this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
70 points (96.1% liked)

Canada

7659 readers
760 users here now

What's going on Canada?

Related Communities

🍁 Meta

πŸ—ΊοΈ Provinces / Territories

πŸ™οΈ Cities / Local Communities

Sorted alphabetically by city name.

πŸ’ SportsHockey

Football (NFL): incomplete

Football (CFL): incomplete

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer

πŸ’» Schools / Universities

Sorted by province, then by total full-time enrolment.

πŸ’΅ Finance, Shopping, Sales

πŸ—£οΈ Politics

🍁 Social / Culture

Rules

  1. Keep the original title when submitting an article. You can put your own commentary in the body of the post or in the comment section.

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage: lemmy.ca

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
otter
mp3
70
To solve Dutch housing crisis, proposal aimed to ban the rich from buying some homes. Could it work here? (www.cbc.ca)
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/canada
48 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

In an attempt to deal with an affordable housing crisis, the Dutch housing minister recently proposed a law that would have allowed municipalities to force some property owners to sell their homes only to low and middle-income earners. The problem the policy is trying to fix is one that's particularly acute in Canada.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] weew 25 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (4 children)
  1. Scale property tax for number of properties owned. Double it per property owned.

i.e. own 2 homes, property tax for ALL homes owned doubles. Own 3 homes, pay 4x property tax. etc. Homes should not be hoarded. And corporations are definitely not exempt, except perhaps before first sale (i.e. they constructed the property) or demolition sale (buying multiple properties for demolition to be able to construct denser units)

  1. Add or expand speculation tax (like the empty homes tax): it should be decently large, like at least 10% of the property's assessed value per year. However, it can be negated based on income tax paid by someone who lives at that location (as reported on their tax filing). There may need to be some additional reductions for retirees/seniors too.

Either way somebody's gotta live and work there to avoid the tax. No "students" owning multi-million dollar mansions.

[–] Revan343 10 points 2 years ago

And then use the tax income to fund construction of government housing, to rent out at cost

[–] TemporaryBoyfriend 9 points 2 years ago

Yup, I've always advocated for a punitive tax on owning more than one residential home. Start with corporations, 1% extra tax on the value of the property each year, increasing at 2x the rate of inflation each year. Two of three years after that, then apply it to privately owned second homes... Within 10 years, the annual tax on any second, third, fourth homes will be greater than any possible profits, and those houses will come on the market as various properties pass into not being profitable investments anymore.

And as others have said, use the collected tax for affordable housing. The best thing to do is for this money to be used to buy condos in existing buildings, and place families there, to prevent "ghettoization" of neighbourhoods.

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

Why not ban anything past a primary home? It's like at a wedding where everyone gets to eat first before going for seconds.

I guess it's a political non-starter given the number of people who own more than one home...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

There can be some good reasons to own multiple homes, so rather than banning it you tax it. That way people can still do it and the city gets more funding for allowing it. Those that can't do the tax will sell down.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

A grandfather clause could be added, so that 'from now on' people can't buy more than 1 home. But there are plenty of less severe ways to fix the problem. A lack of solutions isn't the issue, anyway. The problem is that rich people who control countries don't want to fix housing problems, since they are often the people benefiting.

[–] Showroom7561 3 points 2 years ago

Scale property tax for number of properties owned. Double it per property owned.

I'd like to see that happen, but I'd also like prohibitively high taxes for homes over 2000 sq'. Nobody needs a house that big, and if we're destroying natural habitat to fit ultra large homes, then someone should be paying heavily for it.