According to a new report from Rentals, In July, the Canadian rental market hit a record high with an average asking rent of $2,078, marking an 8.9 per cent annual increase.
Here’s your reminder that Ontario expects disabled people to live on 13k a year.
If they are lucky. Getting disability anything requires 90% luck and a doctor who “has the time” to sign a few documents.
In the US, they assign doctors to evaluate you, only to see you literally struggling to walk/balance yourself, and be told you could “probably work at least 4-8 hours a week, no disability for you, moocher”.
Nevermind that even if said mythical 4-8 hour/week, remote job existed, the pay wouldnt cover jack shit…
And our retirement pension is 760$/month in Canada, lol? At 65yo we will all live in the street
In BC it’s 18k a year for comparison.
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.
Rental income is taxed at 100%, FYI.
I think carrot works better than stick. Instead of punishing everyone who made an investment, and spending god knows how much money to enforce it, just offer a one time capital gains exemption on any investment single family dwelling that has rental income for more than a year. But make that exemption dependent on the sale going to someone who doesn’t already own a home. (No landlords scooping up extra properties) this puts sellers in connection with buyers and since the seller is getting a big payout they can do the extra leg work. I bet many of the properties get sold to existing tenants.
The government gets an easy cost effective way to free up supply, and it doesn’t actually take money out of their pocket. (Just removes future tax income). Limit the program to no more than 3 years. Anyone who is a casual landlord will jump to get out. Boomers in retirement will jump at it as they will have owned these properties for years. This will free up supply in months, not years. Everyone I know who owns rentals that I discussed this with said they would sell if they could avoid capital gains.
That’s my $0.02. FWIW
Instead of punishing everyone who made an investment,
You’ve already lost me. They’re the ones trying to treat homes as a commodity fit for investing. Investments carry risk. Passing the cost of that risk to tenants, or giving them a free pass because they’re being forced to play by real rules instead of the rigged game they’ve been taking advantage of, doesn’t sit well with me.
They made an investment that by its very nature exploits people. They should shoulder the consequences of that decision.
At this point I think I’m with Singapore on land and housing being a publicly controlled good
As it stands now our housing market is just an inflation resistant bank for the wealthy
They just named the price they’re willing to rent it at its entirely secondary to their goals and so it doesn’t serve the housing market
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I’d be fine with all rental housing being entirely owned and controlled by a government body.
Housing is already controlled by a government body, both implicitly and explicitly. The only thing that holds up the housing situation as we know it is that government body – our collective willingness to recognize and abide by it. If we don’t like it, we can change it on a whim. We are the government.
Why should where I get shelter from be a market exactly?
That’s the question. Why not pick a house you like and move in, its owner be damned? The answer, I’m sure, is because you know the government will soon come and kick you out. By brutal force, if need be.
It takes people like you and me to bring that force. We are the government. If we don’t like housing being a market, why are we bringing the force? It’s certainly easier to do nothing.
the people we’re complaining to would have some incentive to give a fuck about us.
Why not complain to them now, then?
This is actually a great idea.
But then how would we generate GDP?
This is fake GDP. Investing in land value is unproductive. Unlike a business, nothing of value is added.
In Canada, spending a million dollars to open a restaurant or found a tech start up is a worse bet than just buying a house. Not to mention these businesses are simply harder to keep open when real estate expenses are so high. This is terrible for our economy and one of the biggest reasons why our GDP-per-capita is falling behind peer countries.
I think their question was facetious.
Hard to tell. Lots of Canadians, including probably our prime minister, genuinely believe that high and rising real estate prices is good for our economy.
Your solution focusing on increasing the supply of single family homes is questionable. Single family homes are incapable of supporting affordable housing markets in high demand areas like Toronto, Quebec, Ontario, and Vancouver, which are where most Canadians live. North America needs more flexibility and capital to support upzoning the housing supply we already have from the overused SFH to missing middle multiplexes, or from those to low rise apartments, or from those to 5 over 1 style buildings, or from those to towers. The rigid Euclidean zoning policies of North America mean that even if all housing stock was privately owned by residents, there would still be a shortage in the high demand places where most people live, leading to continued high prices. Especially because we have so much trouble building quality public transit that would open up more land as desirable for development. High speed rail between Windsor and Quebec City could spread out the demand to existing supply in smaller low-cost cities while providing a boon to those cities’ economies, but Via Rail has pretty definitively shut that down in favor of HFR at this point for cost reasons
This is the only idea aggressive enough to work which is why they will never let it happen
Or at the very least, the focus could go into de-commodifying rentals so that everyone always has a fall-back option for safe, clean, affordable places to live even if they can’t buy a house/condo. Nobody should be seeking profit in a manner that endangers people’s safety.
So what happens to a rental highrise in your policy idea?
Rental highrises are not single-family homes. What we need there are more stringent rent control and to move the majority of such rentals from for-profit property developers to non-profit housing cooperatives.
We could also prohibit property developers from purchasing highrises from each other altogether. You want a new high-rise? Build one. You don’t want one of the ones you own? You get to sell it to a cooperative for a heavily regulated maximum price, and might get to break even.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
The other way to make things more affordable is to raise wages for the lower 90% of earners.
That’s substantially more than my mortgage payment.
$2000+ a month for rent on average is crazy, but rent has always been higher than most mortgage payments, though. Often by a lot.
The biggest benefit to renting is that it doesn’t require a $50,000+ down payment and $10,000+ “repair bombs” every once in a while 😵
Yeah, it wouldn’t even make sense for renting to be cheaper than buying. Most renting is from for-profit landlords. Obviously they have a mortgage, too. They’re obviously going to try to make a profit. Plus mortgage is only part of the cost of owning. There’s also property taxes and maintenance, which renting includes in the rent price.
The problems are mostly that there’s not enough supply (most commonly due to bad zoning), homeowners oppose anything that could help (cause that would reduce the value of the home they already own), and that most of these landlords are for-profit. Being for profit means they aren’t just going to charge more, but they also have a vested interest in making sure it’s more expensive and less tenant friendly.
Why wouldn’t it make sense for renting to be cheaper than buying? Would I prefer to pay $3000 in rent or $3100 in mortgage+all other fees? Even though I’d be cash flow negative by $100, I am building equity. At the end of 30 years, one person owns a home and the other doesn’t, for the difference of just $100/mo.
Renting is in fact cheaper than buying in places like Vancouver, where wages are low but real estate prices are high.
It wouldn’t make sense for a property owner to charge less to rent out an apartment than they are paying to buy it, in the same way it makes no sense to buy high and sell low on the stock market.
You need to cover your costs which includes the mortgage and maintenance fees. In the short term, those fees could be low, but when you need to get the roof or brickwork redone, suddenly you’re losing money. Why would you spend money on property only to lose money on it?
Property shouldn’t be seen as a commodity, but it also shouldn’t be a useless money sink. Who’s going to buy anything more than a single-family home if it’s just going to suck money out of you forever? There would never be any high-density housing anywhere.
The money you pay into a mortgage doesn’t evaporate. Only a portion of your mortgage is considered a cost (interest and fees and the like) the rest goes into your home equity.
If a tenants rent payment doesn’t cover all of your mortgage, taxes and maintenance it does not mean your not making a profit.
No, cash flow negative does NOT mean unprofitable!
Imagine you are a landlord that owns a $500k unit. You are renting it out for $2000, but it costs you $2001 after your mortgage, taxes, maintenance and fees. Is that worth it? Think about it this way: it costs you $1 a month to own a $500k appreciating asset. That’s a ridiculously good deal.
The reason why it can make sense that renting is cheaper (as a monthly ongoing expense) than buying is because you get less when you rent than when you buy: when you rent you merely get the right to use the property, whereas when you buy you get the right to use the property as well as the value of the asset itself.
Almost double mine. Meanwhile, my home’s value has increased by like 50% since 2019. It’s insane, untenable, and unjust.
Right? Basically everything you buy to actually use does not appreciate in value over time. I get that mortgage is lower than rent because every problem with the house is your problem which also cost money. But it’s insane to me that after you payed your mortgage you basically have more value than you paid for.
But honestly, good on you.
Conservative premiers across the country have abolished rent control and created a situation where the wealthy have several income properties ruining everything. Liberals are totally cool with it too. Tax domestic speculators. Encourage public housing at federal and provincial levels. Never vote Conservative.
Tbf rent control doesn’t solve the problem of scarcity.
What scarcity? Nobody is homeless waiting for housing to be built. Redistribute what has been hoarded.
The scarcity that is being measured in units of dollars here.
Landlords should be outlawed. They provide no service to society, only harm
They’re supposed to fill the gap for people who can’t afford to buy, or for whom it doesn’t make sense to do so (i.e. people in town on a temporary job).
The problem is that “landlords” these days are more towards the class of “investors” who expect rents to cover the cost of their mortgage plus additional profit
Public housing in the Viennese style is the proper way to handle this.
There are lots of ways that gap could be filled. Landlords exist to make profit by filling that gap. They have a financial incentive to maximize returns and minimize expenses, and have the leverage to do so to an exploitative degree.
Another way to accomplish that would be through cooperatives, which are non-profit corporations that exist to provide housing. They have a mandate to maximize utility to their tenants, and have no profit incentive leading them to exploit their tenants.
I wouldn’t mind seeing more of those, but I do also remember a day when there were a lot more landlords who charged reasonable rates without becoming overpriced slumlords.
There’s always incentive to “make a profit” but often enough it was just somebody who had extra space after the kids moved out etc and got a little extra pocket money or even just a slightly less “empty nest” feeling. Some lived in half the house (usually upstairs with a basement suite rented) and a smaller few did get another, smaller place while keeping the “family home” for their kids’ return after university or whatever.
Then people started buying second, third, etc places as investments, and it became about “maximizing investment”. These kinds act like sharks, while serial bad-tenants similarly preyed on the more nieve “good” landlords causing more of them to get out of renting.
Co-ops can definitely be part of the solution, but having better controls and adequate staffing at rental regulatory boards etc would be beneficial to both sides, as well as removing pure-profit incentives.
I’ve got a house currently but I’d be ok with seeing the so-called “market values” drop to something people can afford. I’d welcome better regulation on both sides so that my kids don’t end up paying in gold for mold, but also so that I could potentially find somebody decent/trustworthy farther into the future that I could rent space to (in my home) even the kids move out - for a reasonable rate - without having to worry that they’ll destroy the place and steal the plumbing the moment they move in while I wait on 12mo for arbitration.
Looking at the current rents people are asking, I’d say a “reasonable” rate would be ½ or even ⅓ of what most are asking, but at the same time advertising low rents seems to attract a lot of sketchy people. It’s crazy.
Always has been.
If you buy a 4plex for 2 million now, you have no choice to charge a high rent. But all the 8plex or 16plex from the 80s that are paid in full for years, there is no reason to go from 500$/month to 2000$/month just because
100% agree. Nothing pisses me off more than seeing somebody who bought at decades-old prices trying to justify charging thousands, while at the same time not having invested in maintaining the property (and triple that if they pushed out an existing renter or jacked up the rents on them to “keep up with rates”)
They are the reason why people cant afford to buy. Thats a looot of buildings going for sale if you get rid of landlords. Plummeted prices and mortgage payments. Then we should be focusing from the bottom up afterwards, make sure everyone has some place to live with public housing.
Yup, so take away the ability to grossly profit off the backs of others and allow the scales to balance. There’s no reason we can’t do both by disincentivizing gouging and slumlording while at the same time increasing the creation of more affordable housing.
Hell, if a sliding-scale of fees against # of properties/profit were implemented they could use the revenue from that to help fund more affordable housing, while discouraging house-hoarding at the same time.
Outlawing landlords gets rid of price gouging and slumlords. You cannot own property you dont live in, period.
While I don’t completely agree with an outright ban imo there should be strict limits to the amount of residential property a person or corporation can own.
No one should be making significant profit off of something so essential.
Make property ownership a shit investment.
Cap revenue from rent to 5-10%. Tax the living fuck out of empty properties so they’ll take someone, anyone. Tax higher the more properties they own.
Also outright ban AirBnB and make it so corporations are not allowed to own houses.
Yes please, houses are for people, corporations have no business (heh) owning houses.
AirBnB is exacerbating the problem, they need to be regulated to hell or outright banned.
We should really crack down on Airbnbs. Why make $2000 a month by providing a place for someone to live when you can make $500 in one night from a tourist?
Landlords only buy property as an investment vehicle. You cant keep landlords and not have housing being a money making scheme.
So in your mind all those new grads out getting their first jobs should just be homeless for 30 years until they can afford to buy a house? That’s a pretty harmful idea.
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Youre looking at this from the current situation, corporare landlords are running amok buying all the property and only renting, decreasing the supply of houses available to buy instead of rent.
Outlawing landlords means all rental property goes up for sale, and only for people that will live there. Add on some pressure that current landlords have to sell within a few years or it goes to the state, and youre gonna have plenty of cheap houses for sale.
How are people not just breaking into the empty places and just living rent free? Like Canada is probably as cold as here and I would die in the winter if I didn’t have a home.
Exactly what’s going on in Spain. And if it’s your main place of residence it’s legal.
Based Spain
The number of empty places is vastly overstated by people looking for somebody to blame instead of market forces.
Probably a good idea to block market forces that incentiveise corpos from buying up all homes, creating a generation that can’t afford to own a home.
The “market forces” that create that incentive is “too many people, not enough homes”. And the latter was caused by 30 years of municipal stonewalling and the Martin-era cancellation of subsidized purpose-built rental programs – that is, things were better when the government was literally subsidizing landlords.
Then fund building more homes. Why would you give money to a 3th party so they can use said money to hire someone to build more homes. I’m not Canadian but this shouldn’t be an issue you need 8D chess for, if people charge too much, put in price control or make it very expensive to have more than 1 home, if there’s not enough homes then build more.
Municipal government says no.
https://twitter.com/HousingNowTO/status/1441922859358724098
(housing now to is an affordable housing org that builds subsidized housing)
You do need 8D chess if the king can’t control the pawns and the pawns don’t want to move.
If by co-ops this means just a bunch of people coming together that want an apartment and the government gives them money to build said apartment building that they all cooperatively own and live in then that’s an amazing policy and I would 100% support that.
In case you’re interested, I saw a great vid recently about co-ops as a solution to the housing crisis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKudSeqHSJk
(Yes, non-profit co-ops bring down prices overall, but currently any new homes are both being built too slowly and are being snapped up by corporations or private individuals so they can make money off of them. There should be ways to protect home owners’ equity while bringing down the pricing for PRIMARY home buyers.)
Exactly. Municipal governments block affordable housing construction that everyone agrees is a good idea, and everybody blames the Fed for the housing crisis, despite that they have no constitutional power to override the Municipalities (but the provinces do, but they’re happy to let the press blame the Feds while they exploit the housing crisis to give land to sprawl developers out in suburbia).
3th
Seriously, who tf are they renting to? There aren’t that many rich people.
People are spending most of their income on housing
I’m American, but I can’t find a place to rent that doesn’t demand an income of 3x rent. Is that not a thing in Canada?
When I was renting, places were looking the combined income of everyone living there (and any personal guarantor(s)) was at least double the rent, or that you had a long rental history that showed that you could pay.
It’s simple! For me I either have to pay that much, be homeless, move to a tiny shitty city with no work in my field, or spend a year trying to find a decent place that isn’t totally unaffordable while thousands of competing potential tenants do the same to renters with vacancies. So fun!
My landlord upped my monthly rent $600 bucks this year because he’s a cunt and knows I have no fucking choice except to pay him.
I had another comment typed before I realized that they don’t need to fill every room if they have a small fraction paying their rates.
It’s fucking f2p whale economics without the f2p. Nothing against you.
Huh? Which province?
Sorry I’m late with this response, but Alberta
Well, how’d they up the rent by $600? Is there no rent control in Alberta?
Calgary is one of the best places in North America … for landlords. Tenants have basically zero protections here. Every time my landlord does something shitty and shady I look up the law and landlords always have the upper hand.
All I got was a letter stating that as per my lease agreement, my lease is over and I would have to move out by the end of the month (which was a little over 2 weeks away) or reply to the letter to accept the $1800 (previously $1200) rental price.
Example: Have bedbugs? It’s your landlords responsibility to get rid of them. If your landlord doesn’t? You can move out. That’s what the law states, even though it states it’s your landlords responsibility to get rid of them.
Damn. Alberta is really crap. But I’ve heard that in cities at least like Edmonton or Calgary at least the supply is there for housing.
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It is to most if you’re oberying the 1/4 rent rule. That means you’re making close to $100k/year, and that’s a lot for a lot of people.
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Well, many US landlords do a 1/3 rent rule. And I’m hearing about some doing 1/2 rent rule. So, I guess not. But they are looking to consume as much of your income as possible.
Yeah that ain’t rich.
Tell that to people who have a combined household income of $50k-$75k. Big difference.
I’ll tell them to their face. That isn’t rich. I’m not arguing the money doesn’t make a difference, I’m arguing that isn’t rich. Terminology matters, and someone making 50k is in the same classification as someone making 150k from the perspective of the actually rich. Being rich means having wealth.
It’s crazy how most of my friends are paying more for their 3 bedrooms apartment than I pay for my 5 bedrooms plus basement single home. That includes all expenses for a home owner except renovations budget. The landlords are probably abusing with skyrocket profits.
Millenials and GenX are going to live on the street in their old age.
Hah, old age. What a fever dream
BoC keeps raising rates so it’s obvious that home owners have to raise their rental prices too. How else are they going to get more money out of their investments? Everyone’s fucked unless you’re rich.
Fucking hell my salary isn’t even enough to cover 3/4ths of that rent. Pure insanity
$15 an hour seems to be about the minimum wage in Canada. $15x40x4.2=$2520 per month. If you’re working a full-time job and you’re making less than that, then your employer is breaking the law.
Isn’t that before taxes? Or does this work differently in Canada?
Oh I’m not Canadian, my bad for not clarifying. But I still live on a modern western country with a cost of living similar to Canada which is why I commented
Yes, and 2000/month rent is unaffordable at 85% of your income.
I wasn’t trying to imply that it’s affordable at that rate, but they said they make 3/4 as much as the rent. Something is fishy about that. They’re either getting ripped off, or they don’t work full-time. Usually part-time workers don’t refer to their income as “salary”.
Some people work part time tho because the companies don’t want to pay benefits…
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Just saw that Surrey has the highest crime rate per capita as well! So at least you have that going for ya.
Gonna take a gander that those two things are related at this point
“…asking”
Fuck off.
Sorry.
I will never rent long term ever again, thank God I bought a house.
Sadly… You are very lucky you were able to buy a house… Majority now, will never know that luxury which should be considered a human right.
The majority were never going to own a home to begin with.
By design. It didn’t have to be this way
You’re right, but it’s not because of anything innate, but because of particular choices made by your(and my) governments. There are plenty of countries on the planet with 90%+ homeownership, they’re just not typically Free Market Liberal Democracies.
Same thing happening here in Oregon. Homeless people are everywhere.
These homeless just lacking enough personal responsibility to do the boot strap pulling
Just learn Python and buy a house.
Gotta buy those boot straps first though.
