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Why it's time for a serious debate about rent control in Canada
(financialpost.com)
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this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2024
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We need:
-limit 1 house per family
-serious rent control
-4-storey apartments built owned by the public and cooperatives
-Stronger renter protections
-Aggressive tax on empty properties/units
Vacant House Taxes have been tried throughout Canada and are generally ineffective. They are just a distraction.
The main reason why they don't work is fairly obvious: Why would someone own property to keep it vacant?
Sure, there are some people with vacation homes, or second homes where they frequently visit (heck, I might have to get an apartment where my office is located now we're being forced to return to the office). Oh the Urbanity has a great video where they point out the vast majority of "Vacant Homes" are either students who don't permanently live there, in the process of a move, under renovation, etc.
Thankfully, off of Lemmy people seem to get this, and we're all talking construction and rezoning now.
I think people who think about housing critically get it, but unfortunately I don't think most Canadians get this, either on or off Lemmy. It's too easy to see "1.3 Million Vacant Houses" and think that's a solution for the Housing Crisis.
I'm not used to having less political bullshit here, but I guess it could be regional.
At the federal level they're mostly doing tax breaks for potential owners, and subsidies for builders.
Aggressive and escalating.
The longer you leave a residential property vacant, the higher the tax rate becomes.
Speculating on residential housing needs to become costly - more expensive than making it livable and available for people to live there.
Government can do this tomorrow but it will never happen.
These regime whores who will NEVER do a policy that hurts their owners.
I think we also need to discount and ease new construction - NIMBY bullshit shouldn't be allowed to prevent densification and we either need direct subsidies or material subsidies of construction materials.
When new builds are all mcmansions from developers with deep, unethical, ties to politicians it doesn't really help much either.
Looking at you Doug Ford.
Can you explain what you mean by
Many of the times I've heard this sentiment, it's been to either ban Mom&Pop landlords, or ban rental houses completely. These options seem to benefit potential homeowners by screwing over renters. I'm not sure if you mean something different?
"apartments built by thr public or coops" is right there. Don't look at a package proposal and treat each part of it as unrelated or judge it in a vacuum.
I am fully supportive of public housing and coops, but that doesn't explain how a "limit 1 house per family" rule would work or what it's intending to achieve. If you or @Sunshine@lemmy.ca want to expand on that you can even explain it in the context of a whole system, I'm happy to hear it. I am a policy wonk and just want to understand this proposal.
You're probably just going to get flamed here. Most political people (and activists for that matter) are not policy wonks.
They're probably thinking a ban on landlords, as currently legally defined, basically.
That's a lot of 4-story apartments, since that's the main thing that will actually get built under this scheme. I guess it worked okay in the USSR, but Soviet citizens definitely did complain about the lack of other options for living arrangement.
as much as your typical canadian city subreddit complains about homeless encampments?
Probably not - social criticism had to be subtle or the KGB would have words with you. The theme makes it's way into various works of art, though, like Enjoy Your Bath.