Historically, past housing crises have been resolved with massive input from the federal government. I hope this government acts with urgency, people are suffering out there, but given that the last housing minister was literally a housing investor I'm not very hopeful. I think only the NDP has the right alignment of interest and values.
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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By building medium density, transit oriented, neighborhoods; the feds can get after housing, environmental, and cost of living issues at the same time. Get three birds stoned at one.
If provinces fight it, give the housing to another province.
God I wish this would happen. The BCNDP are actually making substantial changes to our legislation but its not enough without major investments into transit infrastructure. Rail corridors need to be reopened/established and active transit projects need to be heavily subsidized.
Heavily subsidized?
It obviously varies wildly, but a road can cost $1,500k per lane km (NS highway planning figure). A multiuse path costs $10k per km (City of Toronto). That's 150:1 ratio.
And that's just construction, path maintenance is basically just snow clearance, roads are expensive; though maintenance data varies incredibly wildly based on how it's annualized and traffic volume.
Make every lane km of road built require the construction of 0.5km of path. Sure, construction costs increase 0.3%, but I'd wager the reduction in car use would see that recovered in maintenance costs (personal guess, not data driven).
But that's all municipal and to some degree, provincial.
What the feds need to do is curb immigration for a while until we figure this out and also create legislation for the realtor business/profession or just make it obsolete. Why the fuck do we need these dweebs when we can just simplify the process instead. There would be no more incentive from those bastards to blow up prices and give bad advice to people for a bigger commission.
Immigration isn't driving the housing crisis, though. Real estate speculation and short-term rentals are.
Massively tax short-term rentals and non-primary-resident housing and watch the problem go away
Immigration doesn't help. We let a million people into the country last year and only built 250k housing units.
It's not driving the crisis, but it's making it a lot worse.
It's all within the mandate of CMHC, they have used the tools to achieve this before.
Housing plans. Municipal planning. Housing construction. Planned, self-contained, communities. Housing quality improvement. Urban renewal. Density enforcement. Non-profit low income housing.
These are all things CMHC has done in the past, and can do again in the future.
Curbing immigration may help housing, but I don't know what the impacts to that on the labour for are. We're already in a labour crunch and using foreign workers.
Realtors are one I hadn't thought of. They should go the way of travel agencies, or be replaced by non-profits of there is something about them I'm missing.
I keep hearing about this labour crunch, and yet as someone who builds houses as a job (carpenter) this is the slowest summer since 2020 for building houses in Alberta. The builders only seem to want to build pre-purchashed houses and have limited the "spec" houses they build and sell later. It's the same for a lot of friends we have in the industry, people are scrambling to find work, not workers.
And I've been putting out resumes to nearby industries & not getting much attention. So really, how much is there a real labour shortage, and where? Because the 4th & 5th biggest cities in the country aren't doing so well.
Industries 62, 72, and 81 are all above 6% vacancy.
Construction had 64k vacancies last quarter, 12k of those in Alberta.
I get it, it sucks when the jobs aren't where you want to live, I've moved my family 6 times (in 15 years) for work, it's harder every time.
To state it is not a federal problem is being incredibly obtuse. Passing the buck on this issue is cowardly and exemplifies a lot of the reasons Canada is struggling as a whole. Trudeau isn't the only guilty party, but he's in the big seat and we need some big answers fast.
I'd like to know why neither Trudeau or PP haven't said they'd restrict how many housing units a single entity can own ... because that's a huge part of this issue.
It really isn't.
65% of Residential properties in Canada are owned by the family that lives in them which is quite high for developed nations, that leaves 35% for rentals which are obviously not owned by the people residing in them and clearly necessary for a functioning housing market.
All limiting the number of owned properties per entity would do is spread the profit out to different landlords, it wouldn't end up helping the average citizen at all.
24% of Alberta's rentals are owned by real estate investment trusts, indicating a move to the financialization of housing as an investment strategy. And it is causing problems.
Housing is a fundamental need, the same as food and water are. Gov'ts have allowed the privatization of these things to the detriment of human survival and it MUST stop ... or only the rich will be alive.
Saying that 35% of housing is rental hides the fact of ownership.
@girlfreddy
You do realize that every rental needs to be owned by someone right?
Whether it's your neighbor directly, or your neighbor's stake in a REIT, it really doesn't matter to the outcome for people who want to live in that area.
Rentals have always been commercialized, the whole point of renting out a unit is to make money.
You're right that housing is a fundamental need, but Canada (since it's inception) has always had private ownership of the housing market. We can fix this with a private market, the government just needs to regulate it better. Restricting ownership to two properties won't fix it though, it just changes the winners from large corporations (owned by rich people) to individual rich people who have enough to own a second home that they rent out.
The only way to make affordable housing is to drop the price of all housing, which is politically suicidal at the moment. You will never convince the 65% of the population that are owners to vote to devalue their property by 75% in order to make things affordable for everyone. The problem needs to get far worse, until ownership drops dramatically before any sort of effective policy can be passed. It's going to be a few decades at least.
If 65% of rental properties are owned by the people living in them and 24% are owned by fucking corporations, that leaves 11% left for everyone else ... including low income people who need to live somewhere.
I'm one of them. Had to move out of my apartment and now I live in a bedroom. At 62 I can't work much anymore because of workplace injuries, have had 4 surgeries to fix what happened, and get $1200 per month to live on. Keep telling me how it can't be fixed.
You're really bad at logic, and reading.
First, I said residential properties, not rental properties. That means any building designed for people to live in it.
Second, the houses people own have people living in them, the majority of Canadians in fact. So do the dedicated rentals (regardless of who owns them) even the properties owned by multiple owners tend to be occupied by renters.
There is no "everyone else" left out, those numbers include everyone who isn't homeless.
I never said it can't be fixed, I said it won't be fixed for a while because the majority of Canadians (and therefore voters) are benefitting from this system inflating their home value.
This is my experience in BC we have foreign owned homes and owner moves back to China leaving house empty or only a single basement suite occupied to have hydro/gas still being billed at the residence. Two of my friends are suite renters in this type of situation. The one hasn't seen the landlord/family in 2 years, so you have a 3500 sqft home empty, causing upward pressure on the housing. I went to rent a house once and Chinese owner and their agent were in town so we did a tour and negotiation. We mentioned the place smelled a bit they said it was rented before but tenant moved out, and has been empty for 6 months because they live in China, so no airflow. When we talked about deposit and cheques and notice to end lease etc. The owner was like, try it out, if you don't think it suits you just move out and we will ignore terminarion of lease issues. The whole vibe was "we don't even care if it is rented, but we have to make a half assed effort to look like we are trying to tenant it. " It was listed well below market rent and empty, so they weren't in any hurry to get rent cheques or have it occupied. This may not be all across Canada, but it is definitely a problem in BC. One townhouse we rented the strata could not actually discerne who even owned the house, when the were digging for info for a conflict it was looking like a shell company purchasing realestate posing as individuals overseas.
Even if not directly responsible for housing they are directly responsible for immigration. Why would they approve a million immigrants a year if they know that provinces are only able to build 250k housing units a year?
It is not even immigration though, out in BC we have foreign owned homes and owner moves back to China leaving house empty or only a single basement suite occupied to have hydro/gas still being billed at the residence. Two of my friends are suite renters in this type of situation. The one hasn't seen the landlord/family in 2 years, so you have a 3500 sqft home empty, causing upward pressure on the housing. I went to rent a house once and Chinese owner and their agent were in town so we did a tour and negotiation. We mentioned the place smelled a bit they said it was rented before but tenant moved out, and has been empty for 6 months because they live in China, so no airflow. When we talked about deposit and cheques and notice to end lease etc. The owner was like, try it out, if you don't think it suits you just move out and we will ignore terminarion of lease issues. The whole vibe was "we don't even care if it is rented, but we have to make a half assed effort to look like we are trying to tenant it. " It was listed well below market rent and empty, so they weren't in any hurry to get rent cheques or have it occupied.
This is the third time this article has been posted here today