50% of Airbnb in Toronto are hosted by entities of 10+ full homes. The average occupancy rate is 37 nights/year. How are we letting this happen?
Numbered corporations create annoymity for these Airbnb landlords to evade taxes and encourage mortgage fraud. force real name incorporation for real estate and cities can enact punishing tax rates for these illegal hotel operators.
Source? 50% seems really low
http://insideairbnb.com/toronto
It’s interactive. I clicked on the “full homes” and only multi listings and the number was 8600/16000.
Cool
You know what would go a long way? Make housing a shitty income source. Bring about heavy taxes on any additional livable property beyond the one you live in yourself. Ban all politicians from landlording - it’s a conflict of interest holding us all back. Ban corporations and foreign organizations from owning housing. You’d see a fire sale. Prices would plummet, and people who need housing would have a greater chance at it. Finally, get a fucking UBI going, and grow universal healthcare to include eye and dental care.
Enough is goddamn enough. We know who the problem is and it isn’t immigrants, it’s well-off folks taking and hoarding more than they need using their much larger disposable income and connections to take advantage of the rest of us.
There are solutions to making Canadian’s lives better, and they’ll take work and time to make happen, but this continuous pissing in the wind isn’t getting us anywhere. We can do this civilly with hard work, or we can get to a breaking point and do things like 1789 France. One way another, the bullshit has got to go.
There’s just not enough houses, though. Measurably. Banning landlords would be bad news for anyone who can’t afford a mortgage downpayment.
Great news then. Banning landlords of non purpose built units, would drop prices!
Like former office space or whatever? That’s not what OP said, but encouraging repurposing is an idea worth talking about.
No, as in single family homes. If the building was expressly built with density in mind (think triplex and above) then it’s fine IMO. This reduces the land scarcity side of the equation, as well as incentivizes density.
social housing
Yeah, we could do a Castro and just nationalise all rentals, in theory. Growing a government department that plays the role of every landlord at once would be a big project, though, and of course it’s not politically viable at the moment. And we’d still have a housing shortage.
Not public housing, social housing. We could seed self-owning housing coops.
Finally, get a fucking UBI going
We did have UBI going. It just set inflation in motion, as the naysayers always said it would, and we had to reel back.
UBI doesn’t have have to cause inflation, but implementation has to be careful to ensure that. You can’t throw any random desk jockey at the job and expect sunshine and rainbows. Trouble is, those who have the right skills aren’t interested in doing the work.
CERB wasn’t UBI
Technically GMI, but we’ve always conflated the two. The so-called UBI study Ontario tired to conduct a few years ago was also GMI, not UBI, if you look at the implementation details. There are subtle differences, to be sure, but they probably don’t make much difference in practice. The conflation isn’t the result of them being radically different.
Further, when you have unskilled people doing the work, as we do, it is likely they would be aware of the difference. So what differences do exist, even where impactful, are ultimately immaterial in any practical sense. Call it UBI, GMI, GBI, MBI, or the many other names thrown out there, and you’ll get the same response every time: “You what? Oh, you want to give people money? Okay. Umm. I don’t know what that entails, but I’ll think of something!”
no it didn’t. saying CERB caused inflation ignores hand waves everything else going on in the world economy.
Immigrants have always been the punching bag of long term residents…
Corporations should never be able to buy homes, they’re not a commodity. I’m in the US and we have the same problem, it’s fucking us over with no end in sight.
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sad by true 😭
No, they are not. The defining feature of a commodity is that it is interchangeable.
If you in Ontario try to charge me too much for a bushel of wheat, I’ll just laugh and buy it from a guy in Saskatchewan selling it at a reasonable price instead. Makes no difference to me. The product is the same either way.
If I try to charge you too much for a house in Ontario, it would make no difference to you to move to Saskatchewan? I suspect not. They are not equivalent products. Living in the Ontario home will be a very different experience to living in the Saskatchewan home.
If housing were a commodity, a lot of our problems would be solved. But, housing is not. It even has a popular slogan to remind you of that fact: Location, location, location.
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People from r/Canada are so pathetic and predictable that they got pissed at the article and the thread about this has already been locked.
“Why would corporations hoard housing if it wasn’t for immigration?” is the main argument they use, like corporations wouldn’t be attempting to profit over a basic human need in any circumstances.
This pisses me off so much.
Are white upper class Americans in their definition of immigrants? Or are they just racist and simping for big corporations lol.
It’s okay. It’s over now. We’re free. Let metacanada go. They can’t hurt us anymore.
I was researching the other day when we might expect the housing market to recover to the point where people can actually afford a house again.
Instead, what I found was lots of articles proclaiming that the housing market will “recover” by 2024. By “recover” they meant that the downward trend in $$$ is going up again. Meaning house prices going up.
It really blew my mind that there is so little concern for affordability and it’s all about the investments… So sad. Seriously considering leaving Canada at some point in the future in order to buy a house, which is nuts.
Blaming corporations is a cop-out. Small “mom and pop” landlords are just as capable of gouging their fellow Canadians for profit. At least there are real-estate corporations that build stuff instead of being purely parasitic.
And at least the corps have to pay tax on their profits. Private owners who bought when things were cheap and are now multimillionaires got all that money effort-free and tax-free thanks to the principal residence exception.
This stinks. I’m not a landlord, I do own my own house.
And at least the corps have to pay tax on their profits
I wish i payed 15%. I’m not even counting on the rebates they get for setting up shop places, or developing “doing research”. Corporations quite often do not pay their fair share. Corporations do buy up swaths of real estate.
Private owners who bought when things were cheap and are now multimillionaires got all that money effort-free and tax-free thanks to the principal residence exception.
Almost nobody got their shit effort-free, you still have to go in with the bank and pay them a shit tonne of money. Principal residence only applies to first residence, and you still have to pay taxes on your residence (I know, because I pay them).
And here’s some news for you: housing was always relatively expensive, people who bought gigantic mortgages took on a whole pile of risk, made the banks rich, and sometimes came out richer for it; that doesn’t make them bad.
How exactly do they get it tax free due to principle residence exemption?
If you bought your house in 1986 for $60k, and then sold it in 2021 for a $million, and you lived in it for those 25 years as your principal residence, then that is tax-free.
Obviously this is less about landlords than just homeowners who are celebrating their good fortune, but still: blaming corporations is a cop-out.
Corporations are 100% to blame for the rising prices. They are increasingly buying new and old homes (single family, apartments and condos).
According to the CHSP, more than a fifth of all houses in British Columbia, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Ontario were owned by investors in 2020. That is a fucking insane number considering the current crisis.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/46-28-0001/2023001/article/00001-eng.htm
That is not the only factor, but it is undeniably an issue in the ballooning price of rent and home value.
According to the CHSP, more than a fifth of all houses in British Columbia, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Ontario were owned by investors in 2020. That is a fucking insane number considering the current crisis.
This does not necessarily mean they’re being bought by corporations. Plenty of individual buyers are investors. And remember, investment properties go onto the market to get rented. If there was really a massive glut of investment properties being created, rents would be plummeting. Is that happening? Of course not. And houses are not only 20% too expensive. And if Toronto made 20% more housing would it solve the housing crisis, would it offset the damage done by “investors”? According to the CMHC, Toronto is only hitting half of its target for completions needed to put a dent in this. Mississauga is doing far worse (which is why I’m deeply skeptical of mayor Bonnie Crombie’s attempt to take over the OLP – she got me to register to in the provincial liberals leadership race just to vote against her).
In Toronto, the number of bedrooms per year built peaked in 2001, and went down to below half by 2019. The housing crisis happened because demand went up and supply went down. Nothing more, nothing less. And the reason supply went down isn’t “corporation” or “investors”, it’s municipal governments that made housing illegal and the provinces that enabled them.
https://twitter.com/benmyers29/status/1222613287092785159
Imagine if there was a starvation crisis and it took years to get approvals to plant more farms. That would be insane, right? And it would also be insane if people blamed “farming corporations” for starvation, right? And yet that’s where we are right now. People blaming “greedy developers” for the housing crisis that’s caused by governments making housing illegal (unless they get a special one-off pardon, like a murder in the USA) combined with rising immigration.
If it really was just investors buying up everything, rents would be cheap. But since it’s expensive both to rent and buy, it means there’s just not enough stuff for all the people who want it. And if you can make a million dollars for putting up a unit, why wouldn’t you? Well, if somebody was stopping you.
Your point is that blaming corporations is a cop out. My point is that blaming the corporations is not a cop out, and one of the reasons, not the only reason. NIMBY and zoning regulations are definitely also affecting the crisis.
If it really was just investors buying up everything, rents would be cheap.
That is such a naive point of view. Landlords would rather leave a unit empty instead of lowering rent because otherwise it would lower the value of their investment.
The housing market isn’t a free market like you seem to imply. People need to have housing, so landlords will definitely gouge their tenants because they can and we see an article pretty much daily of renovictions and rent ballooning up once the lease is at term. Having more supply would definitely alleviate this problem, but it is only part of the solution. REIT buying swath of houses with lower interests than individuals is definitely inflating the prices because they can buy housing at a higher price, causing the other houses in the area to raise as well.
Yeah, that one is well known. I was trying to figure out how they made that work with rentals, which don’t have that exclusive.
Sorry, but how does that tax exemption work for the landlords then? They have to live in the unit for at least a year to avoid capital gain on the property.
That’s 9%/year annual rate of return (assuming 2% inflation), which is good, but not unheard of (here’s the calculator i used. This ignores all the money they put into the place while they lived in it (roof’s and heaters etc aren’t cheap). It also discounts that they need to find a place to live in 2021 where all houses just got much more expensive then back in 1986.
That whole time they were paying property tax.
As a Lemmy passer-by and one-time resident of Toronto… I almost ate the onion on this one.
And they can’t wait until we push our govt to build more homes … So they can buy them up.
Everyone saying we need more supply is a loon. We need a reallocation of existing homes. Building more will just line these assholes’ pockets.
The beaverton speaks truth once again!
Ahh, didn’t know Canadians had their own version of The Onion.
As someone who believes:
A) Housing investors collectively have made incredibly large amounts of money at cost of other Canadians.
B) Essentially every single level of government has done little to aid in housing/infrastructure developments. If not outright block them.
C) Given the other 2 issues aren’t dealt with immigration is the only thing that can completely pivot overnight but we’ve only increased it.
I think the biggest issues is that in the last election 80% of voters seemed to think more of the same was okay. To be clear I’m talking about the people who voted for a party who’s housing minister said that investor is helping the situation or the party’s leader said the same or people who couldn’t even be bothered to vote.
Canada’s fertility rate hasn’t been above the replacement rate in over 50 years and that is with immigration. It’s currently at 1.4 (child per woman/family)
Nearly four-fifths of the 1.8 million population increase from 2016 to 2021 was attributable to new arrivals to Canada either as permanent or temporary immigrants
If you want to lower immigration rates, you’re gonna need to increase birth rates unless you want to become the next Japan where the population is expected to halve within our lifetimes.
The issue is the supply of affordable housing, plain and simple, and there is no solution that does not involve the government intervening in the housing market in some form.
The number one reason young people tell me they do not want kids these days is because they cannot afford it. Perhaps if housing was more affordable and wages weren’t stagnated it wouldn’t be a privledge to raise a family these days.
