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Canada wants to make homes affordable without crushing prices
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this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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It seems to me that increasing supply alone is not going to cut it. Are there not a bunch of financial groups with nearly bottomless wallets that enable them to afford to buy up any amount of property to rent or flip at any price they want, even if it means some properties sit on the market empty for a long time? This government policy seems analogous to having people with $100 dollars sitting at a no-limit poker table with a bunch of billionaires who can afford to endlessly put you all in on every bet, so they always bet more than you have and then the government comes in and says they will allow for more games to be played. Wouldn’t the policy be pointless if you don’t also limit the number of games the wealthy players can play?
You are not only right, but foreshadowing the astroturfing all of that area is going to receive. Regulating real estate is the only answer and then we'll talk about building more. We know this to be true:
I think personal ownership can go higher than just two properties without problems. The issue isn't everybody owning five properties, but a small handful owning thousands.
Following that, limiting corporations' ownership is definitely a top priority. Only owning housing with 30 units or more would probably help a lot. 10 units is just too little I think, as that's just a conjoined townhouse, which can easily be personally owned and operated. 30 is more like a really small low rise.
AirBnB is definitely an issue as well, and is probably the hardest to regulate. Though definitely not the hardest to pass (that's the corporations one). I'm not sure what can be done with it, as there's already laws in place regarding hotels. Maybe force the company to register all BnB locations to a government database in real time? Though with enough housing, I think this will be an insignificant issue. Especially combined with the other changes. BnBing a spare room is quite a different thing compared to an entire unit/house on a permanent basis.
I like the idea of progressively higher taxes. Second house might have a modestly higher tax, but the third will be a steep increase and it only gets higher from there. Anyone who truly wants/needs multiple homes can have em, but they're gonna pay through the teeth for them (which we can invest into building more homes).
We have such a shortage that IMO any extra home ownership is a problem. But it's the kind of problem that I don't think is a concern if they pay sufficient taxes on it. It's the kind of problem that we can largely throw money at to fix.
Personally, I have no issues with things like summer homes, or having a second property you rent out for some money on the side.
The first is typically somewhere that having property is purely a luxury rather than a neccessity, so as long as it's not being done in another large city or something, it's not that much of a big deal. Especially so if the government isn't on the hook for utilities.
For the latter, as long as the number of properties being rent out, and that the renting is done properly, it's not a big deal either. The government already has regulations on rentals anyways, though I do wonder how well they're enforced. Either way, while I do agree that excesses here is an issue, one or two properties utilized like this isn't a problem, even if thousands of people do it in a single city.
I think you're probably right about the numbers, that's definitely a discussion to be had. I originally said 30 on the units but there are units that I walk past a lot and they have about 10. I couldn't see a small business owner owning that, but I guess they could.
Living in Seattle and watching it be demolished was hard to watch, I've accepted it now. We're still fast becoming San Francisco where you have the rich and then no one to work there, it's not a good situation. Regulating the corporations is the only way to begin truly fixing it, imo. All of the best cities in the world are becoming disneyland and nothing behind the curtain.