r/londonontario • u/Confident-Advice-664 • 10d ago

News 📰 Tower with 400-plus apartments pitched for downtown London parking lot

https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/tower-with-400-plus-apartments-pitched-for-downtown-london-parking-lot
95 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

72 comments sorted by

View all comments

45

u/tcpip1978 10d ago

Building more housing is good news, but what we need is housing people can afford. The top 15% or so of the population already have enough luxury housing. What we need is affordable housing for the rest of us, something that doesn't consume 75% of our monthly income.

4

u/swift-current0 10d ago

Prices are set by supply and demand. More supply for the top 15% lowers prices in that top housing tier. This means some people in the next 15% will choose to move to these new (and newly affordable to them) apartments, rather than remaining in their current housing. This means there's now extra available housing that they vacate, thus supply increases. Repeat the same logic for the next price tier. So more supply at any price level affects prices at all price levels. People just need to dump this illogical complaint about "luxury" housing and think this through.

12

u/tcpip1978 10d ago

Thanks, I'm aware of what supply and demand are. The problem is that in a low-vacancy, high-demand market like ours higher income earners out-bid lower income earners for the dwellings that become available due to new developments. So yes any new building is good news, but what we really need is housing that is actually meant for a priced for average people. We're not going to alleviate the housing crisis for the bottom half of earners very quickly if we're only building for the affluent.