The New Democrat government's ambitious homebuilding agenda could result in up to 293,000 new housing units over the next decade, according to a government-commissioned report highlighted Thursday by Premier David Eby.
They aren't worth anything until you sell them again. Billionaires hoarding houses is mostly hype, we just (measurably, sources available) don't have as many houses as other similar countries do, for some reason.
That's a misdiagnosis of the problem. Hedge funds and REITs are not the primary drivers of demand. People keep saying this, but even though we should build non-market housing, banning institutional investors from buying real estate is not nearly enough.
Probably more like 4x that, but on the other hand, this is finally a project that is starting to get a little close to the level of added housing that is needed in a single city (presuming this is concentrated around central Vancouver, not being placed around smaller towns or something stupid like that.
Most proposals only amount to 10% those numbers, and 10 years is a realistic time scale as building homes takes time in the first place.
I love how the conservatives fixate so fucking hard on the imm'grints without acknowledging the need for them and the need for housing to simply support people living longer without paying into cpp/oap.
It must be refreshing to know that for every problem it's either hyper-educated immigrants, refugees, or just the poors' fault somehow, and that magically a strong bootstraps policy will trickle golden mana down from the aristocracy.
A thousand times it'll be wrong, but they're confident this time it'll be right.
We're in the middle of a housing crisis. We can take the edge off it by
reducing demand by temporarily limiting immigration
modifying tax regulations to make real estate a less attractive investment
These are steps the feds can take immediately and unilaterally. Everything else will take years, and will need agreement from municipal and provincial governments.
To play devil's advocate here, surely the issue isn't the fact of immigration but the amount happening each year that is worrying? They're adding 0.6 Winnipegs per year of people without, you know, adding any cities, infrastructure, hospitals, schools, etc to handle the influx. If people can't find a home now, how does adding more people solve that issue?
Edit: to clarify, I have no issue with immigration or immigrants, Canada's history is all about immigration. Just questioning the rate per year without additional work going into upgrading current infrastructure.
2nd edit: to run some numbers, BC currently has 5,000,879 out of Canada's 36,991,981 or 13.5% of the population. If that proportion continues over the next decade, BC will see an approximate increase of 600,750 out of 4,450,000 people based of of this plan (assuming the grown maintains its linear growth). If you divide 600,750 people by 293,000 new units you get 2.05 people per unit, therefore if the people immigrating are bringing their family and living more than 2 people per unit you will see a net surplus of housing, but single people will see a net loss or break even of housing.
All of this is to say, it appears they have planned to create enough housing for the people projected to come here, but not a substantial amount to increase the overall supply. It would appear it will maintain the status quo.
With the way our climate is going I think our current level of immigration is training wheels for whats soon to come, so we need to be making houses both to ease our housing crisis, AND meet our ongoing immigration
No joke. Wearing a conspiracy hat I think a lot of our immigration right now is people seeing the writing on the wall in their respective countries and bailing TF out before the wheels fall off the wagon there.
They better be non-market. I honestly don’t know what premier's are thinking at this point. In my municipality our mayor unilaterally squashed a vacant unit taxation model making not a single comment. Thankfully it’s being revisited