Corporations hoarding homes thank Canadians for enthusiastically blaming immigration

As someone who believes:

A) Housing investors collectively have made incredibly large amounts of money at cost of other Canadians.

B) Essentially every single level of government has done little to aid in housing/infrastructure developments. If not outright block them.

C) Given the other 2 issues aren't dealt with immigration is the only thing that can completely pivot overnight but we've only increased it.

I think the biggest issues is that in the last election 80% of voters seemed to think more of the same was okay. To be clear I'm talking about the people who voted for a party who's housing minister said that investor is helping the situation or the party's leader said the same or people who couldn't even be bothered to vote.

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Canada's fertility rate hasn't been above the replacement rate in over 50 years and that is with immigration. It's currently at 1.4 (child per woman/family)

Nearly four-fifths of the 1.8 million population increase from 2016 to 2021 was attributable to new arrivals to Canada either as permanent or temporary immigrants

If you want to lower immigration rates, you're gonna need to increase birth rates unless you want to become the next Japan where the population is expected to halve within our lifetimes.

The issue is the supply of affordable housing, plain and simple, and there is no solution that does not involve the government intervening in the housing market in some form.

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- If you want to lower immigration rates, you’re gonna need to increase birth rates
  
  The opposite is also true: if you want to see higher birth rates then housing needs to be affordable. Most Canadians require some financial stability before they start a family, and that is difficult today with the sky high housing costs.
  
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- The number one reason young people tell me they do not want kids these days is because they cannot afford it. Perhaps if housing was more affordable and wages weren't stagnated it wouldn't be a privledge to raise a family these days.
  
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- While I agree the answer to the issue is the solution. As I noted it doesn't seems like people agree on the issue.
  
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- So what is wrong with a declining population, anyway?
  
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Note also that the Liberals have basically stated that their immigration policy is intended to suppress wages. It's not about helping refugees, or about diversity, it's about class warfare.

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- the Liberals have basically stated that their immigration policy is intended to suppress wages.
  
  Policy fail, then. With the exception of the height of COVID, wages have beat inflation since Trudeau took the Prime Ministership. Even the BoC has stepped in to try and stop it.
  
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Yeah, the government is helping house Canadians the same way the government is helping Canadians enjoy a livable climate in the future.

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50% of Airbnb in Toronto are hosted by entities of 10+ full homes. The average occupancy rate is 37 nights/year. How are we letting this happen?

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Numbered corporations create annoymity for these Airbnb landlords to evade taxes and encourage mortgage fraud. force real name incorporation for real estate and cities can enact punishing tax rates for these illegal hotel operators.

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Source? 50% seems really low

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- http://insideairbnb.com/toronto
  
  It's interactive. I clicked on the "full homes" and only multi listings and the number was 8600/16000.
  
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You know what would go a long way? Make housing a shitty income source. Bring about heavy taxes on any additional livable property beyond the one you live in yourself. Ban all politicians from landlording - it’s a conflict of interest holding us all back. Ban corporations and foreign organizations from owning housing. You’d see a fire sale. Prices would plummet, and people who need housing would have a greater chance at it. Finally, get a fucking UBI going, and grow universal healthcare to include eye and dental care.

Enough is goddamn enough. We know who the problem is and it isn’t immigrants, it’s well-off folks taking and hoarding more than they need using their much larger disposable income and connections to take advantage of the rest of us.

There are solutions to making Canadian’s lives better, and they’ll take work and time to make happen, but this continuous pissing in the wind isn’t getting us anywhere. We can do this civilly with hard work, or we can get to a breaking point and do things like 1789 France. One way another, the bullshit has got to go.

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There's just not enough houses, though. Measurably. Banning landlords would be bad news for anyone who can't afford a mortgage downpayment.

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- Great news then. Banning landlords of non purpose built units, would drop prices!
  
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- social housing
  
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Finally, get a fucking UBI going

We did have UBI going. It set inflation in motion, as the naysayers always said it would, and we had to reel back.

UBI doesn't have have to cause inflation, but implementation has to be careful to ensure that. You can't throw any random desk jockey at the job and expect sunshine and rainbows. Trouble is, those who have the right skills aren't interested in doing the work. We don't subscribe to slavery, so...

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- CERB wasn't UBI
  
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- no it didn't. saying CERB caused inflation ignores hand waves everything else going on in the world economy.
  
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- So CERB is the driver of inflation. Inflation that the entire world experienced. Holy fuck. Who knew Canada had so much economic power.
  
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Corporations should never be able to buy homes, they're not a commodity. I'm in the US and we have the same problem, it's fucking us over with no end in sight.

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Permanently Deleted

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- sad by true 😭
  
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- No, they are not. The defining feature of a commodity is that it is interchangeable.
  
  If you in Ontario try to charge me too much for a bushel of wheat, I'll laugh and buy it from a guy in Saskatchewan selling it at a reasonable price instead. Makes no difference to me. The product is the same either way.
  
  If I try to charge you too much for a house in Ontario, it would make no difference to you to move to Saskatchewan? I suspect not. They are not equivalent products. Living in the Ontario home will be a very different experience to living in the Saskatchewan home.
  
  If housing were a commodity, a lot of our problems would be solved. But, housing is not. It even has a popular slogan to remind you of that fact: Location, location, location.
  
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Immigrants have always been the punching bag of long term residents...

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People from r/Canada are so pathetic and predictable that they got pissed at the article and the thread about this has already been locked.

"Why would corporations hoard housing if it wasn't for immigration?" is the main argument they use, like corporations wouldn't be attempting to profit over a basic human need in any circumstances.

This pisses me off so much.

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Are white upper class Americans in their definition of immigrants? Or are they just racist and simping for big corporations lol.

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It's okay. It's over now. We're free. Let metacanada go. They can't hurt us anymore.

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I was researching the other day when we might expect the housing market to recover to the point where people can actually afford a house again.

Instead, what I found was lots of articles proclaiming that the housing market will "recover" by 2024. By "recover" they meant that the downward trend in $$$ is going up again. Meaning house prices going up.

It really blew my mind that there is so little concern for affordability and it's all about the investments.. So sad. Seriously considering leaving Canada at some point in the future in order to buy a house, which is nuts.

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Blaming corporations is a cop-out. Small "mom and pop" landlords are just as capable of gouging their fellow Canadians for profit. At least there are real-estate corporations that build stuff instead of being purely parasitic.

And at least the corps have to pay tax on their profits. Private owners who bought when things were cheap and are now multimillionaires got all that money effort-free and tax-free thanks to the principal residence exception.

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This stinks. I'm not a landlord, I do own my own house.

And at least the corps have to pay tax on their profits

I wish i payed 15%. I'm not even counting on the rebates they get for setting up shop places, or developing "doing research". Corporations quite often do not pay their fair share. Corporations do buy up swaths of real estate.

Private owners who bought when things were cheap and are now multimillionaires got all that money effort-free and tax-free thanks to the principal residence exception.

Almost nobody got their shit effort-free, you still have to go in with the bank and pay them a shit tonne of money. Principal residence only applies to first residence, and you still have to pay taxes on your residence (I know, because I pay them).

And here's some news for you: housing was always relatively expensive, people who bought gigantic mortgages took on a whole pile of risk, made the banks rich, and sometimes came out richer for it; that doesn't make them bad.

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How exactly do they get it tax free due to principle residence exemption?

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- If you bought your house in 1986 for $60k, and then sold it in 2021 for a $million, and you lived in it for those 25 years as your principal residence, then that is tax-free.
  
  Obviously this is less about landlords than just homeowners who are celebrating their good fortune, but still: blaming corporations is a cop-out.
  
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The beaverton speaks truth once again!

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As a Lemmy passer-by and one-time resident of Toronto... I almost ate the onion on this one.

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Ahh, didn't know Canadians had their own version of The Onion.

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And they can't wait until we push our govt to build more homes ... So they can buy them up.

Everyone saying we need more supply is a loon. We need a reallocation of existing homes. Building more will just line these assholes' pockets.

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