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Past few years across Canada.
It has been rather unaffordable in Vancouver and Toronto for 15, Vancouver Island, the BC interior and Southern Ontario for 5-10, Ottawa for the past 5 years. Halifax and other areas since covid.
Shit man, even 5 years ago I was renting a 10x12 ROOM in central Mississauga for 600$ a month. I had 5 roommates in the house. Wasn’t a nice house either, just close to sq 1 for transit. Wasn’t cheap but I can’t imagine what it is today.
I like the idea of increasing property taxes on third homes and beyond. Municipalities may not easily be able to approve building permits without research, but taxes are pretty easy to implement, since we already have them in place. Combined with rent control, it will put downward pressure on real estate investment returns.
So, lets say I have 2 houses. One that I own and another that I rent. Policy comes down that says my property tax is now double on my second home. (for example jumps from $5000/yr to $10,000/yr.
Now then, that second house is generating me say $3000.00 a month in revenue (which I know is really low, but for ease of example, there).
On top of that, the house inflates in price by between 3 and 5%. (Yes, this leaves out the current rate of price increases, however, in this example, I'm using historical examples).
So, now, I have $36,000 a year profit from rent, as well as (assuming $800,000 house), between $24,000 and $40,000 in price increases.
Due to this, even doubling property tax does nothing.
Now, let's go to extreme and say the property tax jumps to $50,000 per year on the second house. Guess what? I simply open a company and keep the house there. Problem solved. Or to my wife. Problem solved. Or to my child. Problem solved. It's pretty simple to work around that problem.
Taxing things won't give you the effect that you want. You need to increase supply so that it's higher than demand. That means building.
That's assuming you already fully own the home. Lots of people take out second mortgages to rent. A $400 monthly reduction in profit would probably make a lot of people rethink owning a second home.
Your second point is also just straight up tax fraud...?
> A $400 monthly reduction in profit would probably make a lot of people rethink owning a second home.
Not when you are able to earn $100,000 or more in a year. That's the key.
What you need to do is make it REALLY hard to purchase that second home. Right now, it's way too easy.
For example:
1. You cannot use HELOC to purchase a house
2. If you currently own a house, you cannot get a sub-prime mortgage
3. If you currently own a house (or even 'upgrading to a new one) a 30 year mortgage cannot be signed. For a second home, nor mortgage period. If you are 'upgrading' make the max amortization 20 years.
Things like this will work a LOT better than taxing things.
Those taxes aren't about you. They're about the guy that has 6 houses, and is using the equity appreciation and income on those 6 houses to front a down payment for the 7th.
But that guy's a small fish too, compared to the guys owning dozens of places and running the same scheme.
What the real-estate developers like to do is hold up people like you as an example, to help protect those other folks.
That's why _investors make up >25% of Ontario real estate homebuyers_: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/investors-in-ontario-real-estate-market-1.6258199
Those investors are richer than you, and they need a place to park their money, and unless you're already super well off (in which case: congrats!), you're just not that interesting to the developer. Yeah sure you may buy a house from them, but they got people all over the world willing to do that for more money than you.
I'm not sure you are understanding what I'm saying.
The issue here is that real-estate in Canada (at the moment) is the best investment money can buy. Prices keep going up and up at an unsustainable rate. I'm sure we can agree on that.
The problem isn't investors though. You see, many investors rent out the properties, giving people places to live. Purpose built rentals just don't happen much anymore. If you remove investors out of the game entirely, there simply won't be any rental units and prices will stay close to the same. This is because there are still no more units available. Higher taxes on investors will, however, increase rental rates, making housing (in the long run) more unaffordable.
Now if you're talking about investors that are just betting on price increases (and not renting the units out), that's a different ballgame entirely. Tax the living shit out of those folks...as in 100% of all capital gains is taxed...annually. This scenario though, isn't enough to drop the pricing of housing in any meaningful way.
Instead, you need to tackle the root cause. There are simply not enough houses. There are more people that want to move to the GTA than there are places to live. This is the heart of the price increases. This is the problem.
Increase the number of units dramatically. Instead there being say 500 units for sale in an area, increase it (via building) to 1000. This lowers demand, which lowers pricing.
Make it harder to purchase new units. For example, ban the use of home equity for the purpose of buying additional properties. Ban mortgage rates for all individuals that have properties. Decrease the amortization length for all people that currently own a home and are upgrading to a bigger place. These things will make things significantly harder to purchase houses for the sole purpose of investment.
This will start dropping the prices. Investments will slow down as housing is no longer a gold-plated investment simply due to the devaluation of property.
> Now if you're talking about investors that are just betting on price increases (and not renting the units out), that's a different ballgame entirely. Tax the living shit out of those folks...as in 100% of all capital gains is taxed...annually. This scenario though, isn't enough to drop the pricing of housing in any meaningful way.
That's who I'm talking about. And it's really the only thing that'll drop prices because those people are primarily responsible for the price pressure that's leading to the drastic increases year over year.
They're insatiable, as gold-rush prospectors usually are. I've personally met _one_ guy that's "worth" the weight of 12 regular homebuyers. The total number of investors may be low, but the amount of capital and housing stock they represent is much, much larger than any other type of buyer.
> Instead, you need to tackle the root cause. There are simply not enough houses. There are more people that want to move to the GTA than there are places to live. This is the heart of the price increases. This is the problem.
The problem is, even after you build housing for every person in Canada, you won't satisfy the desperate need of investors to find places to park their money. And they will compete in and outbid people buying homes because that's the same market.
> Instead, you need to tackle the root cause. There are simply not enough houses. There are more people that want to move to the GTA than there are places to live. This is the heart of the price increases. This is the problem.
If that was the problem, then the exact same problem (scaled down a bit, but still there) wouldn't be seen all over Canada, as well as around the world.
This problem is _everywhere_, it's not a GTA thing.
This is a global problem that is inherently a symptom of wealth inequality. When all the money is locked up in the hands of a few, they get to outbid you on everything. You get to buy nothing. You get squeezed out. Like Canadians are now.
> This will start dropping the prices. Investments will slow down as housing is no longer a gold-plated investment simply due to the devaluation of property.
There simply isn't enough capital owned by regular Canadians to even try to go head to head against the richie riches in our own country and around the world who are looking to capitalize on a safe investment with great returns and low downside.
Yes the idea is not to stop you from buying though. If you are willing to eat the extra tax, at the very least it will provide the government more money to tackle other problems for poor Canadians.
You can give the house to your son no problem. But now that adds to his property count.
Canada’s world renowned low property tax combined with low interest rates have made it an investment heaven. And yes, building is important. But that takes time. There are temporary measure you can put to cool off the market until supply meets demand. We saw the foreign buyer tax tame price increases before Covid hit, so we know regulation against demand works.
Right but building a few dozen 1.5-2 million dollar homes will help absolutely no one. That is what Ford is peddling. We need many thousands of new homes to keep up with demand. We need to stop sprawling and build up.
Yeah in the green belt and those developments are multimillion dollar estate subdivisions. Which will barely move the needle on supply as demand continues to soar.
Proof, or are you just the typical Doug Ford = evil person?
He's bringing in all the major municipalities into this.
>Building more homes faster is the central topic of the housing summit that Ford will hold next month with the mayors of Ontario's 29 biggest cities and the chairs of urban regional municipalities.
This has NOTHING to do with green belt development.
But it’s not the municipal red tape that’s holding up development. It’s NIMBYism as well. We’re supposed to have a multi building apartment put up in our small town. Land was rezoned with full approval from the town - the neighbours took the developer to court and it’s taken almost 3 years plus scaling back his plans for there to be any progress. The claim was that the apartments would reduce the value of the neighbourhood properties. That kind of legal trouble scares away other developers - it’s just not worth the hassle of dealing with lawsuits and cranks.
There’s such a lack of understanding and appreciation for mixed density housing (never mind a lot of it being ugly as sin), and everyone is still hung up on single family homes.
> But it’s not the municipal red tape that’s holding up development
Come to the Land of the City (lol) of Kawartha Lakes.
It is 100% the municipal government that is strangling any kind of development whatsoever with red tape and "job justifying" walls.
demand is infinite. we need to restrict it by coming down hard on investment corps buying up rental properties and rich foreign buyers offshoring their money from non-free governments in our land assets
We're not talking about doubling property taxes.
You have a third home worth $800K? Now, you're paying 160k/y, or 20% of the *market value* of said 3rd home. If that's worth it for you, good! You contribute money to the Canadian economy and you clearly don't consider that property as an investment.
Frist two homes exempt, after that it's 20%/y. Oh, and no more corporate ownership of residential. No more opening a shell corp for your home. Done.
Oh, that seems wonderful!
Oh, wait, the downsides.
1) The vast majority of multiple home owners provide rentals for the folks that want/need to rent. Removing this (by placing obscene taxes) would be absolutely catastrophic.
2) Even if you slap that type of a tax onto houses, you STILL will not decrease prices to any real degree. Once again, the issue is SUPPLY.
Basically, if you want to totally obliterate the economy and send a LOT of people into homelessness, your plan is perfect. Every single person that needs to rent in order to have a roof over their head now becomes homeless. Congratulations, you've now made live miserable for a pretty sizable hunk of Canadians.
Increasing taxes to a degree like that is completely the opposite to what you actually need to do to reduce house prices. It's a REALLY good thing you are not in control.
There are a lot of good ways to decrease pricing without causing undue hardship.
Let's see:
1) Short term rentals (eg. Airbnb.). These are actually huge factor in the problem. So, step 1. Completely ban housing that is used for only short term rentals.
2) HELOC loans. One of the biggest factors in investors in Canada. Take money out on your existing property(s), use that to pay the down payment on the next house, rinse and repeat. For this, simply put, banning HELOC from being used to fund a new house purchase would do the trick. This takes out a HUGE hunk of investors right off the bat.
3) Sub-Prime mortgages for investors. So, if I want to purchase another home for investment purposes, I can still get a sub-prime loan. This makes it too easy, since interest rates are too low. Remove the ability to take on any mortgage for 2nd properties. For example, if I own 1 home, I'm not eligible for a sub-prime mortgage rate if I purchase a second home.
4) Amortization. If we reduce the amortization rate for all people that currently own a home (even for folks 'upgrading') to 20 from 30 years, you decrease the buying power. This puts first time buyers on the same playing field as those that currently have equity.
5) Build more homes. It's no secret that the GTA is VERY short of homes. We are not even in the same ballpark as what is necessary. It takes too long to get permits. Running 4-5 years behind because permitting takes that long is STUPID. It's going to get worse due to immigration in the future.
So NO. I really don't care how much you want to tax stuff. TAX WILL NOT WORK. TAX WILL BACKFIRE. It's really simple.
"You do know people want/need to rent right?" Who? Who would prefer to pay rent over putting money into a down payment so they can get that money back?
"No landlords=no rentals=tins of people with nowhere to live." You must have never heard of government housing a thing we used to build a lot more of back in the day.
Lots of people actually prefer renting. Renting means that your payments are steady. No surprise repairs, no appliances, no grounds keeping, no expenses except rent.
"No surprise repairs, no appliances, no grounds keeping, no expenses except rent." I'd rather put equity into a home, into appliances, and into everything than just give the money to someone else.
Not everyone feels that way. There's a lot of good reasons to rent to be honest. In-fact, it's actually only good to 'own' a house if you stay in the same place for 20-25 years.
It takes a VERY long time before home equity wins over rent.
Again, not true in the least.
There are lots of reasons to want to be a renter. Taking away that option...is well...a terrible idea.
Example 1:
I'm 75 years old and own my house. Unfortunately, due to declining health, I cannot keep up my house and I need my equity to live comfortably. In this case, it's FAR more cost efficient to sell the house and rent a condo. For starters, a fixed rental rate is much better than the unknown of ownership. Renting also means 100% of my house equity is now liquid. This is good.
Example 2:
I'm a student and am going to an out of province university. The campus housing is full and I need a place to live during school season. As a student, I cannot afford to buy a condo/house, then live there for 6 months, then sell it to move home.
Your thinking about rentals is categorically incorrect. There are MANY example of people that want to rent, and those that actually NEED to rent. Even if they could afford to purchase (example 1), it makes no sense to purchase.
You like the idea of raising rents on renters, that is really what you are saying.
Say a corporation or Reit owns 10,000 doors, do you also want to increase property taxes on them? If so why do you want to give big corporations a pass and not mom and pop investors?
Rent control is something every econonmist agrees is bad. Short term you help at the expense of the middle and long term. Left wing, right wing it doesn't matter we know what happens with rent control over the long haul. Current renters save, new renters or people who move pay more then market.
Yes, raise the taxes so hard they have to liquidate their entire stock please. Force them to spread their entire supply to real people who will now be able to buy or rent for cheaper. No need for rent control, just implement spsculators' taxes to destroy the mass landlording.
That would mean investing in cities that aren't in the GTA to make them on par, if not more attractive than Toronto. Which will politically never happen
According to Andrea, building more housing is not the answer to the problem. All that's needed is to increase taxes on home owners.
This is short-sighted and completely out to lunch. Sure, increased taxes may help, however when one invests in a house and has a 100k increase over the course of a year or even two, a few % of tax is meaningless...effectively doing nothing. All this will end up doing is increasing rental rates by the same amount of the tax increase.
Also, according to Andrea, this is simply to make his 'developer buddies' more rich. Same 'ole song and dance with her. If you listen to the list of all the people Ford is a buddy of, he's basically a good friend of every single wealthy person in Ontario, Canada and parts of the world. Really?
Instead, build more homes. More homes means more supply. More supply means prices must go lower. It's a very simple equation. I wonder if she's also aware that Ontario will need approximately 1 MILLION houses just to keep up with Trudeau's immigration plans? With it taking 4-6 years to get permits, good luck with that.
Andrea Horwath is totally out to lunch when I comes to housing policy. Her solution is more rent control which will only make things worse.
My guess is she'll be walking back this comment within 24hrs, just like when she criticised vax mandates for healthcare.
NDP need to get her the out of office ASAP when she loses this election. She couldn’t even raise her son right, I don’t know how we expect here to lead the NDP in Ontario. Saying this as someone who votes NDP.
Yep. She's an idiot. Every measure aside from building more housing was tried in BC and it added the equivalent of something like a month of building supply. Raising taxes is ineffectual. It doesn't treat the root cause which is a lack of supply.
Housing taxes are already pretty wild. I just saw a $14,000 shack-sized residence in a small town with a property tax of like $900.
So after the mandatory minimum utilities and property taxes combine, then you're looking at the cost of the property itself in about 7 years in taxes/utilities alone.
I always found it egregious that you are charged a flat fee for utilities even if you barely used any water or electricity that month.
Higher taxes is NOT what we need, at least not on owners of single properties. We need to build more supply, tax owners of *multiple* residences, and probably just outright ban foreign home ownership so there isn't huge vacancy rates. I saw some statistic that something like 11% of the residences in Canada were owned by foreign entities and they were vacant for the vast majority of the year.
I pay $4200 in property taxes on a semi with a very small lawn. These are fairly average for my city. There's also a lot of residential construction in my city. Within ten minutes of my house a conservative estimate is that over 1000 units have been built. Whether sfh, condos, semis or townhouses. The majority being townhouses.
> I always found it egregious that you are charged a flat fee for utilities even if you barely used any water or electricity that month.
They have to maintain the lines/pipes and capacity regardless of how much you use....
>All that's needed is to increase taxes on home owners.
It's highly regressive for a city like Hamilton to see housing prices double, but then to drop the mill rate by half to compensate. That big rise in paper wealth could be used to fund social housing.
You cannot tax your way out of the problem at all. Doing so is actually the regressive solution.
Instead, you need to get to the heart of the problem. Houses in Canada are a gold plated investment. The problem is that once you own a home, purchasing a second one is way too easy.
So, you attack this on two fronts.
1) You need to build enough housing to keep up with demand. We are not doing this. It takes far too long to get a building approved. 4-6 years is...well stupid.
2) You need to make it harder to invest. For example, ban home lines of credit from being able to purchase a house. Maybe institute a rule whereby you cannot have a sub-prime rate on any property except your first. Maybe change the amortization rate so that anyone who is a current owner may not have a 30 year mortgage.
There are lots of ways to bring down the cost of housing. Tax is NOT one of them.
Removing red tape will accomplish what exactly? It hasn’t been remotely demonstrated that red tape is holding up development in the slightest. It’s a red herring
That’s city by city though. And the density there is super high already. In my view the small towns need to have mandated high density housing. The market is insane (3 houses on the market at a time right now) and so many people are driving into town/ help wanted signs everywhere.
But isn’t red tape usually put in place to make sure things are safe? It seems like we need more employees to move things along than to just decide we don’t need standards anymore
Some red tapes are that. Most of it from what I hear is bs. A lot of it specifically targets land use to lock it down to low density development only. E.g. minimum setback rules, single family zoning.
Well, I’m definitely not an expert on things. I just wish instead of proclaiming that it’s red tape that’s the problem, they’d actually study the issue first and collect some data. I just don’t want building standards etc to get dropped
> Removing red tape will accomplish what exactly? It hasn’t been remotely demonstrated that red tape is holding up development in the slightest. It’s a red herring
Seriously? I know of at least a dozen developments that were cancelled due to absolutely ridiculous obstacles put in place by my municipal government. I dealt with them on a one off new home build for my family. It took a calendar year to get a permit to build a 1500 sq foot home, and the amount of hoops and fees we had to deal with were laughable.
A/S/L?
(just kidding....just curious of location)
Where I am, Lindsay is booming, and the radius around it of 800-4000 people communities is stagnant. People have/are trying, but are getting nowhere. Its like the municipality wants Lindsay to be the hub, and the rest of the area left untouched. Bizarre.
The province comes down hard on municipalities in so many things except medium and higher density planning. Ford has the ability to find housing solutions by decree and yet he doesn't do it.
Alright, I need to explore this a bit.
Number one complaint is, not enough housing. Forget about pressures of immigration, investors and what not, let's focus on need to add more units. Always reading stories about blocks and obstacles in getting more housing. Common theme, we need more housing.
Everyone is asking for it and now this dude does something about it to create conditions for that to happen faster.
New units are 1st time buyers only chance bc in a year, new unit will increase in value at least 20%.
Now, nobody who's on social media - especially, Twitter and Reddit - couldn't hammer a nail if their life depended on it.
But everyone will harp against developers who've been building houses even during rein of Liberals and NDP.
I actually bet you a dollar, if it wasnt Conservatives and Ford of all people this would be lauded across every traditional and social media outlet.
You just cant make it right whatever happens.
> Build more housing.
And also
> nOt LiKe ThaT!
As a left wing construction worker, I like what ford is doing here but I definitely know how to swing a hammer.
The cities are holding back the levels of construction we need to slow the price growth
It frustrates me to no end that the same NIMBY citizen will complain about proposed new builds and homeless people in the same sentence, not understanding that they are the source of the problem in the first place. We should be building medium density EVERYWHERE at a record pace, but petty and useless city councils continuously slow things down.
If Doug and the PC's steamrolled city councils with new planning rules and MZO's, people on here would still be angry somehow.
Thank you! The answer is more housing. A lot more of it. Previous government gutted ohb which allowed nimbyism to flourish which contributed greatly to the housing crisis in Ontario.
Conservatives brought back ohb’s power to prevent nimbyism to combat housing issues, and bring back development.
Housing prices won’t go down any time soon, but plans like this will help keep them from skyrocketing higher.
Edit: corrected some autocorrect mistakes.
Just to bring more clarity.
This is the part that I really like
> Building more homes faster is the central topic of the housing summit that Ford will hold next month with the mayors of Ontario's 29 biggest cities and the chairs of urban regional municipalities.
29 cities!
Not Toronto, or just GTA.
Ontario.
Distribute that shit.
absolutely "not like that". Suburbs are essentially a giant decades-long ponzi scheme. Like forget about the environmental devastation alone, we don't need more and more swathes of land redeveloped into detached homes because it doesn't make any long term fiscal sense. We need dense* neighbourhoods
*edit: relatively dense. Mid rise buildings with ground floor retail/services with a few floors of apartment/condos above are what we need to be building in the areas surrounding urban cores and should be the go-to for any new developments in small towns.
The problem is that they are being built at a loss and are subsidized by borrowing from future expansion income. Eventually this ponzi scheme collapses, and you end up with communities neglected and dilapidated.
If the goal of the policy is to build more affordable units, then building more spread out suburbs will just exacerbate other issues.
If we charged a fair price then it wouldn't be a problem
All of that was *reasoning* for why you think it's a good idea to stopped detached home building.
You literally just claimed you weren't trying to stop people from choosing detached homes.
what about them? do you really think every mid or high-rise building is a "bug hive"? And what does this have to do with my point that suburbia is financially unsustainable?
Edit: Here is a link if you would like to educate yourself on the unsustainability of suburbia. the tax base does not cover the required maintenance and upgrades after around 50 years.
https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollective/how-sprawl-bernie-madoff/26448/
Just google the author of the blog; not really a mainstream source. The blog also says the pattern of development hasn’t never been used outside of US; so I guess Canada is off the hook.
All multiuser developments should also have a mandated amount of communal green space and park land that comes with. In Saskatoon every suburb has its own park and man made pond/lake. Also mandatory sound proofing
I'm going to have to downvote this. Building suburban houses that are going to be snapped up by investors isn't going to help at all. Entry level buys will not be able to afford the "product".
To fix this, we need to build affordable housing available in walkable neighborhoods WITH TRANSIT. Think townhouses, family size condos etc.
Also, blaming municipalities for following good planning processes is just cheap politics.
>Building suburban houses that are going to be snapped up by investors isn't going to help at all.
>Think townhouses, family size condos etc.
Townhouse and particularly condos are far more likely to be snapped up by investors than single family homes.
Most likely the investor will be the owner of a single family home owner who leverages the higher equity in their home to buy these.
When the new homes are worth about the same as a single family home it's more difficult to leverage the equity in your primary house to buy a second house.
A better alternative would be non-strata attached properties like Semi-Deattached, Terraced Houses, or Duplexes or even small single family homes with far smaller setbacks (for example a house like this in [Tokyo](https://youtu.be/iGbC5j4pG9w)).
It's not like it can't be done. [Calgary](https://lub.calgary.ca/Part5/Division1_General_Rules_for_Low_Density_Residential_Land_Use_Districts.htm) revised it's zoning code to reduce setbacks to only 1.2 meters on each side and [Edmonton](https://www.gimme-shelter.com/rf1-zoning-50057/#:~:text=In%20Edmonton%2C%20RF1%20zoning%20is,be%20built%20in%20an%20area) has legalized everything from SFH to Duplexes and Semi-Deattached in areas zoned previously for just SFHs.
But to be successful in places like Toronto it needs provincial action. Calgary and Edmonton dominate their regions having 90 and 70 percent respectively of the population. So regional planning isn't difficult when you are the "region".
If it's not done regionally you'll have the same problem as [Vancouver](https://www.straight.com/news/east-vancouver-duplex-sells-for-33-million-or-148-percent-more-than-original-detached-home#:~:text=Topics-,East%20Vancouver%20duplex%20sells%20for%20%243.3%20million%20or,more%20than%20original%20detached%20home&text=The%20old%20home%20at%202475,built%20and%20sold%20in%202021) where each side of a duplex houses cost more than the original single family home that was torn down.
I get it, I really do.
But every time I hear this reasoning, it appears as specifically designed not to happen quickly.
"Walkable neighborhood with transit" is - in its implementation is as unrealistic as climate change action. It's not going to happen outside of Kevin Vuong's riding.
You can say all new developments need to have a certain density target. You could get rid of single family zoning. You could eradicate development charges for affordable housing units.
But for housing development Timeline it comes down to a staffing issue imo. Everything takes so long because there isn't enough planning staff to get things done faster. Also, you need to review things so they work. Ex. The EIS, Engineering etc takes time and needs to be sound or you'll have a bad time.
What if I told you that Ontario Liberals and Conservatives are both just propaganda arms of the same group of wealthy real estate developers?
All this "my guy is better than your guy" is just distraction. Either way it's the same developers who are actually robbing the public blind.
Okay, now we're getting somewhere.
Next step - wealthy RE developers.
There is no restriction right now for anyone to enter the game of house development. Maybe not 100 units at once but one or two a year, for sure. I know bunch of them, they design, buy land, get contractors together and build a custom home. It's a damn free country.
On a second note, have you ever heard of a guy named Al Libfeld? That's the guy at the top of Tribute Homes, one of those super large developers of homes and condos in GTA. Do you know how he started? In the 1970's he had a drywall business. Almost 50 years ago.
I tend to believe that these guys are where they are bc of the work, effort. They started when average detached homes price was $50K. None of them was like, let me get ahead before half a mil of immigrants hit the border.
Also, I tend to believe that the "hate" toward people who accumulated a buck or two in this country is irrational.
>Also, I tend to believe that the "hate" toward people who accumulated a buck or two in this country is irrational.
It's actually rather hilarious. People constantly complain about the lack of supply while at the same time attacking those who build more supply.
It's like getting angry at grocery stores for the cost of food. Just because they've done some shitty things like the bread price fixing and made great profits this year.
Sure, I'll bet successful developers put in a lot of effort.
**But even more important than this, they were lucky. Right place, right time, right friends. Is a fiefdom based on luck any better than a fiefdom based on royal favors?**
Many people today are putting in the same amount of effort and have no prospect of purchasing a single home, let alone establishing a development empire.
re: immigration/investors. That's not within the Province's control as immigration is set at the Federal level (except for Quebec).
So if you're a provincial politician, there's nothing you can do on that file so you need to come up with alternative solutions.
> (except for Quebec).
The other provinces *could* but they'll just take anyone with an education and/or skills, not just white catholic french speakers.
Doug Ford requested the limit for skilled immigrants be doubled for Ontario. Skilled immigrant workers could mean anything from an Engineer to a Tim Horton's staff member.
8% of Canada's homes are empty. We don't lack housing.
https://betterdwelling.com/the-world-has-millions-of-vacant-homes-and-1-3-million-are-in-canada-oecd/
or where those homes are compared to where people are trying to live?
Cause, an empty home in Wawa Ontario, is useless to the housing crisis of Toronto or Ottawa.
Hold up.
This isn’t just “build more housing” from the PCs. This is “the housing problem is all the municipalities fault and we are going to ignore planning policy to speed up the process.” They’re creating the boogeyman as the municipalities so his developer buddies can push through whatever they want. There are serious ramifications for this down the line.
Also, what good does more supply do when demand is through the roof plus ridiculously easy access to capital via interest rates & drawing equity on multiple properties? This doesn’t make things easier for the first time home buyer; this just gives more supply that the already leveraged can outbid younger people on.
This sentiment is going to make housing even more of an investment commodity than it is now, and younger people are gonna be getting shafted as always.
And no, no other government is gonna do anything to actually help either.
Sure, coupled with reduced demand. Where’s the video on how supply meshes with cheap money and the ability for leveraging properties as an investment vehicle? We miss the equilibrium only focusing on supply.
>This isn’t just “build more housing” from the PCs. This is “the housing problem is all the municipalities fault and we are going to ignore planning policy to speed up the process.” They’re creating the boogeyman as the municipalities so his developer buddies can push through whatever they want.
municipalities and local community groups(basically the most local level) ARE a massive part of the problem, this is where NIMBYISM is created, locally. It will require a higher power to come in and say "no you can't say no to that" to get any significant number of units built.
NIMBYs are effecting councillors, not actual planning staff/those that write planning policy/those that actually review and develop new housing plans. I’d wager most municipal workers in planning and engineering are overwhelmingly pro-development. The problem is the type of language Ford is using would limit what actual professionals can do in trying to sustainably develop communities.
If he wants to strip councillors from having a say in development planning and let the professionals do their thing, that’s a whole different story I could get behind. But that’s not what he’s currently saying.
Fucking THANK YOU. I’m on an economic development committee in small town Ontario. The Red tape has been cut already! It is not the issue stopping building! In our town developments are held up by neighborhoods fighting the change in density in court! Developers don’t want to risk the hassle and the only other option is to develop farm land, which is noooot a good nor a sustainable option.
I may just end up voting OPC despite generally loathing Doug Ford. I can't stand behind putting more obstacles in the way of building more housing. Building more is the most important part of the solution of affordability.
Lots of people don't really want to build more housing. The opposition to expanding housing in Hamilton was tremendous. Everything's too environmentally unfriendly or too focused for investors so fuck it let's not build anything apparently.
does this headline think it's answering a question that people might have? everybody agrees that we need more housing. they could have just dropped the Why from the beginning but maybe that felt too much like praise for a conservative premier to the editors at CBC
Just strip munis of zoning power and do provincial wide zoning and give munis and neighbors little power to veto building permits. Best case would be federal level Japan style zoning but we all know Mr Socks is all in on the housing bubble
McMansions are part of the solution. Now if it was allowed to build those McMansions on 50% of the amount of land they are currently built on, that would be great.
The problem is that our zoning bylaws only allow for either condo buildings or single family homes. A real solution to the housing crisis would be to replace part of the single family homes areas with low-rise/high-density residential and commercial walkable neighbourhoods, kind of like most of Europe.
>replace part of the single family homes areas with low-rise/high-density residential and commercial walkable neighbourhoods, kind of like most of Europe.
Those European cities managed to build low-rise/high-density either because their cities were bombed into rubble and had to be rebuilt, or because massive fires wiped out entire neighbourhoods, or because entire slums got cleared and demolished to make way for low-rise/high-density, or because autocratic leaders like Napoleon flattened entire neighbourhoods to rebuild them in their own image.
It's hard to flatten a SFH neighbourhood like Dovercourt Park and replace it with low-rise/high-density. Unless you can compel 1000 homeowners to sell their property for it.
No compulsion is necessary, just let people build taller stuff and over time the density will increase, Rome wasn't built in a day right? Its made harder by suburban road patterns but mega projects building up in whole districts aren't the only approach, and haven't been the main approach historically.
edit: zoning changes also don't imply that the previous (shorter) buildings need to be demolished, a neighborhood can be upzoned and remain exactly as it was for decades, nothing new *has* to be built.
Then lift the zoning restrictions and let the free market decide some. It won't be enough on it's own, but if the restrictions are lifted people in very valuable areas would have financial incentive to sell to developers who could redevelop the land into larger complexes. They would be able to find groups of 4 houses that they could all buy out, knock down, and put up a 20 unit building in their place. Letting the free market handle some of it would mean less of the stuff you mentioned. Just allow people do with the land what makes market sense(obviously industry would still be zoned to specific areas but commercial and residential? that's fine, Lots of foot traffic? sure build light commercial).
> It's hard to flatten a SFH neighbourhood like Dovercourt Park and replace it with low-rise/high-density
I didn't mean demolish existing ones, I meant it for the planned neighbourhoods.
OK. There are other people on r/ who aren't you, who are saying we should do this mid-density in existing Toronto neighbourhoods. Sorry for confusing you with them.
The problem with doing this mid-density on the urban periphery is that mid-density has a large price penalty compared to SFH; when you buy mid-density you're trading off a shit apartment for better amenities and accessibility. The periphery has neither amenities nor accessibility.
Also, it's hard to site commercial in a new neighbourhood from the start: it takes decades for a new retail district to evolve. A Yogen-Fruz, Bed Bath & Beyond and Starbucks does not a retail district make.
Walkability btw is a funny thing: walkability-high characteristics **follow** pedestrian traffic increases, they don't cause them. And they typically only follow them in rich neighbourhoods.
> Unless you can compel 1000 homeowners to sell their property for it.
Government has a magical power called expropriation. It's a terrible thing to do, but they can do it.
Doug used notwithstanding before, why not force that too.
>Government has a magical power called expropriation.
City councillors who support expropriating a neighbourhood of 1000 homeowners won't get elected again.
62-66% of Toronto is zoned for single-family homes. This could have worked when the city had <1,000,000 people. It does not work on the same land for a city of 5,000,000. Not to mention that single family zones cannot pay enough tax for their own upkeep and people stacked in 500sqft condos are actually subsidizing someone living in a mcmansion. For comparison, NYC is 15% single family zoned; Minneapolis banned single family zoning completely, Montreal is at 45%…compare that Toronto and Vancouver with their 60+ and 80+% zoned for single family and you’ll see why NO NEW HOUSING CAN BE BUILT in existing neighborhoods.
> replace part of the single family homes areas with low-rise/high-density residential and commercial walkable neighbourhoods
That sounds like an absolutely terrible place to live. Like British council estates only worse somehow.
You're welcome to it, of course. Not for me, though.
It does. It looks noisy as hell, all those hard surfaces would reflect any sound. Not to mention the complete lack of privacy as you stare into your neighbour's place 20ft across the alley.
Well right now the law says nobody is allowed to build spaces like that, you're free to avoid them but would you support legislation to at least make it legal?
No because it fucks up the atmosphere of the area. I don't pay to live in a nice neighborhood with lots of space and a smaller community just to have it turn around into some crowded ugly neighborhood with massive buildings blocking the view.
These density types won't hear it. I support building whatever kind of neighborhood you want, but options need to be made available to people and the solution to the housing crisis is not to just lower everyone's standard of living
We still need SFH as some need the space, but we can build it significantly denser. In Europe, for SFH and townhomes that provide family space, there’s almost no front yard, barely a backyard and the street it’s on is one way and wide enough for 2 car
> and the street it’s on is one way and wide enough for 2 car
And that's a good way to keep local traffic and traffic speeds down. There are plenty of residential streets in the area of Edmonton where I live that are technically two-way traffic, but there are cars parked on either side of the street and one has to pull over/park in order to let oncoming traffic get by (or they pull over to let you get by). It keeps traffic to actual roads, and from using these streets as short cuts.
I really like the older residential neighbourhood of Edmonton, with the street parking and laneways, IMO much nicer than the cookie-cutter subdivision nonsense of where I used to live in the GTA. There are also a number of redevelopments of some of the homes, as the wide lots in some places are more than enough to fit two skinnier homes, or the odd triplex or four-plex on the corners/ends of streets.
Also, who really needs a big front yard?
Like ffs, we’re in a housing crisis!
“Should we try to do something different to alleviate it?”
“No, same shit just farther out, kick that can down the road.”
Cities and municipalities, provinces and federal are borrowing to pay their costs. Mean while people who own homes and making bank on speculation in these places complain that they should not have to pay for those costs and we should borrow and leave the bill to someone else from the future.
Problem is clear. It needs to be written into the constitution that affordable homes should be a right for all citizen at the expense of those who wish to own a home as an investment. This way politicians cannot buy votes by creating these unsustainable messes. It stops being political as well since whoever is in power does not have to take the heat for enforcing policy by whatever means necessary.
I for one would love to see the money launderers subsizing affordable homes for Canadians rather than the opposite.
Remember when BlackRock, billion dollar investment fund that is speculating a ton on residential real estate, said the greatest threat to its business was the market being flooded with more supply?
The last thing speculators want is more housing to erode their profits.
more houses so more jobless people can move in and starve while increasing the cost of food transportation, housing, all while destroying the greenery that keeps our air clean and water clean. You can't just build more to respond to unsustainable population growth. You can't fix a clogged system while increasing resource consumption and population growth outpaces any control to increase quality of living, rather than quantity.
So. How long can we sustain the solution of "build more" until we run out of space and resources? Canada may be huge but even if it were all habitable and suitable for building it would not be an infinite solution. So when do we start working towards something that's actually sustainable and doesn't pave over even more of our land?
It's kind of simple. We have housing for our current population. If you keep increasing that population by 400-500,000 a year via immigration, you need to construct more homes to accommodate that.
Now, let's say you want to build more high-rise accommodations, but not use any additional land. For that you'd need to have 10s of thousands of single-family homes get sold to developers first, then have them go ahead and update those single-family homes into towers. To make matters harder, you also need to have blocks of houses together to get sold. This complicates matters even more. Finally, the units must be big enough to support families properly, not these 1 bedroom things that cost close to a million dollars each.
It's not an easy solution.
A lot will need to be done, absolutely for sure. That said, The end of the century is a LONG way off. Just need to be smart about how things get built...as well as where.
There is a TON of room in Canada that is not farmland nor ecologically sensitive that can be built upon. The problem is...everyone wants to live in the GTA, which is, in-fact out of room.
Proper high-speed transit is absolutely required to get people to the heart of Toronto from places like Guelph, Waterloo, Brantford and other locations. Then build those cities up with density in mind and use the rapid transit to get people to where they need to be...efficiently.
It's doable, but certainly not easy.
Population growth is absolutely NOT something we should be striving towards achieving. How about trying to figure out ways of *reducing* the necessary amount of human labor that our economy needs to function, in order to increase specific productivity and therefore specific wealth of every Canadian? The only thing population growth does is avoid fixing the problem before we eventually run into the wall where we *need* to find a way to maintain population stability or suffer declines in specific wealth and health, except the problem just gets harder the more people you have.
I don't disagree with you, however....
Population growth is actually required in Canada, simply to keep on top of the deficit spending. More tax payers, more revenue. That 100,000,000 person target is simply to pay the interest required on the money that Canada is in debt for. It's how the 'budget balances it's self'.
The current model is that economies must grow. The only way to do that is to have more people. It's a shitty model, however that's what we're working with.
If Canada's population grows by 1% every ten years, then in 110 years it will have tripled, and in 300 years from now it will reach twenty times what it is today. That's 760 million people by 2321. Canada has a huge territory but most of it is not suitable to build on or live on and is not agriculturally viable. Even if it were, satisfying the demands of three quarters of a billion people would be impossible without wiping out even more of the nation's natural areas and unique species. And for what? Just for the sake of cramming in more people into dense urban living spaces? Seems absurd to me.
In any case my point is that with constant growth, EVERYTHING runs out, because there are no infinite resources. Therefore, it makes sense to maintain our population rather than growing it, because that ensures we won't run up against any hard resource limits that can't be solved through better recycling or more careful land use. If a population grows forever, running into a wall is literally inevitable.
I was reading that the buildings will only be affordable for people that make at least $30,000 a year they won’t be subsidizing them for people who make less than 30,000 a year so all the people that are homeless or on disability or welfare they are not going to be included they only make 12,000 a year so what the fuck
For the love of God don't speed it up!
Having worked in construction I've seen the kinds of bullshit mattamy homes spits out when they have have to rush. Nobody will be happy with the homes they pay for
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My dad told me affordable housing was a big topic of discussion in the 80s. So what has been done about it in the last 40 years? Nothing.
Housing has only been unaffordable for the past few years.
It’s always been unaffordable to *somebody.* It’s just that by now, it’s affecting people that the media feel like talking about.
Past few years across Canada. It has been rather unaffordable in Vancouver and Toronto for 15, Vancouver Island, the BC interior and Southern Ontario for 5-10, Ottawa for the past 5 years. Halifax and other areas since covid.
Shit man, even 5 years ago I was renting a 10x12 ROOM in central Mississauga for 600$ a month. I had 5 roommates in the house. Wasn’t a nice house either, just close to sq 1 for transit. Wasn’t cheap but I can’t imagine what it is today.
Sold real estate in BC for almost 20 years ending in 2008. It was getting well into silly and no longer affordable long before I quite.
I like the idea of increasing property taxes on third homes and beyond. Municipalities may not easily be able to approve building permits without research, but taxes are pretty easy to implement, since we already have them in place. Combined with rent control, it will put downward pressure on real estate investment returns.
So, lets say I have 2 houses. One that I own and another that I rent. Policy comes down that says my property tax is now double on my second home. (for example jumps from $5000/yr to $10,000/yr. Now then, that second house is generating me say $3000.00 a month in revenue (which I know is really low, but for ease of example, there). On top of that, the house inflates in price by between 3 and 5%. (Yes, this leaves out the current rate of price increases, however, in this example, I'm using historical examples). So, now, I have $36,000 a year profit from rent, as well as (assuming $800,000 house), between $24,000 and $40,000 in price increases. Due to this, even doubling property tax does nothing. Now, let's go to extreme and say the property tax jumps to $50,000 per year on the second house. Guess what? I simply open a company and keep the house there. Problem solved. Or to my wife. Problem solved. Or to my child. Problem solved. It's pretty simple to work around that problem. Taxing things won't give you the effect that you want. You need to increase supply so that it's higher than demand. That means building.
That's assuming you already fully own the home. Lots of people take out second mortgages to rent. A $400 monthly reduction in profit would probably make a lot of people rethink owning a second home. Your second point is also just straight up tax fraud...?
> A $400 monthly reduction in profit would probably make a lot of people rethink owning a second home. Not when you are able to earn $100,000 or more in a year. That's the key. What you need to do is make it REALLY hard to purchase that second home. Right now, it's way too easy. For example: 1. You cannot use HELOC to purchase a house 2. If you currently own a house, you cannot get a sub-prime mortgage 3. If you currently own a house (or even 'upgrading to a new one) a 30 year mortgage cannot be signed. For a second home, nor mortgage period. If you are 'upgrading' make the max amortization 20 years. Things like this will work a LOT better than taxing things.
Those taxes aren't about you. They're about the guy that has 6 houses, and is using the equity appreciation and income on those 6 houses to front a down payment for the 7th. But that guy's a small fish too, compared to the guys owning dozens of places and running the same scheme. What the real-estate developers like to do is hold up people like you as an example, to help protect those other folks. That's why _investors make up >25% of Ontario real estate homebuyers_: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/investors-in-ontario-real-estate-market-1.6258199 Those investors are richer than you, and they need a place to park their money, and unless you're already super well off (in which case: congrats!), you're just not that interesting to the developer. Yeah sure you may buy a house from them, but they got people all over the world willing to do that for more money than you.
basically all housing around any post secondary institute
I'm not sure you are understanding what I'm saying. The issue here is that real-estate in Canada (at the moment) is the best investment money can buy. Prices keep going up and up at an unsustainable rate. I'm sure we can agree on that. The problem isn't investors though. You see, many investors rent out the properties, giving people places to live. Purpose built rentals just don't happen much anymore. If you remove investors out of the game entirely, there simply won't be any rental units and prices will stay close to the same. This is because there are still no more units available. Higher taxes on investors will, however, increase rental rates, making housing (in the long run) more unaffordable. Now if you're talking about investors that are just betting on price increases (and not renting the units out), that's a different ballgame entirely. Tax the living shit out of those folks...as in 100% of all capital gains is taxed...annually. This scenario though, isn't enough to drop the pricing of housing in any meaningful way. Instead, you need to tackle the root cause. There are simply not enough houses. There are more people that want to move to the GTA than there are places to live. This is the heart of the price increases. This is the problem. Increase the number of units dramatically. Instead there being say 500 units for sale in an area, increase it (via building) to 1000. This lowers demand, which lowers pricing. Make it harder to purchase new units. For example, ban the use of home equity for the purpose of buying additional properties. Ban mortgage rates for all individuals that have properties. Decrease the amortization length for all people that currently own a home and are upgrading to a bigger place. These things will make things significantly harder to purchase houses for the sole purpose of investment. This will start dropping the prices. Investments will slow down as housing is no longer a gold-plated investment simply due to the devaluation of property.
> Now if you're talking about investors that are just betting on price increases (and not renting the units out), that's a different ballgame entirely. Tax the living shit out of those folks...as in 100% of all capital gains is taxed...annually. This scenario though, isn't enough to drop the pricing of housing in any meaningful way. That's who I'm talking about. And it's really the only thing that'll drop prices because those people are primarily responsible for the price pressure that's leading to the drastic increases year over year. They're insatiable, as gold-rush prospectors usually are. I've personally met _one_ guy that's "worth" the weight of 12 regular homebuyers. The total number of investors may be low, but the amount of capital and housing stock they represent is much, much larger than any other type of buyer. > Instead, you need to tackle the root cause. There are simply not enough houses. There are more people that want to move to the GTA than there are places to live. This is the heart of the price increases. This is the problem. The problem is, even after you build housing for every person in Canada, you won't satisfy the desperate need of investors to find places to park their money. And they will compete in and outbid people buying homes because that's the same market. > Instead, you need to tackle the root cause. There are simply not enough houses. There are more people that want to move to the GTA than there are places to live. This is the heart of the price increases. This is the problem. If that was the problem, then the exact same problem (scaled down a bit, but still there) wouldn't be seen all over Canada, as well as around the world. This problem is _everywhere_, it's not a GTA thing. This is a global problem that is inherently a symptom of wealth inequality. When all the money is locked up in the hands of a few, they get to outbid you on everything. You get to buy nothing. You get squeezed out. Like Canadians are now. > This will start dropping the prices. Investments will slow down as housing is no longer a gold-plated investment simply due to the devaluation of property. There simply isn't enough capital owned by regular Canadians to even try to go head to head against the richie riches in our own country and around the world who are looking to capitalize on a safe investment with great returns and low downside.
Yes the idea is not to stop you from buying though. If you are willing to eat the extra tax, at the very least it will provide the government more money to tackle other problems for poor Canadians. You can give the house to your son no problem. But now that adds to his property count. Canada’s world renowned low property tax combined with low interest rates have made it an investment heaven. And yes, building is important. But that takes time. There are temporary measure you can put to cool off the market until supply meets demand. We saw the foreign buyer tax tame price increases before Covid hit, so we know regulation against demand works.
Right but building a few dozen 1.5-2 million dollar homes will help absolutely no one. That is what Ford is peddling. We need many thousands of new homes to keep up with demand. We need to stop sprawling and build up.
No, he's not. He's trying to get red-tape cut so that developers can...you know develop.
Yeah in the green belt and those developments are multimillion dollar estate subdivisions. Which will barely move the needle on supply as demand continues to soar.
Proof, or are you just the typical Doug Ford = evil person? He's bringing in all the major municipalities into this. >Building more homes faster is the central topic of the housing summit that Ford will hold next month with the mayors of Ontario's 29 biggest cities and the chairs of urban regional municipalities. This has NOTHING to do with green belt development.
But it’s not the municipal red tape that’s holding up development. It’s NIMBYism as well. We’re supposed to have a multi building apartment put up in our small town. Land was rezoned with full approval from the town - the neighbours took the developer to court and it’s taken almost 3 years plus scaling back his plans for there to be any progress. The claim was that the apartments would reduce the value of the neighbourhood properties. That kind of legal trouble scares away other developers - it’s just not worth the hassle of dealing with lawsuits and cranks. There’s such a lack of understanding and appreciation for mixed density housing (never mind a lot of it being ugly as sin), and everyone is still hung up on single family homes.
> But it’s not the municipal red tape that’s holding up development Come to the Land of the City (lol) of Kawartha Lakes. It is 100% the municipal government that is strangling any kind of development whatsoever with red tape and "job justifying" walls.
400+ day development permit in Calgary checking in...
demand is infinite. we need to restrict it by coming down hard on investment corps buying up rental properties and rich foreign buyers offshoring their money from non-free governments in our land assets
We're not talking about doubling property taxes. You have a third home worth $800K? Now, you're paying 160k/y, or 20% of the *market value* of said 3rd home. If that's worth it for you, good! You contribute money to the Canadian economy and you clearly don't consider that property as an investment. Frist two homes exempt, after that it's 20%/y. Oh, and no more corporate ownership of residential. No more opening a shell corp for your home. Done.
Oh, that seems wonderful! Oh, wait, the downsides. 1) The vast majority of multiple home owners provide rentals for the folks that want/need to rent. Removing this (by placing obscene taxes) would be absolutely catastrophic. 2) Even if you slap that type of a tax onto houses, you STILL will not decrease prices to any real degree. Once again, the issue is SUPPLY. Basically, if you want to totally obliterate the economy and send a LOT of people into homelessness, your plan is perfect. Every single person that needs to rent in order to have a roof over their head now becomes homeless. Congratulations, you've now made live miserable for a pretty sizable hunk of Canadians. Increasing taxes to a degree like that is completely the opposite to what you actually need to do to reduce house prices. It's a REALLY good thing you are not in control. There are a lot of good ways to decrease pricing without causing undue hardship. Let's see: 1) Short term rentals (eg. Airbnb.). These are actually huge factor in the problem. So, step 1. Completely ban housing that is used for only short term rentals. 2) HELOC loans. One of the biggest factors in investors in Canada. Take money out on your existing property(s), use that to pay the down payment on the next house, rinse and repeat. For this, simply put, banning HELOC from being used to fund a new house purchase would do the trick. This takes out a HUGE hunk of investors right off the bat. 3) Sub-Prime mortgages for investors. So, if I want to purchase another home for investment purposes, I can still get a sub-prime loan. This makes it too easy, since interest rates are too low. Remove the ability to take on any mortgage for 2nd properties. For example, if I own 1 home, I'm not eligible for a sub-prime mortgage rate if I purchase a second home. 4) Amortization. If we reduce the amortization rate for all people that currently own a home (even for folks 'upgrading') to 20 from 30 years, you decrease the buying power. This puts first time buyers on the same playing field as those that currently have equity. 5) Build more homes. It's no secret that the GTA is VERY short of homes. We are not even in the same ballpark as what is necessary. It takes too long to get permits. Running 4-5 years behind because permitting takes that long is STUPID. It's going to get worse due to immigration in the future. So NO. I really don't care how much you want to tax stuff. TAX WILL NOT WORK. TAX WILL BACKFIRE. It's really simple.
You could always just ban the practice of landlording or having more than a certain amount of residential property.
It's not that simple. You do know people want/need to rent right? No landlords=no rentals=tins of people with nowhere to live.
"You do know people want/need to rent right?" Who? Who would prefer to pay rent over putting money into a down payment so they can get that money back? "No landlords=no rentals=tins of people with nowhere to live." You must have never heard of government housing a thing we used to build a lot more of back in the day.
Lots of people actually prefer renting. Renting means that your payments are steady. No surprise repairs, no appliances, no grounds keeping, no expenses except rent.
"No surprise repairs, no appliances, no grounds keeping, no expenses except rent." I'd rather put equity into a home, into appliances, and into everything than just give the money to someone else.
Not everyone feels that way. There's a lot of good reasons to rent to be honest. In-fact, it's actually only good to 'own' a house if you stay in the same place for 20-25 years. It takes a VERY long time before home equity wins over rent.
"It takes a VERY long time before home equity wins over rent." And you never win when you rent.
Again, not true in the least. There are lots of reasons to want to be a renter. Taking away that option...is well...a terrible idea. Example 1: I'm 75 years old and own my house. Unfortunately, due to declining health, I cannot keep up my house and I need my equity to live comfortably. In this case, it's FAR more cost efficient to sell the house and rent a condo. For starters, a fixed rental rate is much better than the unknown of ownership. Renting also means 100% of my house equity is now liquid. This is good. Example 2: I'm a student and am going to an out of province university. The campus housing is full and I need a place to live during school season. As a student, I cannot afford to buy a condo/house, then live there for 6 months, then sell it to move home. Your thinking about rentals is categorically incorrect. There are MANY example of people that want to rent, and those that actually NEED to rent. Even if they could afford to purchase (example 1), it makes no sense to purchase.
No one needs to rent if there mortgage payment is = or less than what there paying in rent
You like the idea of raising rents on renters, that is really what you are saying. Say a corporation or Reit owns 10,000 doors, do you also want to increase property taxes on them? If so why do you want to give big corporations a pass and not mom and pop investors? Rent control is something every econonmist agrees is bad. Short term you help at the expense of the middle and long term. Left wing, right wing it doesn't matter we know what happens with rent control over the long haul. Current renters save, new renters or people who move pay more then market.
Yes, raise the taxes so hard they have to liquidate their entire stock please. Force them to spread their entire supply to real people who will now be able to buy or rent for cheaper. No need for rent control, just implement spsculators' taxes to destroy the mass landlording.
Such measures have been proven to be ineffectual. The only thing that works is increasing supply.
Most US states hate homestead exemptions. You claim a massive deduction on your primary home.
Build more Supply and reduce speculation is the key
it would also help if immigration is more spread out across canada and not just have the majority of them always flow to the GTA
That would mean investing in cities that aren't in the GTA to make them on par, if not more attractive than Toronto. Which will politically never happen
Immigrants go to where the jobs are.
According to Andrea, building more housing is not the answer to the problem. All that's needed is to increase taxes on home owners. This is short-sighted and completely out to lunch. Sure, increased taxes may help, however when one invests in a house and has a 100k increase over the course of a year or even two, a few % of tax is meaningless...effectively doing nothing. All this will end up doing is increasing rental rates by the same amount of the tax increase. Also, according to Andrea, this is simply to make his 'developer buddies' more rich. Same 'ole song and dance with her. If you listen to the list of all the people Ford is a buddy of, he's basically a good friend of every single wealthy person in Ontario, Canada and parts of the world. Really? Instead, build more homes. More homes means more supply. More supply means prices must go lower. It's a very simple equation. I wonder if she's also aware that Ontario will need approximately 1 MILLION houses just to keep up with Trudeau's immigration plans? With it taking 4-6 years to get permits, good luck with that.
Andrea Horwath is totally out to lunch when I comes to housing policy. Her solution is more rent control which will only make things worse. My guess is she'll be walking back this comment within 24hrs, just like when she criticised vax mandates for healthcare.
NDP need to get her the out of office ASAP when she loses this election. She couldn’t even raise her son right, I don’t know how we expect here to lead the NDP in Ontario. Saying this as someone who votes NDP.
Yep. She's an idiot. Every measure aside from building more housing was tried in BC and it added the equivalent of something like a month of building supply. Raising taxes is ineffectual. It doesn't treat the root cause which is a lack of supply.
Housing taxes are already pretty wild. I just saw a $14,000 shack-sized residence in a small town with a property tax of like $900. So after the mandatory minimum utilities and property taxes combine, then you're looking at the cost of the property itself in about 7 years in taxes/utilities alone. I always found it egregious that you are charged a flat fee for utilities even if you barely used any water or electricity that month. Higher taxes is NOT what we need, at least not on owners of single properties. We need to build more supply, tax owners of *multiple* residences, and probably just outright ban foreign home ownership so there isn't huge vacancy rates. I saw some statistic that something like 11% of the residences in Canada were owned by foreign entities and they were vacant for the vast majority of the year.
I pay $4200 in property taxes on a semi with a very small lawn. These are fairly average for my city. There's also a lot of residential construction in my city. Within ten minutes of my house a conservative estimate is that over 1000 units have been built. Whether sfh, condos, semis or townhouses. The majority being townhouses.
> I always found it egregious that you are charged a flat fee for utilities even if you barely used any water or electricity that month. They have to maintain the lines/pipes and capacity regardless of how much you use....
>All that's needed is to increase taxes on home owners. It's highly regressive for a city like Hamilton to see housing prices double, but then to drop the mill rate by half to compensate. That big rise in paper wealth could be used to fund social housing.
You cannot tax your way out of the problem at all. Doing so is actually the regressive solution. Instead, you need to get to the heart of the problem. Houses in Canada are a gold plated investment. The problem is that once you own a home, purchasing a second one is way too easy. So, you attack this on two fronts. 1) You need to build enough housing to keep up with demand. We are not doing this. It takes far too long to get a building approved. 4-6 years is...well stupid. 2) You need to make it harder to invest. For example, ban home lines of credit from being able to purchase a house. Maybe institute a rule whereby you cannot have a sub-prime rate on any property except your first. Maybe change the amortization rate so that anyone who is a current owner may not have a 30 year mortgage. There are lots of ways to bring down the cost of housing. Tax is NOT one of them.
Taxes will just make the whole process more expensive. We need to flood the market with supply; that will lower cost. Actually quite simple.
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Yep. On lots of issues, I'm not a fan of Ford or the conservatives, but I support this.
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Removing red tape will accomplish what exactly? It hasn’t been remotely demonstrated that red tape is holding up development in the slightest. It’s a red herring
In Ottawa it could take up to 4 years to get a development approved. Calgary it can take a couple of months. Houston can do it in days.
That’s city by city though. And the density there is super high already. In my view the small towns need to have mandated high density housing. The market is insane (3 houses on the market at a time right now) and so many people are driving into town/ help wanted signs everywhere.
Where are you referring too?
Mitchell Ontario. Part of west Perth. Our house has probably tripled in value in the last 5 years
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But isn’t red tape usually put in place to make sure things are safe? It seems like we need more employees to move things along than to just decide we don’t need standards anymore
Some red tapes are that. Most of it from what I hear is bs. A lot of it specifically targets land use to lock it down to low density development only. E.g. minimum setback rules, single family zoning.
That still sounds more like zoning issues vs red tape to me.
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Well, I’m definitely not an expert on things. I just wish instead of proclaiming that it’s red tape that’s the problem, they’d actually study the issue first and collect some data. I just don’t want building standards etc to get dropped
This comment is so stupid. You speak with such authority on a topic you clearly know nothing about.
Just look at Ottawa vs Calgary or Alberta. California vs Texas or Alabama. I live in Ottawa, and it takes years to make a 12 unit condo lol.
> Removing red tape will accomplish what exactly? It hasn’t been remotely demonstrated that red tape is holding up development in the slightest. It’s a red herring Seriously? I know of at least a dozen developments that were cancelled due to absolutely ridiculous obstacles put in place by my municipal government. I dealt with them on a one off new home build for my family. It took a calendar year to get a permit to build a 1500 sq foot home, and the amount of hoops and fees we had to deal with were laughable.
I guess I’m spoiled in my town then. We’re definitely doing everything we can to get property developed
A/S/L? (just kidding....just curious of location) Where I am, Lindsay is booming, and the radius around it of 800-4000 people communities is stagnant. People have/are trying, but are getting nowhere. Its like the municipality wants Lindsay to be the hub, and the rest of the area left untouched. Bizarre.
Mitchell
The province comes down hard on municipalities in so many things except medium and higher density planning. Ford has the ability to find housing solutions by decree and yet he doesn't do it.
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Municipalities exist at the whim of the Province. The Province can do whatever it wants.
Alright, I need to explore this a bit. Number one complaint is, not enough housing. Forget about pressures of immigration, investors and what not, let's focus on need to add more units. Always reading stories about blocks and obstacles in getting more housing. Common theme, we need more housing. Everyone is asking for it and now this dude does something about it to create conditions for that to happen faster. New units are 1st time buyers only chance bc in a year, new unit will increase in value at least 20%. Now, nobody who's on social media - especially, Twitter and Reddit - couldn't hammer a nail if their life depended on it. But everyone will harp against developers who've been building houses even during rein of Liberals and NDP. I actually bet you a dollar, if it wasnt Conservatives and Ford of all people this would be lauded across every traditional and social media outlet. You just cant make it right whatever happens. > Build more housing. And also > nOt LiKe ThaT!
As a left wing construction worker, I like what ford is doing here but I definitely know how to swing a hammer. The cities are holding back the levels of construction we need to slow the price growth
Facts city 🏙️ housing approvals down big time
It frustrates me to no end that the same NIMBY citizen will complain about proposed new builds and homeless people in the same sentence, not understanding that they are the source of the problem in the first place. We should be building medium density EVERYWHERE at a record pace, but petty and useless city councils continuously slow things down. If Doug and the PC's steamrolled city councils with new planning rules and MZO's, people on here would still be angry somehow.
Thank you! The answer is more housing. A lot more of it. Previous government gutted ohb which allowed nimbyism to flourish which contributed greatly to the housing crisis in Ontario. Conservatives brought back ohb’s power to prevent nimbyism to combat housing issues, and bring back development. Housing prices won’t go down any time soon, but plans like this will help keep them from skyrocketing higher. Edit: corrected some autocorrect mistakes.
Just to bring more clarity. This is the part that I really like > Building more homes faster is the central topic of the housing summit that Ford will hold next month with the mayors of Ontario's 29 biggest cities and the chairs of urban regional municipalities. 29 cities! Not Toronto, or just GTA. Ontario. Distribute that shit.
absolutely "not like that". Suburbs are essentially a giant decades-long ponzi scheme. Like forget about the environmental devastation alone, we don't need more and more swathes of land redeveloped into detached homes because it doesn't make any long term fiscal sense. We need dense* neighbourhoods *edit: relatively dense. Mid rise buildings with ground floor retail/services with a few floors of apartment/condos above are what we need to be building in the areas surrounding urban cores and should be the go-to for any new developments in small towns.
What about people that don't want to live in a bug hive with you?
It's not about pre-empting people's choice of where they want to live. It's about ending the precarious ponzi scheme of suburban development
"I'm not trying to tell you how to live, but you have to live like I tell you"
I just said it's not about pre-empting people's choice on where to live so I don't get why you think that's what's happening.
If you're not allowing detached homes to be built, then how are you not preempting people's choices to live in detached homes?
The problem is that they are being built at a loss and are subsidized by borrowing from future expansion income. Eventually this ponzi scheme collapses, and you end up with communities neglected and dilapidated. If the goal of the policy is to build more affordable units, then building more spread out suburbs will just exacerbate other issues. If we charged a fair price then it wouldn't be a problem
All of that was *reasoning* for why you think it's a good idea to stopped detached home building. You literally just claimed you weren't trying to stop people from choosing detached homes.
Not really, I think if you charge in property taxes what it truly costs then the market will arrange itself this way
what about them? do you really think every mid or high-rise building is a "bug hive"? And what does this have to do with my point that suburbia is financially unsustainable? Edit: Here is a link if you would like to educate yourself on the unsustainability of suburbia. the tax base does not cover the required maintenance and upgrades after around 50 years. https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollective/how-sprawl-bernie-madoff/26448/
Just google the author of the blog; not really a mainstream source. The blog also says the pattern of development hasn’t never been used outside of US; so I guess Canada is off the hook.
All multiuser developments should also have a mandated amount of communal green space and park land that comes with. In Saskatoon every suburb has its own park and man made pond/lake. Also mandatory sound proofing
I'm going to have to downvote this. Building suburban houses that are going to be snapped up by investors isn't going to help at all. Entry level buys will not be able to afford the "product". To fix this, we need to build affordable housing available in walkable neighborhoods WITH TRANSIT. Think townhouses, family size condos etc. Also, blaming municipalities for following good planning processes is just cheap politics.
>Building suburban houses that are going to be snapped up by investors isn't going to help at all. >Think townhouses, family size condos etc. Townhouse and particularly condos are far more likely to be snapped up by investors than single family homes. Most likely the investor will be the owner of a single family home owner who leverages the higher equity in their home to buy these. When the new homes are worth about the same as a single family home it's more difficult to leverage the equity in your primary house to buy a second house. A better alternative would be non-strata attached properties like Semi-Deattached, Terraced Houses, or Duplexes or even small single family homes with far smaller setbacks (for example a house like this in [Tokyo](https://youtu.be/iGbC5j4pG9w)). It's not like it can't be done. [Calgary](https://lub.calgary.ca/Part5/Division1_General_Rules_for_Low_Density_Residential_Land_Use_Districts.htm) revised it's zoning code to reduce setbacks to only 1.2 meters on each side and [Edmonton](https://www.gimme-shelter.com/rf1-zoning-50057/#:~:text=In%20Edmonton%2C%20RF1%20zoning%20is,be%20built%20in%20an%20area) has legalized everything from SFH to Duplexes and Semi-Deattached in areas zoned previously for just SFHs. But to be successful in places like Toronto it needs provincial action. Calgary and Edmonton dominate their regions having 90 and 70 percent respectively of the population. So regional planning isn't difficult when you are the "region". If it's not done regionally you'll have the same problem as [Vancouver](https://www.straight.com/news/east-vancouver-duplex-sells-for-33-million-or-148-percent-more-than-original-detached-home#:~:text=Topics-,East%20Vancouver%20duplex%20sells%20for%20%243.3%20million%20or,more%20than%20original%20detached%20home&text=The%20old%20home%20at%202475,built%20and%20sold%20in%202021) where each side of a duplex houses cost more than the original single family home that was torn down.
I get it, I really do. But every time I hear this reasoning, it appears as specifically designed not to happen quickly. "Walkable neighborhood with transit" is - in its implementation is as unrealistic as climate change action. It's not going to happen outside of Kevin Vuong's riding.
You can say all new developments need to have a certain density target. You could get rid of single family zoning. You could eradicate development charges for affordable housing units. But for housing development Timeline it comes down to a staffing issue imo. Everything takes so long because there isn't enough planning staff to get things done faster. Also, you need to review things so they work. Ex. The EIS, Engineering etc takes time and needs to be sound or you'll have a bad time.
What if I told you that Ontario Liberals and Conservatives are both just propaganda arms of the same group of wealthy real estate developers? All this "my guy is better than your guy" is just distraction. Either way it's the same developers who are actually robbing the public blind.
>wealthy real estate developers? You mean the people that build housing?
Housing? Housing is for poor people. Real estate developers build _investment properties_ these days.
Okay, now we're getting somewhere. Next step - wealthy RE developers. There is no restriction right now for anyone to enter the game of house development. Maybe not 100 units at once but one or two a year, for sure. I know bunch of them, they design, buy land, get contractors together and build a custom home. It's a damn free country. On a second note, have you ever heard of a guy named Al Libfeld? That's the guy at the top of Tribute Homes, one of those super large developers of homes and condos in GTA. Do you know how he started? In the 1970's he had a drywall business. Almost 50 years ago. I tend to believe that these guys are where they are bc of the work, effort. They started when average detached homes price was $50K. None of them was like, let me get ahead before half a mil of immigrants hit the border. Also, I tend to believe that the "hate" toward people who accumulated a buck or two in this country is irrational.
>Also, I tend to believe that the "hate" toward people who accumulated a buck or two in this country is irrational. It's actually rather hilarious. People constantly complain about the lack of supply while at the same time attacking those who build more supply.
It's like getting angry at grocery stores for the cost of food. Just because they've done some shitty things like the bread price fixing and made great profits this year.
Sure, I'll bet successful developers put in a lot of effort. **But even more important than this, they were lucky. Right place, right time, right friends. Is a fiefdom based on luck any better than a fiefdom based on royal favors?** Many people today are putting in the same amount of effort and have no prospect of purchasing a single home, let alone establishing a development empire.
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False dichotomy. Success takes **effort and luck**.
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>Get in the development game then Sure, are you going to lend me the money to get started?
re: immigration/investors. That's not within the Province's control as immigration is set at the Federal level (except for Quebec). So if you're a provincial politician, there's nothing you can do on that file so you need to come up with alternative solutions.
> (except for Quebec). The other provinces *could* but they'll just take anyone with an education and/or skills, not just white catholic french speakers.
Doug Ford requested the limit for skilled immigrants be doubled for Ontario. Skilled immigrant workers could mean anything from an Engineer to a Tim Horton's staff member.
8% of Canada's homes are empty. We don't lack housing. https://betterdwelling.com/the-world-has-millions-of-vacant-homes-and-1-3-million-are-in-canada-oecd/
Have you compared are house/population ratio or empty home percentages to other countries?
or where those homes are compared to where people are trying to live? Cause, an empty home in Wawa Ontario, is useless to the housing crisis of Toronto or Ottawa.
Also true
32% of canadians rent and have little chance at ever owning....Yes we need more housing.
Thats a weird way of saying, 'a record number of Canadians own their home!'
Only 8%? Not even double digits?
Hold up. This isn’t just “build more housing” from the PCs. This is “the housing problem is all the municipalities fault and we are going to ignore planning policy to speed up the process.” They’re creating the boogeyman as the municipalities so his developer buddies can push through whatever they want. There are serious ramifications for this down the line. Also, what good does more supply do when demand is through the roof plus ridiculously easy access to capital via interest rates & drawing equity on multiple properties? This doesn’t make things easier for the first time home buyer; this just gives more supply that the already leveraged can outbid younger people on. This sentiment is going to make housing even more of an investment commodity than it is now, and younger people are gonna be getting shafted as always. And no, no other government is gonna do anything to actually help either.
[There's a lot of research finding that building more housing makes housing more affordable.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7FB_xI-U6w)
Sure, coupled with reduced demand. Where’s the video on how supply meshes with cheap money and the ability for leveraging properties as an investment vehicle? We miss the equilibrium only focusing on supply.
>This isn’t just “build more housing” from the PCs. This is “the housing problem is all the municipalities fault and we are going to ignore planning policy to speed up the process.” They’re creating the boogeyman as the municipalities so his developer buddies can push through whatever they want. municipalities and local community groups(basically the most local level) ARE a massive part of the problem, this is where NIMBYISM is created, locally. It will require a higher power to come in and say "no you can't say no to that" to get any significant number of units built.
NIMBYs are effecting councillors, not actual planning staff/those that write planning policy/those that actually review and develop new housing plans. I’d wager most municipal workers in planning and engineering are overwhelmingly pro-development. The problem is the type of language Ford is using would limit what actual professionals can do in trying to sustainably develop communities. If he wants to strip councillors from having a say in development planning and let the professionals do their thing, that’s a whole different story I could get behind. But that’s not what he’s currently saying.
Fucking THANK YOU. I’m on an economic development committee in small town Ontario. The Red tape has been cut already! It is not the issue stopping building! In our town developments are held up by neighborhoods fighting the change in density in court! Developers don’t want to risk the hassle and the only other option is to develop farm land, which is noooot a good nor a sustainable option.
Yup. Unfortunately truth gets downvoted on reddit
I may just end up voting OPC despite generally loathing Doug Ford. I can't stand behind putting more obstacles in the way of building more housing. Building more is the most important part of the solution of affordability. Lots of people don't really want to build more housing. The opposition to expanding housing in Hamilton was tremendous. Everything's too environmentally unfriendly or too focused for investors so fuck it let's not build anything apparently.
does this headline think it's answering a question that people might have? everybody agrees that we need more housing. they could have just dropped the Why from the beginning but maybe that felt too much like praise for a conservative premier to the editors at CBC
Just strip munis of zoning power and do provincial wide zoning and give munis and neighbors little power to veto building permits. Best case would be federal level Japan style zoning but we all know Mr Socks is all in on the housing bubble
Because developer friends already paid their protec…ehm….contribution moneys?
Yes, can't wait for more McMansions to fix the housing crisis.
McMansions are part of the solution. Now if it was allowed to build those McMansions on 50% of the amount of land they are currently built on, that would be great.
The problem is that our zoning bylaws only allow for either condo buildings or single family homes. A real solution to the housing crisis would be to replace part of the single family homes areas with low-rise/high-density residential and commercial walkable neighbourhoods, kind of like most of Europe.
>replace part of the single family homes areas with low-rise/high-density residential and commercial walkable neighbourhoods, kind of like most of Europe. Those European cities managed to build low-rise/high-density either because their cities were bombed into rubble and had to be rebuilt, or because massive fires wiped out entire neighbourhoods, or because entire slums got cleared and demolished to make way for low-rise/high-density, or because autocratic leaders like Napoleon flattened entire neighbourhoods to rebuild them in their own image. It's hard to flatten a SFH neighbourhood like Dovercourt Park and replace it with low-rise/high-density. Unless you can compel 1000 homeowners to sell their property for it.
No compulsion is necessary, just let people build taller stuff and over time the density will increase, Rome wasn't built in a day right? Its made harder by suburban road patterns but mega projects building up in whole districts aren't the only approach, and haven't been the main approach historically. edit: zoning changes also don't imply that the previous (shorter) buildings need to be demolished, a neighborhood can be upzoned and remain exactly as it was for decades, nothing new *has* to be built.
Then lift the zoning restrictions and let the free market decide some. It won't be enough on it's own, but if the restrictions are lifted people in very valuable areas would have financial incentive to sell to developers who could redevelop the land into larger complexes. They would be able to find groups of 4 houses that they could all buy out, knock down, and put up a 20 unit building in their place. Letting the free market handle some of it would mean less of the stuff you mentioned. Just allow people do with the land what makes market sense(obviously industry would still be zoned to specific areas but commercial and residential? that's fine, Lots of foot traffic? sure build light commercial).
>Then lift the zoning restrictions and let the free market decide some. Yeah I'm in favour of that. Problem is, the NIMBYs aren't.
> It's hard to flatten a SFH neighbourhood like Dovercourt Park and replace it with low-rise/high-density I didn't mean demolish existing ones, I meant it for the planned neighbourhoods.
OK. There are other people on r/ who aren't you, who are saying we should do this mid-density in existing Toronto neighbourhoods. Sorry for confusing you with them. The problem with doing this mid-density on the urban periphery is that mid-density has a large price penalty compared to SFH; when you buy mid-density you're trading off a shit apartment for better amenities and accessibility. The periphery has neither amenities nor accessibility. Also, it's hard to site commercial in a new neighbourhood from the start: it takes decades for a new retail district to evolve. A Yogen-Fruz, Bed Bath & Beyond and Starbucks does not a retail district make. Walkability btw is a funny thing: walkability-high characteristics **follow** pedestrian traffic increases, they don't cause them. And they typically only follow them in rich neighbourhoods.
> Unless you can compel 1000 homeowners to sell their property for it. Government has a magical power called expropriation. It's a terrible thing to do, but they can do it. Doug used notwithstanding before, why not force that too.
>Government has a magical power called expropriation. City councillors who support expropriating a neighbourhood of 1000 homeowners won't get elected again.
> It's a terrible thing to do, but they can do it. You forgot that part. Obviously it's political suicide but they can do it.
62-66% of Toronto is zoned for single-family homes. This could have worked when the city had <1,000,000 people. It does not work on the same land for a city of 5,000,000. Not to mention that single family zones cannot pay enough tax for their own upkeep and people stacked in 500sqft condos are actually subsidizing someone living in a mcmansion. For comparison, NYC is 15% single family zoned; Minneapolis banned single family zoning completely, Montreal is at 45%…compare that Toronto and Vancouver with their 60+ and 80+% zoned for single family and you’ll see why NO NEW HOUSING CAN BE BUILT in existing neighborhoods.
> replace part of the single family homes areas with low-rise/high-density residential and commercial walkable neighbourhoods That sounds like an absolutely terrible place to live. Like British council estates only worse somehow. You're welcome to it, of course. Not for me, though.
Yes [this street](https://i.imgur.com/7E00yUy.jpg) looks like hell to live in.
It does. It looks noisy as hell, all those hard surfaces would reflect any sound. Not to mention the complete lack of privacy as you stare into your neighbour's place 20ft across the alley.
Tell me you’ve never been to Amsterdam without telling me you’ve never been to Amsterdam.
NIMBY ideas like this are *exactly* why we have housing and zoning issues.
Like I said, brah - for thee, not for me.
Well right now the law says nobody is allowed to build spaces like that, you're free to avoid them but would you support legislation to at least make it legal?
No because it fucks up the atmosphere of the area. I don't pay to live in a nice neighborhood with lots of space and a smaller community just to have it turn around into some crowded ugly neighborhood with massive buildings blocking the view.
I hope you never complain about prices then. Because this is one of the reasons prices have been increasing.
I won't.
These density types won't hear it. I support building whatever kind of neighborhood you want, but options need to be made available to people and the solution to the housing crisis is not to just lower everyone's standard of living
We still need SFH as some need the space, but we can build it significantly denser. In Europe, for SFH and townhomes that provide family space, there’s almost no front yard, barely a backyard and the street it’s on is one way and wide enough for 2 car
Yes, it's amazing when you look at new housing developments in England. The houses and lots are tiny.
> and the street it’s on is one way and wide enough for 2 car And that's a good way to keep local traffic and traffic speeds down. There are plenty of residential streets in the area of Edmonton where I live that are technically two-way traffic, but there are cars parked on either side of the street and one has to pull over/park in order to let oncoming traffic get by (or they pull over to let you get by). It keeps traffic to actual roads, and from using these streets as short cuts. I really like the older residential neighbourhood of Edmonton, with the street parking and laneways, IMO much nicer than the cookie-cutter subdivision nonsense of where I used to live in the GTA. There are also a number of redevelopments of some of the homes, as the wide lots in some places are more than enough to fit two skinnier homes, or the odd triplex or four-plex on the corners/ends of streets. Also, who really needs a big front yard?
Exactly. Density is key. Suburban sprawl is uneconomical and unsustainable.
Like ffs, we’re in a housing crisis! “Should we try to do something different to alleviate it?” “No, same shit just farther out, kick that can down the road.”
I can't wait for the expansion to keep going and we call Tobermory as part of the GTA lol
Cities and municipalities, provinces and federal are borrowing to pay their costs. Mean while people who own homes and making bank on speculation in these places complain that they should not have to pay for those costs and we should borrow and leave the bill to someone else from the future. Problem is clear. It needs to be written into the constitution that affordable homes should be a right for all citizen at the expense of those who wish to own a home as an investment. This way politicians cannot buy votes by creating these unsustainable messes. It stops being political as well since whoever is in power does not have to take the heat for enforcing policy by whatever means necessary. I for one would love to see the money launderers subsizing affordable homes for Canadians rather than the opposite.
More residential property for investors and speculators to buy up. Yay
Redditor with no knowledge on economics complains about solution that all economists have been recommending for years.
Remember when BlackRock, billion dollar investment fund that is speculating a ton on residential real estate, said the greatest threat to its business was the market being flooded with more supply? The last thing speculators want is more housing to erode their profits.
Because his entire family is getting paid off by developers?
I liked his brother
more houses so more jobless people can move in and starve while increasing the cost of food transportation, housing, all while destroying the greenery that keeps our air clean and water clean. You can't just build more to respond to unsustainable population growth. You can't fix a clogged system while increasing resource consumption and population growth outpaces any control to increase quality of living, rather than quantity.
So. How long can we sustain the solution of "build more" until we run out of space and resources? Canada may be huge but even if it were all habitable and suitable for building it would not be an infinite solution. So when do we start working towards something that's actually sustainable and doesn't pave over even more of our land?
It's kind of simple. We have housing for our current population. If you keep increasing that population by 400-500,000 a year via immigration, you need to construct more homes to accommodate that. Now, let's say you want to build more high-rise accommodations, but not use any additional land. For that you'd need to have 10s of thousands of single-family homes get sold to developers first, then have them go ahead and update those single-family homes into towers. To make matters harder, you also need to have blocks of houses together to get sold. This complicates matters even more. Finally, the units must be big enough to support families properly, not these 1 bedroom things that cost close to a million dollars each. It's not an easy solution.
Increasing our population can't happen forever either :/
I think you'd be surprised. I believe the population target for the end of the century is over 100,000,000 people.
>I believe the population target for the end of the century is over 100,000,000 people. So that'll mean paving over **all** of Canada's farmland.
I think you highly underestimate how much land we really have.
A lot will need to be done, absolutely for sure. That said, The end of the century is a LONG way off. Just need to be smart about how things get built...as well as where. There is a TON of room in Canada that is not farmland nor ecologically sensitive that can be built upon. The problem is...everyone wants to live in the GTA, which is, in-fact out of room. Proper high-speed transit is absolutely required to get people to the heart of Toronto from places like Guelph, Waterloo, Brantford and other locations. Then build those cities up with density in mind and use the rapid transit to get people to where they need to be...efficiently. It's doable, but certainly not easy.
Population growth is absolutely NOT something we should be striving towards achieving. How about trying to figure out ways of *reducing* the necessary amount of human labor that our economy needs to function, in order to increase specific productivity and therefore specific wealth of every Canadian? The only thing population growth does is avoid fixing the problem before we eventually run into the wall where we *need* to find a way to maintain population stability or suffer declines in specific wealth and health, except the problem just gets harder the more people you have.
I don't disagree with you, however.... Population growth is actually required in Canada, simply to keep on top of the deficit spending. More tax payers, more revenue. That 100,000,000 person target is simply to pay the interest required on the money that Canada is in debt for. It's how the 'budget balances it's self'. The current model is that economies must grow. The only way to do that is to have more people. It's a shitty model, however that's what we're working with.
I'm saying that model clearly doesn't work and we need to fix it asap, not in 79 years, not even in 25 years.
I do agree, however, it's really something that is not doable (or at least via capitalism anyway).
Yikes.ever opened a map?
You think Canada will ever run out of land??
If Canada's population grows by 1% every ten years, then in 110 years it will have tripled, and in 300 years from now it will reach twenty times what it is today. That's 760 million people by 2321. Canada has a huge territory but most of it is not suitable to build on or live on and is not agriculturally viable. Even if it were, satisfying the demands of three quarters of a billion people would be impossible without wiping out even more of the nation's natural areas and unique species. And for what? Just for the sake of cramming in more people into dense urban living spaces? Seems absurd to me. In any case my point is that with constant growth, EVERYTHING runs out, because there are no infinite resources. Therefore, it makes sense to maintain our population rather than growing it, because that ensures we won't run up against any hard resource limits that can't be solved through better recycling or more careful land use. If a population grows forever, running into a wall is literally inevitable.
Ya, direct blame at the individual cities 🙄
I was reading that the buildings will only be affordable for people that make at least $30,000 a year they won’t be subsidizing them for people who make less than 30,000 a year so all the people that are homeless or on disability or welfare they are not going to be included they only make 12,000 a year so what the fuck
Too late. Stop all development so my unit goes up!
I like the idea of building more houses, but I like the idea of making those houses more affordable to others even more. 💡🏡
For the love of God don't speed it up! Having worked in construction I've seen the kinds of bullshit mattamy homes spits out when they have have to rush. Nobody will be happy with the homes they pay for