There is an impossible-to-imagine amount of unpaid labor involved. Completely unjustifiable.
Then when you land and open the doors, you stick around until everyone has deboarded, look around, then take the company shuttle to the flight base again to debrief about the flight. This is mandatory.
Sometimes a mechanical problem on the runway (not even your plane necessarily) will stop you from boarding passengers and you can’t do anything, you just wait. My longest shift was 19 hours.
(One such time was on Christmas Eve when one of the regional airports we were supposed to drop people at simply didn’t clear their runway of snow (good for them) and we just had to take a plain full of confused and angry people back to Montreal, where the airport staff had all already left.)
Help two hundred people fight with their carry-on and tell people they’re not in the right seat and that they can’t get anything until the plane is in the air, and sometimes wait hours before you are allowed to close the doors.
Not being paid for all the prep work and all the waiting was such a slap in the face. You wake up at 5 am, you have to be at the company flight base at 6:15, answer a quiz about safety procedures, get on the company shuttle to the airport, go through the check-in process, board, inspect the plane…
I didn’t stick around and the top 1 reason was that the conditions were brutal. The pay was not *bad* compared to other jobs that would take me as a barely educated 21 years old, but everything else sucked.
I know about this because I was a flight attendant for about 6 months in 2008, which, I hate to remind you all, is closer and closer to 20 years ago. I am the all being reminded also. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
You’re in it! It’s the best part!
The particulars of what we do and how we do it are going to matter a lot but broadly speaking I think this short essay from @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com is a good place to start thinking through it. www.liberalcurrents.com/its-not-the-...
Right, this is why I don't think it's not a fruitful enterprise to try to reach a Pareto optimal housing market. The way land rents work, both social and economic, means that consumers and sellers of access to land are always wrestling with some kind of monopoly, and dissolving those *will* hurt.
The author of this blog is now on Bluesky! You should follow Addison and subscribe to the newsletter! @ad-mastro.bsky.social
It appears this problem has been solved for me. @ad-mastro.bsky.social! Your work is great!
We are struggling to get out of the Capitalism has failed to build badly needed housing/Capitalism has built enough housing phase. cc @eean.dev
Now the wheels are flying off and we import discourse from other ailing markets because, well, the symptoms are the same.
I think it’s a matter of getting pretty decent affordability results because of 70s statecraft from a separatist government, cultural tolerance/appetite for multiresidential and some form of capital flight after referendum scares in the 80s and 90s made everyone complacent until we ran out of land.
It’s interesting to note that Québec delivers more purpose-built rental per 1000 and overall than any other province, and that’s been the case for about two decades. There is a lot going on here that doesn’t map quite neatly over the theory.
But those policies are inherited from 70s progressive separatists governments, and the reasoning for a lot of our productive policies have been lost to time. The discourse is captured by the market/non-market debate, hence the need for all this throat clearing.
Universal (but wonky, i.e. second generation reactive) rent-control on private rentals and strong-for-North-America participation in the overall market by social, co-op and nonprofit housing providers, with decent outcomes.
And yet!
I crossposted to Reddit and the people in r/canadahousing *hate* it. 🙃
I'm not proud to say I was reading this with the intention of finding out which Celine Dion song was the culprit
Today this post got a nod from @cwhitzman.bsky.social so I feel that I have earned the right to reskeet myself, I pleasure of which I dare not overindulge.
I lost the thread but someone posted about the importance of virtue signalling to civic order and progress. We should want civility to feel good! Make people proud about following the rules!
In which I go to war against the term non-market housing. medium.com/@AdamMongrai...
there’s shitty food and then there’s
Some people keep on living in the hopes that they will eventually see their enemies croak one day. Me? I live to see what is the least significant thing LinkedIn will choose to send me a notification about.
5.4) @jwmason.bsky.social's point about the relative value of a particular ownership is especially important to me, in this context. If someone is paying rent to live *somewhere precise*, they're not rewarding the landlord for their exceptional landlording qualities. bsky.app/profile/jwma...
5.3) The insight here is right: public building and operating can absolutely put the screws on bad operators by increasing competition for buyers. We really have nothing to lose by choosing direct state provision of services here, provided with can keep costs down (at least at private sector levels)
5.2) For this to work of course: all buildings must be rent-stabilized and vacancy rates have to kept high to give consumers a lot of options in a given location. Rent stabilization and new construction are two great taste that taste great together.
5.1) Rent stabilization should be thought not as a favor we do to poorer households, but as a way to protect consumers in general from the price-setting power of buyers, which end up distorting the incentives to offer quality housing services by inflating the relative value of land in a given rent.
Of course not. They are conceding the price of monopoly to live in a specific place, not because they enjoy the presence of mould.
5.1) This is @mtsw.bsky.social's point about there being no units so bad that they stop gentrification: when someone pays a ton of money for a run-down studio with terrible service from the landlord in NYC, are they revealing their preference for terrible housing services?
5) This is where housing-as-a-service helps make sense of what policies would be beneficial for the population, because there is a difference between the value that the market puts on a given location and the value it gives to good service from the operator.
4.5) So if you have non-stabilized units of comparable quality going for $3000 monthly, it sure will look on paper like the real revenue potential for the rent-stabilized building next door is $3000 * the number of units.
4.4) There is a loopy bit of logic here because location prices are set by buyers, not producers, so if you find someone willing to pay for your debt obligations at a specific place, this one transaction contaminates land prices around the given unit.
4.3) But in housing services, the seller is always a monopoly. This is an old observation - it's in Wealth of Nations, it's the foundation of georgism, it's the location-location-location of realtors. Residential units are non-fungible, you are always bargaining for a thing with no exact substitute.
4.2) In most other conventional businesses, consumers will react to declining value by taking their business elsewhere (obligatory observation about seller's inflation helping make sense of the real frictions here, even in ordinary goods and services).
4.1) This is no fault of the tenant! They are getting worse service in exchange for more money! If you were looking to buy a restaurant, you couldn't bank on keeping the same menu but increasing your prices by 150% to even out your finances after outbuying other interesting buyers.
4) Related to OP's point, these nonsensical acquistions can be turned into sob stories about how rent stabilization is actually hurting tenants you guys, because the internals don't allow operators to pay for the upkeep.
3.2) If you're trying to build a large asset portfolio, then it would make sense to buy a lot (meaning outbidding other buyers) even if the internals are rotten. Traditional banks eventually turn down that kind of business, but you know who won't? The real estate pros teaching you all these tricks.
3.1) The advice given out in these schools rarely spell out that some deals are rotten - they talk a lot about personal objectives. Like they won't say that you shouldn't buy below 8% cap rate, they will say it depends on what you're trying to do.
3) In Québec at least, there is some kind of quasi-shadow banking industry of private lenders that also operate non-chartered schools for would-be real estate investors. This acts as a source of artificial stimulus in favor of inflated transactions.
2.1) This suits both the lenders and the buyers, especially if debt obligations can be framed as something tenants have to pay for. You increase the value of your business without increasing the quality of your services. Everyone gets a boost in asset listed values for no real additional work.
2) Lenders will take an optimistic view of revenue growth or net income projections, failing to account for rent stabilization rules or the eventual deferred maintenance debt.
1) In jurisdictions with lax rent stabilization enforcement, operators are counting on simply ignoring the law and charging marginal rents. This puts tenants at increasing risk of no-fault evictions and/or rent gouging.
So why are these buildings getting saddled with levels of debt that puts them in the red at day 1? I have a couple of answers.