Joseph Stiglitz on Canada’s Housing Inequality: ‘It’s Very Disturbing’
Ex-World Bank top economist talks unaffordability, the TPP, and being a fiscal ‘black sheep.’
Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, is the third-most cited economist in the world, according to Research Papers in Economics. Photo by David P. Ball.
Skyrocketing housing prices in Canada’s cities, most dramatically in Vancouver, threaten the cohesion of our society, argues Nobel laureate and former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz.
The Columbia University professor sat down with The Tyee on Friday at the University of British Columbia for a wide-ranging interview, touching on foreign real estate speculation, the changing field of economics, and how the new Liberal government might soon find its promises to the middle class derailed by trade deals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
That trade deal, billed as “the largest, most ambitious free trade initiative in history,” would allow foreign corporations to challenge participating governments using investor-state dispute settlement hearings — and potentially force taxpayers to reimburse them for any national policies and laws that hurt future profits or don’t grant a company “fair and equal treatment.”
The 72-year-old American author of The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them hasn’t previously discussed Canada’s housing crisis. But the harm and social strife caused by property speculation and empty condos is something Stiglitz knows well.
“It’s the same phenomenon happening in New York,” he said. “We attributed it maybe to Russian oligarchs buying multimillion-dollar apartments in huge buildings… driving up rents, making it unaffordable to live in the city.”
Figuring out the crisis is just one of many inequality-related challenges now facing Justin Trudeau’s government. But if addressed, Stiglitz noted, the rewards will be great.
“There are very significant benefits to creating communities with diversity, diverse incomes and other forms, that cannot exist if we price ordinary people out of our cities,” he said.
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