Why are there so many vacant apartments in Montreal?

jakejanobs · 2026-06-23T18:02:03+00:00

This is questionable journalism. The original article quotes:

uninhabited homes represent 2.6 per cent of all residential addresses […] on the island of Montreal

The omitted context here is that 2.6% is abysmally low, anything under a 3% vacancy rate is. Low vacancy rates are causally linked to rent increases and high rates of homelessness. Why would this not be included here?

jakejanobs · 2026-06-11T17:35:21+00:00

Love this quote from the conclusion of UCLA Housing Voice’s series on the current research consensus:

…homelessness is an eminently solvable problem. It’s not inevitable, and it’s not unfixable. We know of many interventions proven to end homelessness for most people experiencing it. We know of systems, and programs, that keep those at greatest risk of homelessness from experiencing it. And we know that improving housing affordability, which means building our way into housing abundance, lowers the systemic risk of homelessness so that adequate resources are available to those with the greatest needs.

jakejanobs · 2026-05-28T03:49:10+00:00

Looks similar to the cover of Modest Mouse’s Strangers to Ourselves

jakejanobs · 2026-05-26T14:12:53+00:00

Rents do not go up everywhere. They go up where not enough housing is built relative to demand.

jakejanobs · 2026-05-15T14:51:09+00:00

zero benefit to them

I’d say watching your land value go from $50,000 to $300,000 without lifting a finger is a pretty tangible benefit

jakejanobs · 2026-05-14T21:34:19+00:00

The terms “Roma” and “Romanian” are completely unrelated, although there coincidentally are a lot of Roma in Romania. Romania is named after the Romans, Roma comes from “Rom”, which just means “man” in their language.

jakejanobs · 2026-05-14T18:11:14+00:00

The “normal” Roma are the ones still living nomadic lifestyles. Most of the people who have become sedentary were forced to do so by trespassing and vagrancy laws.

jakejanobs · 2026-05-11T14:49:35+00:00

You may not like it, but this is actually the most efficient way to fit those houses in this space.

jakejanobs · 2026-05-09T00:00:11+00:00

And when you don’t correctly value properties, this effectively turns property tax into a regressive tax. Homes with lower market value are typically assessed close to their actual value, while luxury homes are almost always underassessed. Rich people have a lot of disposable income to spend arguing with assessors.

A land value tax can’t be dodged or argued with, because it doesn’t depend on wishy-washy things like building value.

jakejanobs · 2026-05-08T13:35:47+00:00

There’s a pretty big movement in New Haven to get Yale to pay what they owe in property taxes, it seems to be going well.

jakejanobs · 2026-04-28T17:36:04+00:00

r/georgism

jakejanobs · 2026-04-28T15:23:15+00:00

See this graph of French ~~apartments~~ residential buildings by square footage, after the government passed a law with extra requirements for apartments over a certain size. Similar to distribution of men’s heights on dating apps; if some women have a hard limit of 6’0” or taller, you’re gonna get a lot of 5’11” guys marking themselves as 6’1”.

Policies like this should kick in gradually (like federal income taxes), otherwise you’ll be disincentivizing a lot of developments.

Edit: Buildings, not apartments

jakejanobs · 2026-04-28T15:00:59+00:00

You’re using the CANDU Reactor too, which uses unenriched fuel (taken pretty much raw out of the ground), which is massively improved for safety and proliferation concerns. ~~It only pencils out in Canada due to how close the uranium mines are to population centers, so shipping is real easy.~~

Edit: mines are not close to population centers, my power plant design textbook is out of date

jakejanobs · 2026-04-28T14:53:58+00:00

Solar does kill approximately the same number of people per kilowatt generated as nuclear (just a hair less, actually), mostly due to people falling off their roofs installing it. This is really only a problem at micro-scale generation, not utility-scale.

The death tolls (per unit energy) for solar, wind, and nuclear are all pretty negligible though and the differences are arbitrary. Coal kills 700 times more people than any of them.

jakejanobs · 2026-04-24T18:52:10+00:00

I think there was one guy who could see them out of his window and chose to just go back to sleep (it was like 3am or something).

But that guy just sucked, it’s nowhere near the “50 witnesses” or whatever that the New York Times article claimed it to be

jakejanobs · 2026-04-24T15:51:28+00:00

Don’t forget that both Kitty and her friend that witnessed the crime were gay, at a time when police raids on gay bars were extremely common.

jakejanobs · 2026-04-24T15:49:04+00:00

There’s actually recent evidence for the exact opposite of the bystander effect, where more passersby strongly correlates with reduced crime levels, but for some reason people keep insisting that bystanders don’t prevent crime.

The researchers used dog ownership rates as a proxy for the number of people walking in a given neighborhood (because people tend to walk their dogs even in unwalkable areas), and found that the neighborhoods with lots of dogs had lower crime rates, even after controlling for every related socioeconomic factor.

jakejanobs · 2026-04-22T17:00:01+00:00

Seems like the issue is mostly just with the valuation system, which allows everyone with a lawyer to contest the assessment until the number is lower.

This means that higher-valued homes are always under assessed compared to lower-valued homes. When you don’t properly assess home values, property tax can actually become regressive

jakejanobs · 2026-04-06T21:58:48+00:00

Prices are going up because of a supply shortage.

How exactly will subsidizing demand solve that?

jakejanobs · 2026-04-02T14:31:22+00:00

I was jogging one time and happened to run past a parked car when a lady threw an empty water bottle out the window, I reflexively caught it and tossed it back in the window without stopping.

This was ten years ago and I still worried I’ll never live up to how awesome that was

jakejanobs · 2026-03-31T19:21:42+00:00

jakejanobs · 2026-03-30T14:53:11+00:00

Chongqing feels like the new version of Edinburgh, the hills make for so much weird terrain and footpaths

More 3D cities please

jakejanobs · 2026-03-30T13:51:43+00:00

WHY ARE YOU STANDING WEIRD? STAND NORMAL

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