According to a new report from Rentals, In July, the Canadian rental market hit a record high with an average asking rent of $2,078, marking an 8.9 per cent annual increase.
What we need to do is de-incentivize the commodification of housing entirely. Really make it unprofitable to deal in homes while passing the risk for your “investment” on to the people you’re exploiting.
I’m talking about an outright ban on all corporations, foreign and domestic, from owning single family homes — corporations need offices, not homes, and shell corporations and LLCs don’t even need those. Give a one year grace period, then tax all rental income collected from single-family homes at 100%. Maybe fine them each year too until they shape up.
I’m talking about regulating rental prices on short-term rentals, and capping the annual income allowed from short-term rental units to a value indexed against minimum wage (or preferably the area’s living wage, determined not by any level of government itself but by valid third party organizations).
I’m talking an annual federal tax on properties not occupied full time by the owner or their immediate blood relative. Parent, sibling, or child. Something insane, maybe 400-800% of the home’s property tax. Multiply it exponentially for each hoarded home. Throw in an exception for a second home if it’s far enough from the first (people who own cottages aren’t the problem, and shouldn’t be penalised). But only for the second home — nobody needs two or three or four “vacation homes”.
That’s how we force land-rich boomers out of the housing “market” and get homes into the hands of people who need them, who should have a right to stable housing, who are currently being blocked from the market by vampiric land leeches.
Or at the very least, the focus could go into de-commodifying rentals so that everyone always has a fall-back option for safe, clean, affordable places to live even if they can’t buy a house/condo. Nobody should be seeking profit in a manner that endangers people’s safety.
But then how would we generate GDP?
This is fake GDP. Investing in land value is unproductive. Unlike a business, nothing of value is added.
In Canada, spending a million dollars to open a restaurant or found a tech start up is a worse bet than just buying a house. Not to mention these businesses are simply harder to keep open when real estate expenses are so high. This is terrible for our economy and one of the biggest reasons why our GDP-per-capita is falling behind peer countries.
I think their question was facetious.
Hard to tell. Lots of Canadians, including probably our prime minister, genuinely believe that high and rising real estate prices is good for our economy.
Here’s your reminder that Ontario expects disabled people to live on 13k a year.
If they are lucky. Getting disability anything requires 90% luck and a doctor who “has the time” to sign a few documents.
In the US, they assign doctors to evaluate you, only to see you literally struggling to walk/balance yourself, and be told you could “probably work at least 4-8 hours a week, no disability for you, moocher”.
Nevermind that even if said mythical 4-8 hour/week, remote job existed, the pay wouldnt cover jack shit…
And our retirement pension is 760$/month in Canada, lol? At 65yo we will all live in the street
In BC it’s 18k a year for comparison.
That’s interesting, thanks
How are people not just breaking into the empty places and just living rent free? Like Canada is probably as cold as here and I would die in the winter if I didn’t have a home.
Exactly what’s going on in Spain. And if it’s your main place of residence it’s legal.
Based Spain
The number of empty places is vastly overstated by people looking for somebody to blame instead of market forces.
Probably a good idea to block market forces that incentiveise corpos from buying up all homes, creating a generation that can’t afford to own a home.
The “market forces” that create that incentive is “too many people, not enough homes”. And the latter was caused by 30 years of municipal stonewalling and the Martin-era cancellation of subsidized purpose-built rental programs – that is, things were better when the government was literally subsidizing landlords.
Then fund building more homes. Why would you give money to a 3th party so they can use said money to hire someone to build more homes. I’m not Canadian but this shouldn’t be an issue you need 8D chess for, if people charge too much, put in price control or make it very expensive to have more than 1 home, if there’s not enough homes then build more.
3th
Municipal government says no.
https://twitter.com/HousingNowTO/status/1441922859358724098
(housing now to is an affordable housing org that builds subsidized housing)
You do need 8D chess if the king can’t control the pawns and the pawns don’t want to move.
If by co-ops this means just a bunch of people coming together that want an apartment and the government gives them money to build said apartment building that they all cooperatively own and live in then that’s an amazing policy and I would 100% support that.
In case you’re interested, I saw a great vid recently about co-ops as a solution to the housing crisis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKudSeqHSJk
(Yes, non-profit co-ops bring down prices overall, but currently any new homes are both being built too slowly and are being snapped up by corporations or private individuals so they can make money off of them. There should be ways to protect home owners’ equity while bringing down the pricing for PRIMARY home buyers.)
I will never rent long term ever again, thank God I bought a house.
Sadly… You are very lucky you were able to buy a house… Majority now, will never know that luxury which should be considered a human right.
The majority were never going to own a home to begin with.
By design. It didn’t have to be this way
You’re right, but it’s not because of anything innate, but because of particular choices made by your(and my) governments. There are plenty of countries on the planet with 90%+ homeownership, they’re just not typically Free Market Liberal Democracies.
Conservative premiers across the country have abolished rent control and created a situation where the wealthy have several income properties ruining everything. Liberals are totally cool with it too. Tax domestic speculators. Encourage public housing at federal and provincial levels. Never vote Conservative.
Tbf rent control doesn’t solve the problem of scarcity.
What scarcity? Nobody is homeless waiting for housing to be built. Redistribute what has been hoarded.
The scarcity that is being measured in units of dollars here.
Seriously, who tf are they renting to? There aren’t that many rich people.
People are spending most of their income on housing
I’m American, but I can’t find a place to rent that doesn’t demand an income of 3x rent. Is that not a thing in Canada?
Dead country
Millenials and GenX are going to live on the street in their old age.
Landlords should be outlawed. They provide no service to society, only harm
They’re supposed to fill the gap for people who can’t afford to buy, or for whom it doesn’t make sense to do so (i.e. people in town on a temporary job).
The problem is that “landlords” these days are more towards the class of “investors” who expect rents to cover the cost of their mortgage plus additional profit
There are lots of ways that gap could be filled. Landlords exist to make profit by filling that gap. They have a financial incentive to maximize returns and minimize expenses, and have the leverage to do so to an exploitative degree.
Another way to accomplish that would be through cooperatives, which are non-profit corporations that exist to provide housing. They have a mandate to maximize utility to their tenants, and have no profit incentive leading them to exploit their tenants.
Public housing in the Viennese style is the proper way to handle this.
Always has been.
If you buy a 4plex for 2 million now, you have no choice to charge a high rent. But all the 8plex or 16plex from the 80s that are paid in full for years, there is no reason to go from 500$/month to 2000$/month just because
100% agree. Nothing pisses me off more than seeing somebody who bought at decades-old prices trying to justify charging thousands, while at the same time not having invested in maintaining the property (and triple that if they pushed out an existing renter or jacked up the rents on them to “keep up with rates”)
They are the reason why people cant afford to buy. Thats a looot of buildings going for sale if you get rid of landlords. Plummeted prices and mortgage payments. Then we should be focusing from the bottom up afterwards, make sure everyone has some place to live with public housing.
Yup, so take away the ability to grossly profit off the backs of others and allow the scales to balance. There’s no reason we can’t do both by disincentivizing gouging and slumlording while at the same time increasing the creation of more affordable housing.
Hell, if a sliding-scale of fees against # of properties/profit were implemented they could use the revenue from that to help fund more affordable housing, while discouraging house-hoarding at the same time.
Outlawing landlords gets rid of price gouging and slumlords. You cannot own property you dont live in, period.
While I don’t completely agree with an outright ban imo there should be strict limits to the amount of residential property a person or corporation can own.
No one should be making significant profit off of something so essential.
Make property ownership a shit investment.
Cap revenue from rent to 5-10%. Tax the living fuck out of empty properties so they’ll take someone, anyone. Tax higher the more properties they own.
Also outright ban AirBnB and make it so corporations are not allowed to own houses.
Yes please, houses are for people, corporations have no business (heh) owning houses.
AirBnB is exacerbating the problem, they need to be regulated to hell or outright banned.
We should really crack down on Airbnbs. Why make $2000 a month by providing a place for someone to live when you can make $500 in one night from a tourist?
Landlords only buy property as an investment vehicle. You cant keep landlords and not have housing being a money making scheme.
So in your mind all those new grads out getting their first jobs should just be homeless for 30 years until they can afford to buy a house? That’s a pretty harmful idea.
Youre looking at this from the current situation, corporare landlords are running amok buying all the property and only renting, decreasing the supply of houses available to buy instead of rent.
Outlawing landlords means all rental property goes up for sale, and only for people that will live there. Add on some pressure that current landlords have to sell within a few years or it goes to the state, and youre gonna have plenty of cheap houses for sale.
Fucking hell my salary isn’t even enough to cover 3/4ths of that rent. Pure insanity
$15 an hour seems to be about the minimum wage in Canada. $15x40x4.2=$2520 per month. If you’re working a full-time job and you’re making less than that, then your employer is breaking the law.
Isn’t that before taxes? Or does this work differently in Canada?
Oh I’m not Canadian, my bad for not clarifying. But I still live on a modern western country with a cost of living similar to Canada which is why I commented
Yes, and 2000/month rent is unaffordable at 85% of your income.
I wasn’t trying to imply that it’s affordable at that rate, but they said they make 3/4 as much as the rent. Something is fishy about that. They’re either getting ripped off, or they don’t work full-time. Usually part-time workers don’t refer to their income as “salary”.
Some people work part time tho because the companies don’t want to pay benefits…
“…asking”
Fuck off.
Sorry.
Same thing happening here in Oregon. Homeless people are everywhere.
These homeless just lacking enough personal responsibility to do the boot strap pulling
That’s substantially more than my mortgage payment.
$2000+ a month for rent on average is crazy, but rent has always been higher than most mortgage payments, though. Often by a lot.
The biggest benefit to renting is that it doesn’t require a $50,000+ down payment and $10,000+ “repair bombs” every once in a while 😵
Yeah, it wouldn’t even make sense for renting to be cheaper than buying. Most renting is from for-profit landlords. Obviously they have a mortgage, too. They’re obviously going to try to make a profit. Plus mortgage is only part of the cost of owning. There’s also property taxes and maintenance, which renting includes in the rent price.
The problems are mostly that there’s not enough supply (most commonly due to bad zoning), homeowners oppose anything that could help (cause that would reduce the value of the home they already own), and that most of these landlords are for-profit. Being for profit means they aren’t just going to charge more, but they also have a vested interest in making sure it’s more expensive and less tenant friendly.
Why wouldn’t it make sense for renting to be cheaper than buying? Would I prefer to pay $3000 in rent or $3100 in mortgage+all other fees? Even though I’d be cash flow negative by $100, I am building equity. At the end of 30 years, one person owns a home and the other doesn’t, for the difference of just $100/mo.
Renting is in fact cheaper than buying in places like Vancouver, where wages are low but real estate prices are high.
It wouldn’t make sense for a property owner to charge less to rent out an apartment than they are paying to buy it, in the same way it makes no sense to buy high and sell low on the stock market.
You need to cover your costs which includes the mortgage and maintenance fees. In the short term, those fees could be low, but when you need to get the roof or brickwork redone, suddenly you’re losing money. Why would you spend money on property only to lose money on it?
Property shouldn’t be seen as a commodity, but it also shouldn’t be a useless money sink. Who’s going to buy anything more than a single-family home if it’s just going to suck money out of you forever? There would never be any high-density housing anywhere.
No, cash flow negative does NOT mean unprofitable!
Imagine you are a landlord that owns a $500k unit. You are renting it out for $2000, but it costs you $2001 after your mortgage, taxes, maintenance and fees. Is that worth it? Think about it this way: it costs you $1 a month to own a $500k appreciating asset. That’s a ridiculously good deal.
The reason why it can make sense that renting is cheaper (as a monthly ongoing expense) than buying is because you get less when you rent than when you buy: when you rent you merely get the right to use the property, whereas when you buy you get the right to use the property as well as the value of the asset itself.
The money you pay into a mortgage doesn’t evaporate. Only a portion of your mortgage is considered a cost (interest and fees and the like) the rest goes into your home equity.
If a tenants rent payment doesn’t cover all of your mortgage, taxes and maintenance it does not mean your not making a profit.
