In a country with some of the world’s most expensive real estate, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government wants housing to become more affordable.
In a country with some of the world’s most expensive real estate, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government wants housing to become more affordable.
You are not only right, but foreshadowing the astroturfing all of that area is going to receive. Regulating real estate is the only answer and then we’ll talk about building more. We know this to be true:
I think personal ownership can go higher than just two properties without problems. The issue isn’t everybody owning five properties, but a small handful owning thousands.
Following that, limiting corporations’ ownership is definitely a top priority. Only owning housing with 30 units or more would probably help a lot. 10 units is just too little I think, as that’s just a conjoined townhouse, which can easily be personally owned and operated. 30 is more like a really small low rise.
AirBnB is definitely an issue as well, and is probably the hardest to regulate. Though definitely not the hardest to pass (that’s the corporations one). I’m not sure what can be done with it, as there’s already laws in place regarding hotels. Maybe force the company to register all BnB locations to a government database in real time? Though with enough housing, I think this will be an insignificant issue. Especially combined with the other changes. BnBing a spare room is quite a different thing compared to an entire unit/house on a permanent basis.
I like the idea of progressively higher taxes. Second house might have a modestly higher tax, but the third will be a steep increase and it only gets higher from there. Anyone who truly wants/needs multiple homes can have em, but they’re gonna pay through the teeth for them (which we can invest into building more homes).
We have such a shortage that IMO any extra home ownership is a problem. But it’s the kind of problem that I don’t think is a concern if they pay sufficient taxes on it. It’s the kind of problem that we can largely throw money at to fix.
Personally, I have no issues with things like summer homes, or having a second property you rent out for some money on the side.
The first is typically somewhere that having property is purely a luxury rather than a neccessity, so as long as it’s not being done in another large city or something, it’s not that much of a big deal. Especially so if the government isn’t on the hook for utilities.
For the latter, as long as the number of properties being rent out, and that the renting is done properly, it’s not a big deal either. The government already has regulations on rentals anyways, though I do wonder how well they’re enforced. Either way, while I do agree that excesses here is an issue, one or two properties utilized like this isn’t a problem, even if thousands of people do it in a single city.
I think you’re probably right about the numbers, that’s definitely a discussion to be had. I originally said 30 on the units but there are units that I walk past a lot and they have about 10. I couldn’t see a small business owner owning that, but I guess they could.
Living in Seattle and watching it be demolished was hard to watch, I’ve accepted it now. We’re still fast becoming San Francisco where you have the rich and then no one to work there, it’s not a good situation. Regulating the corporations is the only way to begin truly fixing it, imo. All of the best cities in the world are becoming disneyland and nothing behind the curtain.
Those sound like better ideas to prioritize to me. Besides political machinations, what reasons are there not to implement those types of policies?
Everyone who is making money by not implementing these policies is peeling off some of it to keep the policies that make them the money in place.
Corporations have lots of money and so a lot of people are told that it’s the “nimby’s” who aren’t letting things get built and that “Trickle Down Housing works!”. There is a slight chance Trickle Down Housing would work in 30 to 40 years, but regulating real estate is the fastest, easiest and best for the people who live there. So basically, the people who want more and more money.