this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
67 points (92.4% liked)

Canada

9527 readers
1282 users here now

What's going on Canada?

Related Communities

🍁 Meta

🗺️ Provinces / Territories

🏙️ Cities / Local Communities

Sorted alphabetically by city name.

🏒 SportsHockey

Football (NFL): incomplete

Football (CFL): incomplete

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer

💻 Schools / Universities

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

💵 Finance, Shopping, Sales

🗣️ 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.

  2. Election Interference / Misinformation

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
otters_raft
67
Trudeau seeking advice from youth on 'pressing concerns' to inform future policy (www.ctvnews.ca)
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/canada
29 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

The prime minister is meeting with his youth advisory board this week to hear its most 'pressing concerns,' with the aim of informing future policy decisions.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ramjambamalam 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Sincere question: how would this help renters? It seems to me that this would discourage people from buying investment properties to rent out, and increase the supply available to buyers. While this would make it cheaper to buy, it seems like it would make it more expensive to rent, unless one or more of the following is true:

  1. A significant number of units are sitting empty, owned by speculators, rather than being rented. out (plausible, but I haven't seen proof - is there any?)
  2. Landlords are colluding to keep prices high (unlikely given that there are hundreds of thousands of independent landlords per StatsCan)
  3. For some reason besides collusion, free-market pricing is otherwise inapplicable to rent prices (why could this be?)

If you or anyone else would kindly shed some light on this for me, I would gladly join your cause. As it stands, I'm currently more of an advocate for building public housing to increase the supply of both rental and purchase units, rather than adjusting the bias of what units we already have towards ownership over rentals.

[–] Someone 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Someone buying an investment property doesn't increase the amount of housing available. Sure, it's one more rental available, but it's also one less home available to be purchased by someone planning to live in it. I won't claim to be any kind of expert, but it's pretty obvious that it having a middle man extracting profit increases housing costs overall.

The type of investors that do increase housing are developers. In the tax model above, the developers can apply to have the tax reduced to 5% which seems to make it much more lucrative than buying individual houses to rent as is.

[–] ramjambamalam 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

If they don't increase the amount of housing, then they don't decrease it either, right? They effectively move a house that would be bought by a home buyer, to a house that would be rented by a renter.

I can see how given the argument that landlords generally make profit, that they are a needless middleman, and therefore they contribute to higher housing costs. Is there any evidence that this impact is so substantial that regulating independent landlords will be a boon for consumers of housing?

I appreciate you sharing your perspective! I remain open to be informed as to how such a policy would help the housing crisis.

[–] Powerpoint 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yes. The evidence is the housing market in 2023. Tax domestic speculators. Regulate the hell out of them. They are the main reason that everything is so screwed.

[–] ramjambamalam 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

"the housing market in 2023"

Could you explain what you mean by that? I'd like to understand more but that's a very broad statement.

Obviously the housing market is bad for buyers and renters currently. How can we differentiate between the primary cause being independent landlords, and there being insufficient supply? Both would have the effect of high prices, right? Therefore, more evidence is required to be persuasive.

Again, I remain open to being convinced, and once convinced would gladly be a staunch advocate for your position! My apologies if I'm missing something obvious. I really am sincerely trying to understand the argument for taxing independent landlords as a solution to our housing crisis.