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Canada’s Housing Crisis Demands Action, Not Words
(jacobin.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2023
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Socialism
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Politicians are terrified at the idea of seeing house prices decrease and losing the home owners’ votes, but when prices are driven up with all sorts of dubious tactics nobody bats an eye.
The housing market in Canada is plagued with speculation and fraud. Very few realtors face any kind of scrutiny or repercussion. The whole system is organized for people to engage in bidding wars while being kept in the dark about the actual "auction" going on. The realtors stimulate the bidding to rake in bigger commissions. Very few repercussions take place as they’re more or less autoregulated.
There are two realtors currently facing scrutiny, one of which was also starring in a reality TV show about making big bucks selling properties. It does look like they’re mainly being punished for not being secretive enough about it, rather than for the act of it.
Another thing I imagine is it's mostly a fear of losing the vote of property owners who are using it for equity, income rental, or with the intent of resale.
I imagine there's more than a few home owners like myself who were simply lucky, and bought into this broken system wanting it to change. So it's not like they had my votes in the first place.