Experts say Ottawa is playing more of a role in housing, which is mostly a provincial and territorial responsibility, but federal involvement hasn’t brought much relief amid rising home prices.

  • @[email protected]
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    01 year ago

    @girlfreddy

    You do realize that every rental needs to be owned by someone right?

    Whether it’s your neighbor directly, or your neighbor’s stake in a REIT, it really doesn’t matter to the outcome for people who want to live in that area.

    Rentals have always been commercialized, the whole point of renting out a unit is to make money.

    You’re right that housing is a fundamental need, but Canada (since it’s inception) has always had private ownership of the housing market. We can fix this with a private market, the government just needs to regulate it better. Restricting ownership to two properties won’t fix it though, it just changes the winners from large corporations (owned by rich people) to individual rich people who have enough to own a second home that they rent out.

    The only way to make affordable housing is to drop the price of all housing, which is politically suicidal at the moment. You will never convince the 65% of the population that are owners to vote to devalue their property by 75% in order to make things affordable for everyone. The problem needs to get far worse, until ownership drops dramatically before any sort of effective policy can be passed. It’s going to be a few decades at least.

    • girlfreddy
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      01 year ago

      @BlameThePeacock

      If 65% of rental properties are owned by the people living in them and 24% are owned by fucking corporations, that leaves 11% left for everyone else … including low income people who need to live somewhere.

      I’m one of them. Had to move out of my apartment and now I live in a bedroom. At 62 I can’t work much anymore because of workplace injuries, have had 4 surgeries to fix what happened, and get $1200 per month to live on. Keep telling me how it can’t be fixed.

      • @[email protected]
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        11 year ago

        You’re really bad at logic, and reading.

        First, I said residential properties, not rental properties. That means any building designed for people to live in it.

        Second, the houses people own have people living in them, the majority of Canadians in fact. So do the dedicated rentals (regardless of who owns them) even the properties owned by multiple owners tend to be occupied by renters.

        There is no “everyone else” left out, those numbers include everyone who isn’t homeless.

        I never said it can’t be fixed, I said it won’t be fixed for a while because the majority of Canadians (and therefore voters) are benefitting from this system inflating their home value.