this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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According to a new report from Rentals, In July, the Canadian rental market hit a record high with an average asking rent of $2,078, marking an 8.9 per cent annual increase.

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[–] [email protected] 55 points 2 years ago (27 children)

What we need to do is de-incentivize the commodification of housing entirely. Really make it unprofitable to deal in homes while passing the risk for your "investment" on to the people you're exploiting.

I'm talking about an outright ban on all corporations, foreign and domestic, from owning single family homes — corporations need offices, not homes, and shell corporations and LLCs don't even need those. Give a one year grace period, then tax all rental income collected from single-family homes at 100%. Maybe fine them each year too until they shape up.

I'm talking about regulating rental prices on short-term rentals, and capping the annual income allowed from short-term rental units to a value indexed against minimum wage (or preferably the area's living wage, determined not by any level of government itself but by valid third party organizations).

I'm talking an annual federal tax on properties not occupied full time by the owner or their immediate blood relative. Parent, sibling, or child. Something insane, maybe 400-800% of the home's property tax. Multiply it exponentially for each hoarded home. Throw in an exception for a second home if it's far enough from the first (people who own cottages aren't the problem, and shouldn't be penalised). But only for the second home — nobody needs two or three or four "vacation homes".

That's how we force land-rich boomers out of the housing "market" and get homes into the hands of people who need them, who should have a right to stable housing, who are currently being blocked from the market by vampiric land leeches.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 2 years ago (6 children)

So Bob sees your tax, looks at the Ahmed family renting his unit. Says "oh crap, uh, Ahmeds, you're out, I need to put my brother Doug in there to dodge this tax!"

Result: Brother Doug moves from a tiny apartment to living in Bob's house.

The Ahmeds cannot find another place, because half the Bobs are doing a similar scam, and the other half the Bobs are doubling their rents because they can see they now have a good that's in even shorter supply and they don't feel guilty at all for this because they're now paying triple property tax.

The Ahmeds now live in their car and eat cat food.

You know when the number of rentable units goes down, rental prices go up, right? I'm all for going after people who leave units vacant, and for taxing the income people get from these investments, but taxing rental units means making the rent price worse.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (5 children)

But if Bob moves Doug into his second house, then he's now either a) exploiting his brother instead of a stranger, which most landleeches are less likely to want to do, or (more likely) b) giving his brother a better rent to avoid exploiting his brother... and is thus making a much smaller profit than when he was exploiting the Ahmed family. And if not, then at least Bob only has so many brothers he can rent to, so the worst kinds of Bob will eventually have to sell off some number of properties.

But the goal of the immediate family exemption is to allow families to help each other own homes that aren't beholden to some shit stain developer or daywalking asshat. Specifically to let boomer and gen-x parents provide struggling millenial or gen-z children with homes, but I'm sure I could come up with a handful of other semi-likely relevant situations as well.

Back to your example though, the lack of profit he's now making pushes Bob to sell the place. And because all his landleech buddies are making less and less money per hoarded home, they're also more likely to be unloading their surplus stock at the same time. And if these people all lose money on the sale of their extra homes as prices come crashing down, fucking good.

And as prices come down, more people who are currently renting because buying is prohibitively expensive are able to stop renting and move into a place they own, this freeing up rental spaces.

Of course I'd also support going much more simple and literally forcing landleeches to give their hoarded homes on pain of prison time, but I figured that's a little more radical than the general population could ever come close to supporting.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I get your angry, but your comment about housing prices crashing is going to fuck over so many good hard working people that bought houses in the last 5 years. You would subject those people to holding hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt (say if they had to move for work); just to satisfy your need for revenge?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

As mad as I am, it's genuinely not about revenge. It's about making the prospect of home ownership a realistic and attainable goal for entire generations of people for whom, right now, it's literally a joke.

Fact is there's not really any way to both return housing prices to realistic levels and keep prices steady for current owners. I don't pretend this is a simple problem, or that solving it won't cause other problems as a result. But in my opinion the problem you're suggesting is of a much lesser scale than what we're facing today, and has less drastic solutions. Using the taxes collected from serial landleeches to compensate normal people who need to move during and following the market crash to offset the debt caused by a now-underwater mortgage could be a solution, for example. And fuck knows the banks aren't innocent in this whole mess themselves, and could probably be forced to shoulder their share of the burden as well.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I agree with you about the pricing. Interest rate hikes should have provided the cooling off period to slowly bring prices down. But we don't have the supply to allow for a buyers market to take over. I watch coworkers who are late twenties and early thirties signing $900,000 mortgages. They are desperate. So the small number of people who can actually afford homes are taking the small supply even at these interest rates. I made a post up earlier about a way to free up supply, which of course was met with more anger. This whole situation sucks.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Prices are already down over 20% and it IS a buyers market at the moment. The problem is that people don't have the funds so even though prices are down significantly there are now fewer buyers because people can't borrow. The elephant in the room is that wages need to come up.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

The other way to make things more affordable is to raise wages for the lower 90% of earners.

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