• 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.

    • 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…

        • 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!”

  •  T (they/she)   ( @Templa@beehaw.org ) 
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    2211 months ago

    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.

  •  Pxtl   ( @Pxtl@lemmy.ca ) 
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    11 months ago

    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.

  • 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.