There are so many great ideas that could have been implemented by now, and have been implemented in other countries. But the Liberals have only instituted policies to make it worse. Only now that the youth vote is leaving them they may at least pay lip service to it. It’s honestly disgusting.
I think the most novel proposal we put forward in the report is taxing the total real estate holdings of large landowners, as opposed to individually taxing each property using the aforementioned brackets. This could entail situations where large landowners own a portfolio of properties, each falling below that $3 million threshold, but that cumulatively add up to tens of millions of dollars. In this scenario, by taxing the total holdings instead of each property separately, these owners would no longer be able to avoid paying those progressive property tax rates.
There’s a few interesting bits to this article, but I like this one the most. Property taxes on the cumulative amount of property a person or company owns is huge. It provides a punishment for buying up large amounts of property.
People already pay taxes on cumulative properties. You need this plus the progressive tax idea.
I think the concern is that:
- The rich would try to skirt this with numbered or shell companies, or family or other relations.
- The rich would pass this onto tenants.
Now, the solution is to a) couple this with rent control, b) exempt purpose-built rentals from this endeavour, and c) punish serial transgressions with confiscation.
Frankly, I think the idea of punishing malfeasance by landlords with confiscation to be just awesome: if you’re a predatory slumlord, we take the house and repurpose it as RGI public housing. Do I worry about the government becoming predatory? Yes, yes I do, but in this case it’s a lesser-of-two-evils thin.
Corporations shouldn’t be allowed to own residential property in the first place. Make it illegal.
Slumlords and overpriced rentals can be storage issues though. It can be a nice place, but if you’re paying $2k+/mo for a 1b1b that’s way too fucking much even if it’s in good condition
Triple property taxes for units not occupied by owners. Quick fix.
Forbid corporate ownership of anything under 4 units/12 bedrooms, and require them own 100% of any contiguous building over 4 units. Added taxes will just be passed on to residents. Corporations are used to aggregate money (both public corps and family/friend groups) and avoid taxes.
Then make a financial law that forbids making property loans with collateral which includes any real property that is not the property being purchased. No condo bros buying units and then re-fi-ing out to buy more.
The issue is owners just fake the documents when your property tax or vacancy tax mail arrives. Friend of mine rents basement suite, landlord has not lived in main house for over two years, it has been empty the entire time. somebody comes every few weeks to collect mail.
Then why not check on it occasionally and put a hefty fine on it when they fake the documents? If you cannot make a new and important law because rich people will try to bypass it than the state is useless.
Agreed.
People forging documents to evade taxes? That’s fraud. Put them in jail or if they’re a foreign national; take their property until they set foot in the country; then put them in jail.
There definitetly should be a better method. An honour system by mailing and online affirmation of occupied unit is useless.
this would work. It would make things like the 2009 banking crisis more of a crisis but maybe thats not a bad thing.
the other thing is downward pressure needs to be applied to the market: new units sold at below market value to people that don’t already own homes
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They could, but that’s still going to take a lot to balance the scales. It should be part of an overall plan for housing affordability
We must always punish to the poor. /s
So Basically, there’s always going to be a crisis. Cool thanks.
Land value tax would fix this.
Georgism making a comeback baby!
The solution is to build more housing.
So BlackRock can buy it and rent it out to people for $3,000 a month? What use is more housing if rich people who own 1,000 houses are just going to buy it? The solution is more complicated.
The solution is complicated because people can’t agree on the problem.
As with your comment and subject of the article there is plenty of people that are perfectly happy with the housing crisis as long as the remain to the favourable side of it.
If there is too much inventory the price for rent will go down.
That would require making more land and increasing the capacity of existing high-use, aging infrastructure for water, sewage, power, and trash. I can find you a cheap place to live out in the sticks. Hell, the town down the road from me has brand new, 3BR 2.5BA 1900SF homes with garage for $270k (USD). You only need 2BR/1BA and 1100SF? $150k. Thing is, it’s a 30-40 minute drive to the center of my 200,000 person MSA. But this isn’t a fun, entertaining city with excellent walkability, public transit, a major airport, and multiple concert venues and public spaces so people aren’t flocking to move out here.
That is part of the solution, the othee part is not letting a foreign owner buy a place and leave it vacant.
Why do people always specify “foreign” owners? I don’t see how being born in Canada should enable one to hoard housing.
House Hoarding is also an issue, but at least a Canadian is going to rent it to make cash and provide housing. Foreign owners often sit on empty prooerties to move money from China (or elsewhere) and so you have a full house vacant. This creates a lot of housing supply issues thus driiving prices artificially. If we had enough units available for anybody looking, even canadian house horders woyld see rental price drop, and make it not so lucrative to rent
If we had enough units available for anybody looking
That’s what literally what price is for. The higher the price, the fewer people actually looking. Eventually equilibrium is found where what is for sale matches those serious about buying.
If you think there are more people looking than there are units, expect prices to climb a whole lot more.
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