this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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I feel like I'm missing something. Don't we have a housing shortage, not merely an "owner-occupied" home shortage or a "rental" home shortage? Somebody please tell me what I'm missing.
If too many homes were owned by investors and rented out, why aren't rented homes more affordable? If you say, "greedy landlords," are you suggesting that the roughly 1.4 million landlords in Canada (source) are all effectively colluding? I find that highly implausible.
If we had sufficient housing supply for the demand in general, wouldn't that result in lower prices to both rent and own, depending on what's right for each individual?
I don't know about Canada, but in the U.S., yes, that's happening
AirBnB's a significant part of the issue. Short term rentals don't provide a place for people to actually live, while often providing a higher return over the short term than a long term rental unit.
Real estate speculators, too, add extra pressure to the housing market. Speculators often don't rent the property out at all, and attempt to treat housing as a raw commodity, buying up homes and just waiting for real estate prices to increase as the bubble continues to grow.
There may be real housing constraints in the country, but they're severely exacerbated by the view of housing as capital, rather than as homes.
When investors buy properties and set higher rent prices, non-investor landlords raise their rent prices to whatever the artificially-inflated market rate is for the area. Not all 1.4 million landlords have to be actively working on fucking the populace, but they all end up participating in it because no one is going to charge lower rent out of the goodness of their heart.
And when the "non-investor" landlords raise their prices high enough, they quickly find they have enough money to consider investing in a second rental property, out bidding people who have trouble saving after paying artificially inflated rent.
Did you know that the original version of Monopoly was called "The Landlord's Game", and was used as a teaching aid to teach the poor about the inherent immorality and inevitable loss of freedom and equality land ownership entails? Then a capitalist came along, stole the whole thing, rebranded it Monopoly, and made a shitload of money.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/The_Landlord's_Game
Isn't that an oxymoron? A landlord is by definition, an investor. Maybe you mean something else...
Theres no one single issue, but all of the above happening at once AND a population boom at the same time to top it off. We need an all-of-the-above approach to fix it too. Remove zoning restrictions, make lending for multiplexes easier, build public housing as fast and as much as possible, and found new towns... to name a few.
Nobody is homeless waiting for a home to be built they can purchase. There isn't a physical housing shortage.
Are you suggesting that building affordable homes wouldn't help anyone escape homelessness?
Homeless people aren't usually the class that can secure a mortgage or have the cash to purchase a home regardless of the affordability of the home.
Right, but you can also rent affordable housing...
Having enough supply isn't as profitable