this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
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I tried to point this out on Reddit and Lemmy so many times and usually got downvoted. People want to believe there's some nefarious boogeyman buying up houses and keeping them vacant, but the reality is that virtually all homes in Canada have occupants. We just don't have nearly enough housing for the population.
Edit: it's still happening. In the other thread on this board about this article, people are saying "it's not the foreign buyers we should tax, it's the corporate buyers". People will do all sorts of mental gymnastics to avoid considering the possibility that we need to densify our housing.
We need to change the ways we build our cities. The suburban experiment has failed and we need to address that. Commiting nearly every scrap of residential zoning for exclusively single family homes has had massive impacts on the urban fabric of our cities, the scarcity of housing, and the dependance on cars.
We don't need to eliminate all single family homes, but we do need to make it possible to build multi-residences and mixed use areas. We also need to address how we tax residential properties because as it stands, single family zoning is often subsidized by the denser areas of the city.
Vancouver and Toronto are currently sitting about 7% and 7.4% homes that are empty or not for usual residents. That's a fucking massive number, imo.
Source: https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/astonishing-drop-in-number-of-empty-homes-in-metro-vancouver-census
Okay and you could have 50% more homes available if 20% of the SFH in a city was converted into apartments. 7% is nothing if we actually would densify what we build rather than just sprawling suburbs.
Sure, but let's not pretend it's not an issue.
"empty or not for usual residents." is a useless metric. Student houses are considered "empty" if the the students have a family home to return to and haven't updated their mailing address.
Wrong. It states directly in the article that students and foreign workers are not included in that metric.
From Stats Canada.
Students are usual residents of Canada, they're not usual residents of the place they stay in while studying in school.
Directly quoted from the source I posted.
That's why I clarified how you misinterpreted that sentence, and gave you a source from Stats Canada. I also worked the last census in KW, where there's a large student population, so it was drilled into our heads students only count if they live in that house year round (and preferable changed the address on their ID).