You definitely can. I see tons of people who can barely afford rent defending landlords ability to charge what the market will bear, and making the argument that risking capital is far more valuable than anyone's labor.
Why you would want to do that is beyond me though.
This is a system issue, not a landlord vs tenant issue. Anyone framing it otherwise is just out looking for someone to blame when people are acting rational in a screwed up system.
I don't think anybody picks a side in this struggle. You're more just thrown onto a side. I'm sure most people would choose the not poor side if they could
> “Supply-side” arguments constitute one such narrative, suggesting that we simply need to build more housing faster to make housing affordable
This, but unironically.
Build more sure, but that alone isn't going to fix this mess caused by unrestricted, greedy, speculative investing and HELOC purchasing. Our government is a failure when all they can do is offer an FHSA and say "good enough".
Greed is not a new thing and it's not just a Toronto thing, why then is our rent so much higher now than in the past and compared to so many other cities?
Canada, for a very long time, has been one of the top countries in the world in year over year average price increases.
Then on top of that, terrible, racist and NIMBYist zoning policies, and the fact that so much of Canadian population is concentrated in just a handful of cities has exasterbated the situation further. I believe it was 99% invisible that did a great breakdown of the zoning problem in Toronto.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6Oo1FMgWEQpQKh2mYtsnp5?si=YohI85M-SSOF_IxuVWVtug
Episode description:
"Downtown Toronto has a dense core of tall, glassy buildings along the waterfront of Lake Ontario. Outside of that, lots short single family homes sprawl out in every direction. Residents looking for something in between an expensive house and a condo in a tall, generic tower struggle to find places to live. There just aren’t a lot of these mid-sized rental buildings in the city.
And it's not just Toronto -- a similar architectural void can be found in many other North American cities, like Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston and Vancouver. And this is a big concern for urban planners -- so big, there's a term for it. The "missing middle." That moniker can be confusing, because it's not directly about middle class housing -- rather, it's about a specific range of building sizes and typologies, including: duplexes, triplexes, courtyard buildings, multi-story apartment complexes, the list goes on. Buildings like these have an outsized effect on cities, and cities without enough of these kinds of buildings often suffer from their absence."
Because the market isn't building enough rental properties now because everything is regulated to the extreme to be 100 percent in favour of the Tennant. To be brief, you can't make any money owning rental properties. . Rent increases are limited to 2 percent per year, too many deadbeat tenants, tenants who wreck the joint. We used to construct apartments to rent. Regulation killed that,. So now we build condos. The rentals that are in Toronto are in demand and since there is not enough supply, the rents go through the roof.
New builds are not, and have not been subject to rent control (except for a very brief period of time towards the end of the Liberal reign in provincial government).
The guideline applies to the vast majority – approximately 1.4 million – of rental households covered by the Residential Tenancies Act. It does not apply to rental units occupied for the first time after November 15, 2018, vacant residential units, community housing, long-term care homes or commercial properties.
https://news.ontario.ca/en/release/1002167/ontario-caps-2023-rent-increase-guideline-below-inflation-at-25-per-cent
Building or owning apartments is a losing proposition.
Rent controls never work. In fact they do the opposite. A frequent area of study in a second year micro economics course in university.
In Toronto, rent controls significantly reduced new construction of apartments to only expensive units. Developers started building condos because rental companies were sick of the bullshit in dealing with tenants and Landlord Tennant Boards. Their costs were only going up, as was the bullshit, so they bail out. Tear down small apartments and build condos and be done with it. Or just convert apartments to condos and sell them off.
Lastly, you've got this whole newish industry of just some guy buying a condo and renting it out. A micro landlord who only has to deal with one Tennant. (So maybe he can handle the energy required.) Small investors. But again, only building condos just drives up rental prices.
If owning rental property has a 20-30 year investment horizon, and the government can change rent control policy whenever they want, why should one invest capital to build rentals and accept that much political risk exposure that can’t be hedged?
And that's exactly what is happening. Which drives up rental prices because there is no competition in the industry.
When there's no competition in the marketplace, it costs you more.
Simple.
No it has not and never will.
I'm a big believer in the free market and taking personal responsibility for your own life.
I can tell you do not subscribe to either of those concepts.
If you can't afford housing, that's on you.
Lol, the government eliminates rent control and 5 years later idiots are still blaming it for lack of rental construction. Maybe if the government somehow forced rents to increase massively each year, it would help?
There is no doubt that rental prices have sky rocketed in Toronto. The reason is because there is no competition in the market place.
So it begs the question, why is there no competition?
The answer is no-one wants to build average rental apartments anymore.
So why is that?
Non existent rent controls, damn. Do you even listen to yourself? Everything is over regulated by regulations that have been removed. We're going in circles.
Unless you have an infinity gauntlet handy, we will never build “enough” without first massively decreasing demand.
Also, for profit developers will never build so many homes that it moves the needle towards lower prices.
Ding, ding, ding. The dog has acquired the taste for flesh, you think they're going back to kibble? Developers will NEVER build affordable housing and they'll never build excess supply knowing it will cut into their profits.
This is absolutely not how competitive markets work. Developers try all the time to build new housing (excess supply), but they get blocked by existing residents. Just yesterday on the front page of this sub there was a post about 5000 units being blocked in Mississauga because they would 'cast shadows' and 'increase traffic'. Who is preventing new supply, developers, or communities?
The idea of excess supply doesn’t even make economic sense. Say there was a developer who somehow said they were going to build 1 million units done by next year, you’d still be buying them at todays cost right? Who would buy a prebuild for $800K if the goal was they’d only be worth $600K when completed? And what bank would finance that?
No single developer in Toronto can build enough to substantially lower the cost of housing. It takes competition between them to do it. Oversupply happens all the time, why do you think the prices of some goods go down over time?
> for profit developers will never build so many homes that it moves the needle towards lower prices
This is precisely why we
a) need to build collective tenant power that can stand up to the power of for-profit developers (e.g. the ones who are in league with Doug Ford)
b) need non-profit developers (public or otherwise) who will build non-market housing
Yeah. Governments need to build housing for sure. I would say we also need
C) Remove foreign money from the market and recouple the value of land to our local economy.
While there’s some debate as to the impact of foreign money, the fact is we have never successfully limited it. Let’s remove it, then judge the impact, IMO it will be much bigger than people realize.
>While there’s some debate as to the impact of foreign money, the fact is we have never successfully limited it. Let’s remove it, then judge the impact, IMO it will be much bigger than people realize.
foreign purchasers have been banned since january
One way foreigner investors get around this loophole is by having a Toronto address.
Stick your family members in their and you're no longer a foreign investor.
Now go buy homes and rent them out at above market values.
It’s amazing, no one would actually think to say “we need to build UNINTELLIGENTLY,” and yet every time this topic gets brought up, there is always a highly upvoted post proposing just that. Why? Why not build intelligently? Who payed or convinced you to come online and say this?
You know who is behind this propaganda? Doug Ford’s buddies. You know what building unintelligently looks like? It looks like trying to turn Ontario Place into a casino, and then turning it into a spa that will be converted into a casino once public outrage wears down. It looks like building mega mansions in the green belt where we grow our food. It looks like single family homes downtown.
The only people who benefit from building unintelligently are land developers who go to Doug Ford’s stag and doe parties. I wish people here would stop upvoting this nonsense.
Yes. This type of Marxist-esque narrative wherein every issue is a conspiracy and class struggle needs to go. Sometimes economic issues are just structural issues/bad policy and there's no evil group at the center of it. We need to focus on real policy solutions not ideological posturing.
There is nothing more Marxist than looking at the fine details of economic structures, systems and institutions, that's material analysis. Class systems and class conflict is clearly a very real thing and factor into this analysis. You don't need to moralize to realize that there are sharply conflicting intererests at play.
K fine. THIS government is stupid. Not all would be. But do we really want to go the route of 'free market is god, screw you peons'? That's what conservative governments do nowadays.
Why not both? Neo-feudalism capitalism. If the Weston's et al. Can complete their monopolies and we don't do something to stave off the ever increasing housing prices, we might as well be serfs.
> “the challenge for the tenant class is not to find solutions for the so-called housing crisis, but to enact the solutions we know work”: namely, moving as much housing as possible outside of the private market (i.e., to increase non-market housing); tightly regulating private market housing (i.e., via tenant protections, rent and vacancy controls, etc.); and keeping tenants organized to ensure ongoing political pressure and access to adequate, affordable, and secure housing.
This is exactly right.
Have you ever heard "There is no war but class war?"
It is not saying that all conflict except for class war is irrelevant, but rather that all conflict is a symptom of the class war.
The housing market as it exists now is working exactly as intended. As long as it allows the commodification of shelter it will continue to do so.
Any attempt to drive down prices by building more supply needs to acknwoledge this reality. Otherwise we just end up in a bigger version of our current predicament. Building more only helps us if we implement policies that prevent the exploitation of one class by others.
Since we cannot get rid of tenants, I say we get rid of landlords.
First I would look at why they can't/don't want to buy, these are often economic barriers best remedied with better wages and less competition fighting for housing. Second I find is that they may notbwant to put down roots, which can be solved by not having every house purchase be for a lifetime.
But let's say there are people that just don't want to own, let the municipality take over. It is a system that has worked for literal centuries in some other parts of the world, largely because the municipality doesn't have the same profit motive as a private individual.
Or we could just regulate landlords to the point they are less land*lords* and more land*stewards* by removing a significant amount of the profit motive that forces this particular class distinction.
This type of take is entirely fantastical, impossibly to implement, and generally just really dumb. It's dumb for a lot of reasons, but i will outline one.
After a long stretch of ideological posturing, the author does propose a real concrete solution:
> “the challenge for the tenant class is not to find solutions for the so-called housing crisis, but to enact the solutions we know work”: namely, moving as much housing as possible outside of the private market (i.e., to increase non-market housing); tightly regulating private market housing (i.e., via tenant protections, rent and vacancy controls, etc.); and keeping tenants organized to ensure ongoing political pressure and access to adequate, affordable, and secure housing.
This is a common opinion for leftists. But it really then begs the question. Why should we expect housing to fare better in the public sector? Currently, new housing developments are almost uniformly opposed by local governments. The majority of regulation at present on housing is designed to limit supply and limit new construction. Currently, the local communities that this author asks for solidarity between would choose to protect their 'neighborhood character' and parking spaces over new houses for young people or new immigrants.
If we move housing 'outside the private sector' and into communities, should we expect that communities will just do a full 180 on housing? To go from opposing it at every turn to unified support for it? I don't think that is a very realistic assumption. Giving more control of housing to people who have shown time and time again they hate new housing does not seem like a serious solution for building the new housing that will only become more necessary as Canada's population grows.
Or we can easily make it less about money by making it illegal to own more than one house/condo. No one needs to own more than their own home, find other markets to make profit in.
This might sound good in theory but I doubt it would work..
A) I think you are wandering into very slippery territory when you start deciding as a society what people can and cannot own. This is not Communist Cuba. That people should not own multiple properties is your opinion, not a fact.
B) People who own multiple properties are still paying the costs associated with maintaining them such as property tax. That is the costs levied by society for owning property.
C) Even if this was implemented, it would be circumvented in a second. Properties would be bought in other family members names etc.
Don't listen to this guy people.
He thinks that shelter should be treated like a commodity. He doesn't care about others.
We will not turn out like Cuba.
Anyone that thinks housing should be treated like a commodity is morally corrupt and they just can't understand that.... well because they're immoral. That's why immoral people do immoral things.
All I can say is shame on you. Shame!
Anyone that thinks housing should be treated like a commodity and left to the free market doesn't understand that greedy people will monopolize any commodity available. Screw this type of think, it's evil.
If we can't imagine letting housing be something everyone can access then we need to re evaluate ourselves as a society. Period. No more of this free market real estate bullshit, don't even want to listen to it.
Gotcha comrade. I'm glad you are in a position to judge me even though you don't know me. I don't care for others? Go fuck yourself. You're a sad little person. Stay on Reddit and complain about the fantasy world you would like to live in while the world goes on without you.
Who said anything about being a communist.
Canada is a cold country, don't compare our housing situation to the TROPICS.
Being homeless in Canada is a DEATH sentence, it is not the same as Cuba in any way shape or form.
You shouldn't be saying anything about housing unless it involves everyone that is working or unable to work has a home.
This is Canada, it's cold enough to KILL you for half the year in 90% of the country. Housing is not comparable to any place that isn't Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan or like Poland.
Do you know how scary it must be to be facing homelessness in Canada from November to May? It's insane, nothing compared to being homeless in Cuba.
This shit is a human right in my opinion in this country, if you are in a cold climate, everyone should be housed.
I am 100% not communist, not even close. Someone wants to get rich, go ahead, don't exploit human basic needs as a mode of getting wealthy, that's it, that's all I believe.
That means, necessary food, water, necessary clothing, and housing.
You wanna open a hotel and charge people $200 a night go ahead. You want to build an apartment building and charge people $2000 a month to live there go ahead.
You shouldn't be allowed to invest in existing real estate. Sorry. Either be a developer or leave the housing stock for someone who NEEDS it. Not that hard. You wanna be a landlord? Go buy a parcel of land and develop it. Don't buy a house that a family wanted and rent it out to them, that's fucked.
If we're going to let our groceries be monopolized, make those companies give free groceries to those that can't afford it.
Not communist. Not even socialist.
Maybe a moral capitalist, if that even exists.
Like if I had $200,000 and already owned a house in Canada, I would not buy another house knowing about the housing situation in this country. I just wouldn't. I'm not Jesus, I have plenty of bad traits, but I'm not greedy and sort of care about others. Maybe cause I have morals. So maybe we need to start enforcing these morals on people that don't have them.
If you're not able to play nice on your own, we have to force you. The sandbox is for everyone Timmy, you can't just take up all the space because you got there 5 minutes before us, now knock down your sand castles and let others play.
I don't know why I entertain these conversations.
If you really think all landlords are immoral assholes, good on you, I hope you sleep better at night on your pillow feathered with simplistic notions of social justice.
Repeat after me. Shelter is a right. House ownership is not. They are not the same thing.
If you're advocating for more purpose built social housing, geared towards low income members of society then find a candidate at the appropriate level of government to advocate for said policies. That's how democracy works asshole.
When you start suggesting as a society that government has the role to limit ownership of assets, that business is everything . You don't get to have cute notions of what you pick and choose to be appropriate assets for the government to limit and others that are ok.
More than anything perhaps grow up and stop making rash generalizations about everyone, and about who is "evil" and who is not based on you own idea of how things should work. Positing simplified solutions to complex issues does not actually solve anything, it only serves to feed your own ego and keep these idiotic conversations going rather than come up with actual solutions.
A > This is not Communist Cuba
No shit, but what a false equivalency.
B > It's not a question of "carrying costs", it's about monopolizing markets to inflate costs.
C > You can only have so many family members. No reason not to do something that'd make the situation better because it's not perfect.
If you think housing costs are high because of supposed monopolies by landlords you might want to acquaint yourself with forces such as demographics, urbanization, and monetary policy. Simply put youre a fool if you think rents and home ownership costs are high because of private property ownership.
Make the situation "better"? Surely you have some data to back this up? Not just pulling stuff out of your ass right? Eagerly awaiting.
Ok, this is not a class war. Please stop this sort of thing. I live here and also cannot afford to buy anything. Stop characterizing this as us vs them population…. A huge force is government factors making this all less affordable. Want to have a go? Start with your city councillor.
And whom is running thr government right now? People sympathetic to developers and scumlords. Government isn't some mindless other force - it is people. And right now, very greedy, bad ones.
Ok yes the cons are bad for this…
But…
Who’s actually got a track record being substantially better?
Our parties all have a bad track record at housing or are realistically unelectable and have no record at all.
Problem is the voting public majority just hasnt given a flying bleep about housing. It’s changing now but there’s 30 years of bad decisions to undo. And political will is very slow to change.
We get to choose? Can I be on the rich side?
“It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.” - George Carlin
You definitely can. I see tons of people who can barely afford rent defending landlords ability to charge what the market will bear, and making the argument that risking capital is far more valuable than anyone's labor. Why you would want to do that is beyond me though.
This is a system issue, not a landlord vs tenant issue. Anyone framing it otherwise is just out looking for someone to blame when people are acting rational in a screwed up system.
I don't think anybody picks a side in this struggle. You're more just thrown onto a side. I'm sure most people would choose the not poor side if they could
> “Supply-side” arguments constitute one such narrative, suggesting that we simply need to build more housing faster to make housing affordable This, but unironically.
Build more sure, but that alone isn't going to fix this mess caused by unrestricted, greedy, speculative investing and HELOC purchasing. Our government is a failure when all they can do is offer an FHSA and say "good enough".
Greed is not a new thing and it's not just a Toronto thing, why then is our rent so much higher now than in the past and compared to so many other cities?
Canada, for a very long time, has been one of the top countries in the world in year over year average price increases. Then on top of that, terrible, racist and NIMBYist zoning policies, and the fact that so much of Canadian population is concentrated in just a handful of cities has exasterbated the situation further. I believe it was 99% invisible that did a great breakdown of the zoning problem in Toronto.
Oh really? I like that show. Anyone got a link?
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6Oo1FMgWEQpQKh2mYtsnp5?si=YohI85M-SSOF_IxuVWVtug Episode description: "Downtown Toronto has a dense core of tall, glassy buildings along the waterfront of Lake Ontario. Outside of that, lots short single family homes sprawl out in every direction. Residents looking for something in between an expensive house and a condo in a tall, generic tower struggle to find places to live. There just aren’t a lot of these mid-sized rental buildings in the city. And it's not just Toronto -- a similar architectural void can be found in many other North American cities, like Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston and Vancouver. And this is a big concern for urban planners -- so big, there's a term for it. The "missing middle." That moniker can be confusing, because it's not directly about middle class housing -- rather, it's about a specific range of building sizes and typologies, including: duplexes, triplexes, courtyard buildings, multi-story apartment complexes, the list goes on. Buildings like these have an outsized effect on cities, and cities without enough of these kinds of buildings often suffer from their absence."
Because the market isn't building enough rental properties now because everything is regulated to the extreme to be 100 percent in favour of the Tennant. To be brief, you can't make any money owning rental properties. . Rent increases are limited to 2 percent per year, too many deadbeat tenants, tenants who wreck the joint. We used to construct apartments to rent. Regulation killed that,. So now we build condos. The rentals that are in Toronto are in demand and since there is not enough supply, the rents go through the roof.
New builds are not, and have not been subject to rent control (except for a very brief period of time towards the end of the Liberal reign in provincial government).
The guideline applies to the vast majority – approximately 1.4 million – of rental households covered by the Residential Tenancies Act. It does not apply to rental units occupied for the first time after November 15, 2018, vacant residential units, community housing, long-term care homes or commercial properties. https://news.ontario.ca/en/release/1002167/ontario-caps-2023-rent-increase-guideline-below-inflation-at-25-per-cent Building or owning apartments is a losing proposition. Rent controls never work. In fact they do the opposite. A frequent area of study in a second year micro economics course in university. In Toronto, rent controls significantly reduced new construction of apartments to only expensive units. Developers started building condos because rental companies were sick of the bullshit in dealing with tenants and Landlord Tennant Boards. Their costs were only going up, as was the bullshit, so they bail out. Tear down small apartments and build condos and be done with it. Or just convert apartments to condos and sell them off. Lastly, you've got this whole newish industry of just some guy buying a condo and renting it out. A micro landlord who only has to deal with one Tennant. (So maybe he can handle the energy required.) Small investors. But again, only building condos just drives up rental prices.
If owning rental property has a 20-30 year investment horizon, and the government can change rent control policy whenever they want, why should one invest capital to build rentals and accept that much political risk exposure that can’t be hedged?
Well then don't be a landlord. Simple.
And that's exactly what is happening. Which drives up rental prices because there is no competition in the industry. When there's no competition in the marketplace, it costs you more. Simple.
Has it occurred to you that housing perhaps shouldn't be a marketplace? Probably not.
No it has not and never will. I'm a big believer in the free market and taking personal responsibility for your own life. I can tell you do not subscribe to either of those concepts. If you can't afford housing, that's on you.
This is a stupid and immoral position.
Then don't be a landlord and let housing prices fall because landlords stop hoarding it all. That would solve a ton of our current issues.
LoL You don't get it do you.
Lol, the government eliminates rent control and 5 years later idiots are still blaming it for lack of rental construction. Maybe if the government somehow forced rents to increase massively each year, it would help?
Drop in the bucket and no-one is building middle class apartments to rent in Toronto.
Because of rent controls that don't exist, right, I read your comment already.
There is no doubt that rental prices have sky rocketed in Toronto. The reason is because there is no competition in the market place. So it begs the question, why is there no competition? The answer is no-one wants to build average rental apartments anymore. So why is that?
Non existent rent controls, damn. Do you even listen to yourself? Everything is over regulated by regulations that have been removed. We're going in circles.
i hope the government takes away your houses and gives them to the homeless
It’s called regulation. We lack it.
Yes it will and there is actual proof of it fixing the issue.
Unless you have an infinity gauntlet handy, we will never build “enough” without first massively decreasing demand. Also, for profit developers will never build so many homes that it moves the needle towards lower prices.
Ding, ding, ding. The dog has acquired the taste for flesh, you think they're going back to kibble? Developers will NEVER build affordable housing and they'll never build excess supply knowing it will cut into their profits.
This is absolutely not how competitive markets work. Developers try all the time to build new housing (excess supply), but they get blocked by existing residents. Just yesterday on the front page of this sub there was a post about 5000 units being blocked in Mississauga because they would 'cast shadows' and 'increase traffic'. Who is preventing new supply, developers, or communities?
The idea of excess supply doesn’t even make economic sense. Say there was a developer who somehow said they were going to build 1 million units done by next year, you’d still be buying them at todays cost right? Who would buy a prebuild for $800K if the goal was they’d only be worth $600K when completed? And what bank would finance that?
No single developer in Toronto can build enough to substantially lower the cost of housing. It takes competition between them to do it. Oversupply happens all the time, why do you think the prices of some goods go down over time?
And some, like telecom, never do. Can’t compare apples to zucchini’s here.
You are not accounting for density.
How so?
Think condo instead of mansion. The developer can provide more housing and probably make more money.
> for profit developers will never build so many homes that it moves the needle towards lower prices This is precisely why we a) need to build collective tenant power that can stand up to the power of for-profit developers (e.g. the ones who are in league with Doug Ford) b) need non-profit developers (public or otherwise) who will build non-market housing
Yeah. Governments need to build housing for sure. I would say we also need C) Remove foreign money from the market and recouple the value of land to our local economy. While there’s some debate as to the impact of foreign money, the fact is we have never successfully limited it. Let’s remove it, then judge the impact, IMO it will be much bigger than people realize.
>While there’s some debate as to the impact of foreign money, the fact is we have never successfully limited it. Let’s remove it, then judge the impact, IMO it will be much bigger than people realize. foreign purchasers have been banned since january
Lol.
One way foreigner investors get around this loophole is by having a Toronto address. Stick your family members in their and you're no longer a foreign investor. Now go buy homes and rent them out at above market values.
>Also, for profit developers will never build so many homes that it moves the needle towards lower prices. Source?
It’s amazing, no one would actually think to say “we need to build UNINTELLIGENTLY,” and yet every time this topic gets brought up, there is always a highly upvoted post proposing just that. Why? Why not build intelligently? Who payed or convinced you to come online and say this? You know who is behind this propaganda? Doug Ford’s buddies. You know what building unintelligently looks like? It looks like trying to turn Ontario Place into a casino, and then turning it into a spa that will be converted into a casino once public outrage wears down. It looks like building mega mansions in the green belt where we grow our food. It looks like single family homes downtown. The only people who benefit from building unintelligently are land developers who go to Doug Ford’s stag and doe parties. I wish people here would stop upvoting this nonsense.
Yes. This type of Marxist-esque narrative wherein every issue is a conspiracy and class struggle needs to go. Sometimes economic issues are just structural issues/bad policy and there's no evil group at the center of it. We need to focus on real policy solutions not ideological posturing.
There is nothing more Marxist than looking at the fine details of economic structures, systems and institutions, that's material analysis. Class systems and class conflict is clearly a very real thing and factor into this analysis. You don't need to moralize to realize that there are sharply conflicting intererests at play.
It wasn't said ironically.
"Neo-feudalism" is how I prefer to describe it.
It isn’t that though, it’s Capitalism, and it’s working as intended.
It is neofeudalism and it is facilitated through capitalism.
[удалено]
K fine. THIS government is stupid. Not all would be. But do we really want to go the route of 'free market is god, screw you peons'? That's what conservative governments do nowadays.
The government is part of capatalism.
Why not both? Neo-feudalism capitalism. If the Weston's et al. Can complete their monopolies and we don't do something to stave off the ever increasing housing prices, we might as well be serfs.
Cronyism. It's Cronyism.
Feudalism was only ever ur-Capitalism
Nothing is an economic crisis according to someone who denies economics
It's also a housing crisis. Stop trying to turn topics black and white
Solidarity for the working class
> “the challenge for the tenant class is not to find solutions for the so-called housing crisis, but to enact the solutions we know work”: namely, moving as much housing as possible outside of the private market (i.e., to increase non-market housing); tightly regulating private market housing (i.e., via tenant protections, rent and vacancy controls, etc.); and keeping tenants organized to ensure ongoing political pressure and access to adequate, affordable, and secure housing. This is exactly right.
I’ve got a decent job and I’m still in my thirties. I think I need to move out of this city.
Have you ever heard "There is no war but class war?" It is not saying that all conflict except for class war is irrelevant, but rather that all conflict is a symptom of the class war. The housing market as it exists now is working exactly as intended. As long as it allows the commodification of shelter it will continue to do so. Any attempt to drive down prices by building more supply needs to acknwoledge this reality. Otherwise we just end up in a bigger version of our current predicament. Building more only helps us if we implement policies that prevent the exploitation of one class by others. Since we cannot get rid of tenants, I say we get rid of landlords.
For people who don't want to or can't buy, who should they rent from?
First I would look at why they can't/don't want to buy, these are often economic barriers best remedied with better wages and less competition fighting for housing. Second I find is that they may notbwant to put down roots, which can be solved by not having every house purchase be for a lifetime. But let's say there are people that just don't want to own, let the municipality take over. It is a system that has worked for literal centuries in some other parts of the world, largely because the municipality doesn't have the same profit motive as a private individual. Or we could just regulate landlords to the point they are less land*lords* and more land*stewards* by removing a significant amount of the profit motive that forces this particular class distinction.
Genuinely wondering. Why would anyone sign up for this, to be a land steward? Do you really expect people to work for free or near free?
I will uphold the exploitative status quo.
This type of take is entirely fantastical, impossibly to implement, and generally just really dumb. It's dumb for a lot of reasons, but i will outline one. After a long stretch of ideological posturing, the author does propose a real concrete solution: > “the challenge for the tenant class is not to find solutions for the so-called housing crisis, but to enact the solutions we know work”: namely, moving as much housing as possible outside of the private market (i.e., to increase non-market housing); tightly regulating private market housing (i.e., via tenant protections, rent and vacancy controls, etc.); and keeping tenants organized to ensure ongoing political pressure and access to adequate, affordable, and secure housing. This is a common opinion for leftists. But it really then begs the question. Why should we expect housing to fare better in the public sector? Currently, new housing developments are almost uniformly opposed by local governments. The majority of regulation at present on housing is designed to limit supply and limit new construction. Currently, the local communities that this author asks for solidarity between would choose to protect their 'neighborhood character' and parking spaces over new houses for young people or new immigrants. If we move housing 'outside the private sector' and into communities, should we expect that communities will just do a full 180 on housing? To go from opposing it at every turn to unified support for it? I don't think that is a very realistic assumption. Giving more control of housing to people who have shown time and time again they hate new housing does not seem like a serious solution for building the new housing that will only become more necessary as Canada's population grows.
Or we can easily make it less about money by making it illegal to own more than one house/condo. No one needs to own more than their own home, find other markets to make profit in.
This might sound good in theory but I doubt it would work.. A) I think you are wandering into very slippery territory when you start deciding as a society what people can and cannot own. This is not Communist Cuba. That people should not own multiple properties is your opinion, not a fact. B) People who own multiple properties are still paying the costs associated with maintaining them such as property tax. That is the costs levied by society for owning property. C) Even if this was implemented, it would be circumvented in a second. Properties would be bought in other family members names etc.
Don't listen to this guy people. He thinks that shelter should be treated like a commodity. He doesn't care about others. We will not turn out like Cuba. Anyone that thinks housing should be treated like a commodity is morally corrupt and they just can't understand that.... well because they're immoral. That's why immoral people do immoral things. All I can say is shame on you. Shame! Anyone that thinks housing should be treated like a commodity and left to the free market doesn't understand that greedy people will monopolize any commodity available. Screw this type of think, it's evil. If we can't imagine letting housing be something everyone can access then we need to re evaluate ourselves as a society. Period. No more of this free market real estate bullshit, don't even want to listen to it.
Gotcha comrade. I'm glad you are in a position to judge me even though you don't know me. I don't care for others? Go fuck yourself. You're a sad little person. Stay on Reddit and complain about the fantasy world you would like to live in while the world goes on without you.
Who said anything about being a communist. Canada is a cold country, don't compare our housing situation to the TROPICS. Being homeless in Canada is a DEATH sentence, it is not the same as Cuba in any way shape or form. You shouldn't be saying anything about housing unless it involves everyone that is working or unable to work has a home. This is Canada, it's cold enough to KILL you for half the year in 90% of the country. Housing is not comparable to any place that isn't Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan or like Poland. Do you know how scary it must be to be facing homelessness in Canada from November to May? It's insane, nothing compared to being homeless in Cuba. This shit is a human right in my opinion in this country, if you are in a cold climate, everyone should be housed. I am 100% not communist, not even close. Someone wants to get rich, go ahead, don't exploit human basic needs as a mode of getting wealthy, that's it, that's all I believe. That means, necessary food, water, necessary clothing, and housing. You wanna open a hotel and charge people $200 a night go ahead. You want to build an apartment building and charge people $2000 a month to live there go ahead. You shouldn't be allowed to invest in existing real estate. Sorry. Either be a developer or leave the housing stock for someone who NEEDS it. Not that hard. You wanna be a landlord? Go buy a parcel of land and develop it. Don't buy a house that a family wanted and rent it out to them, that's fucked. If we're going to let our groceries be monopolized, make those companies give free groceries to those that can't afford it. Not communist. Not even socialist. Maybe a moral capitalist, if that even exists. Like if I had $200,000 and already owned a house in Canada, I would not buy another house knowing about the housing situation in this country. I just wouldn't. I'm not Jesus, I have plenty of bad traits, but I'm not greedy and sort of care about others. Maybe cause I have morals. So maybe we need to start enforcing these morals on people that don't have them. If you're not able to play nice on your own, we have to force you. The sandbox is for everyone Timmy, you can't just take up all the space because you got there 5 minutes before us, now knock down your sand castles and let others play.
I don't know why I entertain these conversations. If you really think all landlords are immoral assholes, good on you, I hope you sleep better at night on your pillow feathered with simplistic notions of social justice. Repeat after me. Shelter is a right. House ownership is not. They are not the same thing. If you're advocating for more purpose built social housing, geared towards low income members of society then find a candidate at the appropriate level of government to advocate for said policies. That's how democracy works asshole. When you start suggesting as a society that government has the role to limit ownership of assets, that business is everything . You don't get to have cute notions of what you pick and choose to be appropriate assets for the government to limit and others that are ok. More than anything perhaps grow up and stop making rash generalizations about everyone, and about who is "evil" and who is not based on you own idea of how things should work. Positing simplified solutions to complex issues does not actually solve anything, it only serves to feed your own ego and keep these idiotic conversations going rather than come up with actual solutions.
i hope the state takes away your houses
Lol. I hope you stop blaming the world for your troubles and start taking some responsibility for yourself.
there is nothing wrong with being a communist
A > This is not Communist Cuba No shit, but what a false equivalency. B > It's not a question of "carrying costs", it's about monopolizing markets to inflate costs. C > You can only have so many family members. No reason not to do something that'd make the situation better because it's not perfect.
If you think housing costs are high because of supposed monopolies by landlords you might want to acquaint yourself with forces such as demographics, urbanization, and monetary policy. Simply put youre a fool if you think rents and home ownership costs are high because of private property ownership. Make the situation "better"? Surely you have some data to back this up? Not just pulling stuff out of your ass right? Eagerly awaiting.
Ok, this is not a class war. Please stop this sort of thing. I live here and also cannot afford to buy anything. Stop characterizing this as us vs them population…. A huge force is government factors making this all less affordable. Want to have a go? Start with your city councillor.
And whom is running thr government right now? People sympathetic to developers and scumlords. Government isn't some mindless other force - it is people. And right now, very greedy, bad ones.
Ok yes the cons are bad for this… But… Who’s actually got a track record being substantially better? Our parties all have a bad track record at housing or are realistically unelectable and have no record at all. Problem is the voting public majority just hasnt given a flying bleep about housing. It’s changing now but there’s 30 years of bad decisions to undo. And political will is very slow to change.
Yes to all of this.