this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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A reminder: rent is the purest form of supply/demand in the housing market. Nobody rents multiple units to sit on them the way people do to buy them. If prices are going up, that means vacancy is low and there just aren't enough units to rent compared to the number of people who are looking for a unit. Landlords hiking prices are hiking prices because somebody will pay that higher price.
The solution has to involve either building a crapload more units, or having less people who need housing (as always, Malthusians are invited to go first). Anybody who is proposing other approaches to this problem is either a con-man or an idiot. You cannot redistribute your way out of a shortage.
I need you in every housing thread I post here.
I honestly try to be That Guy on this subject but I am getting tired of the swarm of downvotes from "well this is dumb we just need to do the simpler thing and abolish capitalism" contingent.
Offer and demand should be taught in high schools.
There are more empty buildings than homeless people. There are "investment properties" sitting empty all over.
The problem is the greed of the parasitic landlord class.
This is a myth. What "empty building" studies usually cover is buildings that have no usual occupant. That includes things like student houses where the occupants still have a "home address".
30% of Canadians are domestic speculators. This isn't a myth, it's a fact.
Not arguing there, but GP was saying that a horrendous number of units are vacant which is simply not true. And there are a few cases where being a landlord isn't hoarding housing away from potential buyers, like in a University neighborhood where students and temporary staff will need access to rental houses. Now, obviously, student housing would be better handled by purpose-built multi-unit rental buildings but city hall says no.
Landlords are still parasites.
We don't need to build more investment and luxury homes. We need to focus on affordable housing.
"We" - as in the government or the taxpayer - don't build investment or luxury homes at all. Private businesses build them. All they need is permission to build them.
And they want to build them because there's demand for them. If you don't let them meet that demand, it will be met in a worse way: by rich people buying the homes of poor people and converting those into luxury investment housing. You can see that everywhere - flips, teardowns, gentrification, etc. That's what happens if you don't let enough new luxury housing get built: you think the luxury buyers are gonna stop buying?
So to solve the housing crisis, 2 things need to happen:
government needs to invest heavily in affordable housing and public construction infrastructure.
government needs to get the hell out of the way of the private sector that will happily profit from stopping the bleeding.
Your saying just cut out the process of converting or gentrifying altogether? What is the point of building homes for the rich when it's the poorest that need it the most. I agree we still need high end homes for high end earners but they're already in a great position and don't need, but rather want, more property. Maybe there should be a cap or heavy tax on owning multiple properties.
How do you do that? Let's say I buy a run-down house, spend 2 years dumping a bucket of money and sweat into it to make it into a nice place, and then sell it. That house is now converted and gentrified. That kind of "flip the house I live in" is how a lot of people got started into playing the housing market. And at slower pace that's just the normal process of how normal non-investment houses function as they go crazy-high in value, without even involving "investors".
How do you ban that? And more to the point why would you want to?