In the current housing crisis, it is extremely important to look for new solutions, especially from the younger generations. The solutions of past generations will not work in the economic uncertainty people are facing in their personal lives. The generation that is growing up right now will be facing different challenges from past generations, and today’s solutions must be geared towards an uncertain and constantly evolving future.
For past generations, it was a sound financial investment to purchase an education and to purchase a home. These are both significant long-term investments, entered into by our generation and generations before us, based upon the confident assumption of steady employment.
Investing in an education is no longer an assurance of a good-paying job when one graduates. The job market is evolving so fast that students need to prepare for job positions that do not even exist yet. I recently had the experience of going back to college for a new career path. After spending 9 months jumping through hoops to obtain funding, I was finally on my way to the future. This was in September of 2022 in an illustration degree program. In November of that year, ChatGPT made news headlines with the images it was creating. By the time I graduated, there had been layoffs in industries that use artists, and I am now competing with highly experienced applicants for work.
I have read many articles where young people are told that they can not be replaced in jobs that require skills such as problem solving, creativity and interpersonal skills. These skills are held by those experienced workers who are losing their jobs now. They are great skills to have, but without being paired with concrete skills and experience, it does not offer more than a slight hope to those who are entering the job market.
The overwhelming belief in our society is that the worth of a person is measured by their job, but what happens when those jobs become obsolete? What happens when you can not retrain a person for a new job before it too becomes obsolete? Retraining people for new jobs requires money from a system that is cutting funding for education, with no guarantee that the funds will generate a good return on the investment.
The U.S. Department of Labour has made a prediction that as many as one in five jobs will be replaced by AI. The rush to depend upon AI for important tasks, when one so often hears about it producing unreliable results, will likely slow this trend, but many companies are focusing upon reducing their headcount. This is a general trend that reduces the number of consumers who are able to purchase their products. The most likely result will be a feedback cycle that will create more layoffs in a downward economic spiral.
The cost of an education is going up as our government cuts funding for higher education. How are new graduates, who cannot get a job in their chosen career, and have difficulty getting work at minimum wage, to pay off the debts created by obtaining higher education? A person can not afford to purchase a home when only making minimum wage.
A mortgage requires 30 years of steady employment. This does not include many years of saving for a down payment. It only requires a few missed mortgage payments to lose everything. Forced sales of homes due to missed mortgage payments, once rare, are now becoming common. Real Estate prices are dropping, and I personally believe that they will continue to drop as fewer people find themselves able to afford to buy a home. How can we make future housing development plans based upon the assumption that new home buyers will be willing to take the risk of entering the real estate market?
We need to focus primarily on building smaller housing units that can be rented. More than that, we need to have access to rental housing that is not run for profit. Our Canadian winters have extreme weather and there are never enough shelters for those who are in dire need. Instead of making the homeless criminals for not having a place to stay, we need to recognize how we are creating the problem. Any person who is disabled and requires specialized adaptations to their accommodations should be protected from losing their home if another place to live that has the same adaptations can not be acquired.
As fewer people are able to obtain jobs, this will cut substantially into the income that our government, both federal and provincial, depend upon to run essential programs. Cutting funding to health and education services feeds the downward spiral. Property Taxes must be collected to pay for essential services at the local level.
People who want to paint a rosy picture of the future with AI talk about a Universal Basic Income to provide for our needs. They neglect to give consideration to the problem of how this goal would be financed. If we intend as a society to rely upon computers as a major economic force that will replace people in our workforce, we need to consider how our society and our governments need to adapt.
Computers do not pay income taxes. As they continue to replace people at a rapid pace, perhaps it is time to consider the idea that they should. Our governments spend huge amounts of money to develop software and infrastructure that use up our essential resources and harm the environment. We should tax the resources that are used. We should tax the subscriptions to AI software when it is used to replace human workers. We should tax the water and electricity resources used by large data centres.
There are many ways that we can be more creative in our solutions to current problems. We need to consider the long-term implications of the decisions made today. We need to include representatives of younger generations in our decision-making processes. They are the ones who will face the consequences of the decisions made today. The old solutions used by older generations will not be enough. We need to evolve. We need to be creative now.