Their premise is that the free market drove up the price of houses. Deregulation that is to say end of social housing programs led to this.

Yes and no - lack of supply led to this. It doesn’t really matter where the supply comes from. More social housing would certainly be good though.

Is that not neo-liberal? High construction costs come mainly from high cost of labor. The market driving up costs isn’t free market?

Do… do you think that business owners like having higher labour costs? I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone on the left complain about higher worker wages.

What protectionist policies are there?

Try building a residential property and see how many hoops you have to jump through.

When have property values been under threat of dropping.

If supply were to increase, prices will drop. This is good for everyone except those who think their house is a retirement fund.

They’ve been ever increasing due to market demand.

You forgot half of the “supply and demand” equation.

You say “lack of good investment”. Others say investors determined housing was a prime investment.

Exactly… Whereas housing shouldn’t be an investment. If its value outpaces inflation, it becomes less and less affordable to new buyers.

5-over-1 refers to a building/zoning design where you have one floor of commercial business space on the ground (typically small businesses, cafés, etc.) and then around 5 floors of residential apartments above it. Your classic “mixed use” neighbourhood: great for land values, walkability, sustainability, transit, cycling, etc.

I’m dubious about the claim that neoliberal policies naturally lead to this design though, as those with the money routinely seem more interested in paving a few hectares of green belt and filling it up with single family homes.

What would be helpful is for zoning bylaws to start redrawing cities with more 5-over-1 areas, replacing wide/noisy/dirty/dangerous through roads with narrow winding ones and broad sidewalks littered with trees and cafés.

I think zoning laws, parking requirement and crazy urbanism rules are a form of protectionism that drive home prices up.

It’s crazy that the land you buy is so restricted that the only thing you can do is… nothing asides from trying to win the lawn contest with your neighbors.

In my opinion, those are the factors that led to this catastrophe. Houses are literally frozen. You cannot start a business, you cannot build another house on your land, nothing.

The government can build more affordable housing, sure, but ultimately, we need to let the city build itself without overly restrictive zoning and urbanism by-laws.

Whether you like it or not, politics is into you and directly affects your life. It’s good to learn more about it.

“Neoliberal” refers to an economic push (typically championed by right-wing parties). The short explanation is that neoliberal proponents want to strip regulation wherever they can, believing that “the market” will provide what the regulations were guaranteeing (safety, competition, etc.) organically.

An extreme example would be removing any controls on food safety. The idea is that if a company gets a reputation for producing toxic/dangerous food, the market (ie, the people buying food) will naturally avoid that company because they don’t want to get sick and that company will go out of business. That risk is what keeps them in line.

A more common example is vehicle emissions. We regulate a lot of terrible stuff out of car exhaust — lead for example — because the market refused to do it themselves.

Opponents to neoliberalism point out that:

1. The massive amount of money in the hands of corporations means that their ability to manipulate the market (through advertising, media manipulation, or intimidating/buying their competitors) means that the market is insufficiently free for such policies and…
2. That (perhaps most importantly) the individual often will not make purchasing decisions based on what’s good for the broader public.

Also, a few thousand dead kids due to some executive deciding to add arsenic to corn flakes to reduce costs is too high a price to pay for “liberalising” the economy.