As a Canadian I'm a little shock by this description. Stifle innovation? The gov't ran the phone system in Alberta until the 1990's (or so). There was no innovation because it was determined "that's the job for the gov't, not private businesses" and they did it terribly.
Look at the cellular phone networks in Canada. Nothing changes unless the CRTC OKs it. Those companies would be eaten for lunch without the gov't backing them.
My own experience in the US is that things change much quicker when it comes to innovation. Are their stupid regulations? Sure, but they seem to change pretty quickly down here when people get pissed.
Not to defend the cellular oligopoly in Canada (because it's one of the worst in the world) but things aren't perfect in the US either.
T-Mobile and Sprint just agreed to merge, which means the US will have only 3 major wireless providers: AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint/T-Mobile.
> My own experience in the US is that things change much quicker when it comes to innovation. Are their stupid regulations? Sure, but they seem to change pretty quickly down here when people get pissed.
The US government just defacto banned (or outright, I can't recall) using ZTE/Huawei equipment in their mobile networks.
Say what you want about the Chinese, and I have no doubt they have ambitions of an NSA-like agency, but the rest of the world is fine to use their equipment and it smacks of protectionism for America to block their use.
I totally agree though that the Canadian government doesn't do nearly enough to encourage competition, and is usually quite content to let an oligopoly remain if it means avoiding foreign ownership.
The coastal cities embrace some kinds of individualism for sure.
That's also why when people do tend to leave the Bay Area, they go to other liberal areas like Seattle/Portland/Boulder/Asheville/Austin/Boston/NYC, even though those areas also have housing crises and the cost of living is rapidly approaching the Bay, rather than places like Mississippi, West Virginia, or Detroit, where their dollars would stretch a lot farther.
It was definitely a world of difference from where I grew up, even though it wasn't that far away. My experience in my hometown (Utica) was that it was a constant uphill battle fighting with idiots to try to get sensible policies in place to make the quality of life there better (context: It's a rust belt city with 0 industry or jobs, but a sizable amount of the population there actively makes things worse for themselves). For me, moving to a liberal area wasn't just a tolerance thing, it was a "I want to be around like-minded folks who actually care about improving their city and have the competence to do so". I don't want to come across the wrong way here- there were some people in Utica who really did try to make it a nice place to live, but I always felt like they were drowned out by fools.
Wow, that's true for all those cities? I might have guessed it for Boston and NYC, maybe Seattle too, not so much about the others. But don't know a lot about this area.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/05/pf/oregon-unaffordable-calif...
https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2018/01/10/austin-ho...
The best solution to high demand is a land value tax. That applies not just to houses, but to offices, shops, parking lots, etc. This means that land owners have to use their land efficently. If parking triples in cost, so be it. If road tolling is required, c'est la vie.
The proceeds of those tax must then be pumped into the local economy - funding services and improvements, like new bridges, or metro lines, or higher wages for central services (like schools and police)
I think a better solution would be relaxing zoning/making new development easier in areas of high scarcity.
It's also a feature that it would have a larger impact in areas where land value is high and less impact in areas where land value isn't high (so "most of the US" doesn't really matter).
The money goes to the local administration, who then can spend it on truly public places like parks, offering tax breaks to businesses they want to attract, subsidising housing, etc, which everyone benefits from.
Its is also the loss of opportunity suffered by those excluded with left uncompensated leads to a net transfer of incomes, capitalised into rental incomes and selling prices, and a misallocation of resources. Housing issues are purely a symptom of this economic injustice.
A Land Value Tax ends that net transfer, which is why the selling price of land falls to zero.
If you can make an acre of land in SF generate $1m profit a year, even with a 10,000% LVT it would still be worth $10k. With a more realistic 2% LVT, it would be worth $980k.
However if your acre of land makes $15k a year in profit as a parking lot, a 2% LVT means that you'll sell it to someone who can utilise the space in a better way, rather than make a $5k loss.
That person may build a house, and pay $20k a year in tax, setting a rental value of $1700pcm. Or they may build a 5 home building and pay $4k a year in tax per home, setting a rental value on each home at $350pcm.
If they want a $36k a year profit, then those prices mean renting out a single home for $4700pcm, or 5 homes for $850pcm each.
Zoning laws vary the value of the land of course. Land zoned as 'a park' is pretty much worthless (but not valueless). Land zoned as 'single story house' is worth at least $8m an acre ($2.5m for a house on a 1/4 acre plot). Land zoned as 'multi story' may be worth say $20m an acre.
However at 2% LVT, the single story home will be paying $160k per acre per year. The multi story with 40 homes will pay $10k a year per acre per home. Far cheaper, thus able to attract more buyers.
On top of that, there's a large incentive for residents in single story homes to rezone their area to multi story -- land price increases 150%, they sell up their (current) $2.5m home for $5.5m, making a cool 3M in profit.
If you allow a 1% LVT to accrue as a charge on the value of the home, that's only paid on disposal, there's no affordability problem either. Own a $2m piece of land at age 18, each year 1% of the value gets added as a charge. Die age 108 and 80% of the land value is then taken to pay the back-charges, leaving 20% for the estate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(197...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_218_(19...
Proposing it as a sales tax might avoid Prop 13, but continues the problem where new buyers fund the state budget and homeowners/Baby Boomers get everything for free.
Also, schools and local services might not get funded every year, I assume the rate of sales isn't constant.
If it's a majority, then I think it's safe enough characterize the individualistic attitude as American.
The ecosystem [1] that provides dollars to high-risk investments (like tech startups) just doesn't exist on the same scale in Canada. The only players with that kind of money are the federal and provincial governments, which are by nature very conservative.
[1] For example, one source of funding is large pensions and endowments, who take a tiny percentage of their overall portfolio and put it into "high-risk" investments. The funds are so large that the tiny percentage amounts to millions and millions of dollars.
It's having some issues getting off the ground though, it just kicked off a few months ago and I think they are way behind handing out funding. There's only been a handful of challenges and not many applicants (I submitted a proposal, which was serialized as a submission number just over 300). They are supposed to be distributing about $100M/yr, or 1% of the federal R&D budget.
Fuck, ain’t that the truth. Or their great-grandad made the money and each subsequent generations job is to not fuck up the gravy train.
You're absolutely right that the culture of respecting changemakers is not as present in Canada. But the SFBA is the world leader here. There probably isn't any place on earth that's more optimistic about innovators.
I don't think this is a culture thing, exactly. It's just that everyone who became rich in the SFBA did so by exploiting trends or innovating – since like, the 1890s. And the USA plowed zillions of dollars into the tech ecosystem in the Bay Area since World War II. Once you have that tech investor class, culture bends a lot towards their way of thinking.
Investors in Canada just don't have that kind of money to play with. Or, they made their money in an old-school industry, like resource extraction, and they flip out at the risk levels in tech startups.
In terms of prevailing national norms, I'd say Canada is slightly more change-friendly than the USA. Think about all the ways that the USA tries to kill immigration, stifle innovation in favor of incumbents, and put regulatory barriers in the way for entrepreneurs.
In contrast, Canada has lots of official policies to support tech entrepreneurship and skilled immigration. Plus, socialized medicine really does make it easier to be an entrepreneur. Politically and culturally, Canada isn't that into retro stuff, or trying to revive earlier, more conservative eras. People think their best days are ahead of them.
It's true that the people in Canada are not super interested in overturning anyone's applecart, for its own sake or just to get rich. That's not as respected here. People are more likely to be interested in innovations that improve the general social welfare. But maybe that's not such a bad thing.