You know what would go a long way? Make housing a shitty income source. Bring about heavy taxes on any additional livable property beyond the one you live in yourself. Ban all politicians from landlording - it’s a conflict of interest holding us all back. Ban corporations and foreign organizations from owning housing. You’d see a fire sale. Prices would plummet, and people who need housing would have a greater chance at it. Finally, get a fucking UBI going, and grow universal healthcare to include eye and dental care.
Enough is goddamn enough. We know who the problem is and it isn’t immigrants, it’s well-off folks taking and hoarding more than they need using their much larger disposable income and connections to take advantage of the rest of us.
There are solutions to making Canadian’s lives better, and they’ll take work and time to make happen, but this continuous pissing in the wind isn’t getting us anywhere. We can do this civilly with hard work, or we can get to a breaking point and do things like 1789 France. One way another, the bullshit has got to go.
There’s just not enough houses, though. Measurably. Banning landlords would be bad news for anyone who can’t afford a mortgage downpayment.
Great news then. Banning landlords of non purpose built units, would drop prices!
Like former office space or whatever? That’s not what OP said, but encouraging repurposing is an idea worth talking about.
No, as in single family homes. If the building was expressly built with density in mind (think triplex and above) then it’s fine IMO. This reduces the land scarcity side of the equation, as well as incentivizes density.
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Yeah, we could do a Castro and just nationalise all rentals, in theory. Growing a government department that plays the role of every landlord at once would be a big project, though, and of course it’s not politically viable at the moment. And we’d still have a housing shortage.
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Same problem as with getting a mortgage, then. A lot of people don’t have the money to start or buy into such a thing.
Finally, get a fucking UBI going
We did have UBI going. It set inflation in motion, as the naysayers always said it would, and we had to reel back.
UBI doesn’t have have to cause inflation, but implementation has to be careful to ensure that. You can’t throw any random desk jockey at the job and expect sunshine and rainbows. Trouble is, those who have the right skills aren’t interested in doing the work. We don’t subscribe to slavery, so…
CERB wasn’t UBI
Technically GMI, but we’ve always conflated the two. The study Ontario tired to conduct a few years ago, which was oft-referred to as a UBI study, was also GMI, not UBI, if you look at the implementation details. There are subtle differences, to be sure, but they probably don’t make much difference in practice. The conflation isn’t the result of them being radically different.
Further, when you have unskilled people doing the work, as we do, it is likely they would be unaware of the difference. So what differences do exist, even where impactful, are ultimately immaterial in any practical sense. Call it UBI, GMI, GBI, MBI, or the many other names thrown out there, and you’ll get the same response every time: “You what? Oh, you want to give people money? Okay. Umm. I don’t know what that entails, but I’ll think of something!”
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no it didn’t. saying CERB caused inflation ignores hand waves everything else going on in the world economy.
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50% of Airbnb in Toronto are hosted by entities of 10+ full homes. The average occupancy rate is 37 nights/year. How are we letting this happen?
Numbered corporations create annoymity for these Airbnb landlords to evade taxes and encourage mortgage fraud. force real name incorporation for real estate and cities can enact punishing tax rates for these illegal hotel operators.
Source? 50% seems really low
http://insideairbnb.com/toronto
It’s interactive. I clicked on the “full homes” and only multi listings and the number was 8600/16000.
Cool
People from r/Canada are so pathetic and predictable that they got pissed at the article and the thread about this has already been locked.
“Why would corporations hoard housing if it wasn’t for immigration?” is the main argument they use, like corporations wouldn’t be attempting to profit over a basic human need in any circumstances.
This pisses me off so much.
Are white upper class Americans in their definition of immigrants? Or are they just racist and simping for big corporations lol.
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Corporations should never be able to buy homes, they’re not a commodity. I’m in the US and we have the same problem, it’s fucking us over with no end in sight.
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sad by true 😭
No, they are not. The defining feature of a commodity is that it is interchangeable.
If you in Ontario try to charge me too much for a bushel of wheat, I’ll laugh and buy it from a guy in Saskatchewan selling it at a reasonable price instead. Makes no difference to me. The product is the same either way.
If I try to charge you too much for a house in Ontario, it would make no difference to you to move to Saskatchewan? I suspect not. They are not equivalent products. Living in the Ontario home will be a very different experience to living in the Saskatchewan home.
If housing were a commodity, a lot of our problems would be solved. But, housing is not. It even has a popular slogan to remind you of that fact: Location, location, location.
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Immigrants have always been the punching bag of long term residents…
Blaming corporations is a cop-out. Small “mom and pop” landlords are just as capable of gouging their fellow Canadians for profit. At least there are real-estate corporations that build stuff instead of being purely parasitic.
And at least the corps have to pay tax on their profits. Private owners who bought when things were cheap and are now multimillionaires got all that money effort-free and tax-free thanks to the principal residence exception.
This stinks. I’m not a landlord, I do own my own house.
And at least the corps have to pay tax on their profits
I wish i payed 15%. I’m not even counting on the rebates they get for setting up shop places, or developing “doing research”. Corporations quite often do not pay their fair share. Corporations do buy up swaths of real estate.
Private owners who bought when things were cheap and are now multimillionaires got all that money effort-free and tax-free thanks to the principal residence exception.
Almost nobody got their shit effort-free, you still have to go in with the bank and pay them a shit tonne of money. Principal residence only applies to first residence, and you still have to pay taxes on your residence (I know, because I pay them).
And here’s some news for you: housing was always relatively expensive, people who bought gigantic mortgages took on a whole pile of risk, made the banks rich, and sometimes came out richer for it; that doesn’t make them bad.
I was researching the other day when we might expect the housing market to recover to the point where people can actually afford a house again.
Instead, what I found was lots of articles proclaiming that the housing market will “recover” by 2024. By “recover” they meant that the downward trend in $$$ is going up again. Meaning house prices going up.
It really blew my mind that there is so little concern for affordability and it’s all about the investments… So sad. Seriously considering leaving Canada at some point in the future in order to buy a house, which is nuts.
The beaverton speaks truth once again!
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And they can’t wait until we push our govt to build more homes … So they can buy them up.
Everyone saying we need more supply is a loon. We need a reallocation of existing homes. Building more will just line these assholes’ pockets.
