Experts say Ottawa is playing more of a role in housing, which is mostly a provincial and territorial responsibility, but federal involvement hasn’t brought much relief amid rising home prices.
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.
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.
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 the third time this article has been posted here today
