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About fucking time. Fifteen years later , but better late than never.
Force the rich to sell their multiple houses too. Tax their wealth and they won't have a choice. 3rd homes should get taxed at 10% of their value or more. Let's stop kidding around. That'll force them to divest fast as fuck.
I have a question for you.
What percentage of Canadian homes are owned by a single person or family who has 3 or more properties?
What if I told you that number is so small that your argument is great rage bait, but realistically useless?
65% of residential properties in Canada are owned by the family that lives in them, another very large chunk is dedicated rental apartments, then there's a ton of second properties like cottages, etc., then of course there are people who have a second property for rental, but the number left remaining for people with a third property (for themselves or rental) is less than a couple percent of the total housing market.
Go ahead and implement that tax, it's not going to hurt anyone I care about, but if you expect any noticeable effect on the housing market you're not thinking logically about the situation.
"It doesn't effect people, even if people are upset about it, so why should we do anything" is not a good and effective way for a government to work.
The same trust in self-governing is what made the Internet the shithole that we're dealing with now. I'd rather the parties make an adjustment before something is abused, not after.
Nobody in this goddamned world has ever heard the term "preventative" I swear to God.
You don't brush your teeth when you start getting cavities. You brush to prevent them.
You don't install seatbelts after you've been ejected from your car. You get a car that already has seatbelts and airbags.
Vaccines, healthy foods, routine hardware maintenance (cars, computers, etc), exercise and stretches... You're supposed to do and get things BEFORE you have the problems they solve.
We really really need to get into the habit, as a species, of trying to prevent bad things before they happen.
Not good enough. We need at least 1 million new homes a year. We need to force municipalities to allow for mixed-use zoning so that we don't only create single-family homes in suburbs that are largely disconnected from transit and amenities. We need to discourage urban sprawl and incentivize mass transit.
The Liberals know this because they talk to developers and municipalities and want their centrist "compromise" to be the solution. It won't be, it'll just be another half-measure that the Conservatives can point to when they want to highlight the poor spending choices of the opposition.
The Canada Housing Accelerator Credit is already the federal level incentive for density-favoured zoning. Zoning is handled by the provinces who can override municipalities, but the feds can't override provinces re: housing. Poilievre's platform is to revoke payments to provinces as punishment for not meeting housing quotas, but this is only going to get provinces more in debt and the budget crunch will only make building housing more difficult.
We need at least 1 million new homes a year
So a crown corporation building homes to get construction to half that level is good. And provinces can bolster that with appropriate zoning changes to spur provincial, municipal public and private development to get to that million target. Sitting back and complaining about the whole plan because it's not the silver bullet isn't helpful here.
I don't really see how I can be helpful here since I'm not a municipal official or an elected representative, complaining is really all I am able to do as an average person.
I'm tired of being promised change only to be met with half-measures that get scrapped by the next party in power. Aren't you sick of every policy being a version of "we'll commit to making things slightly better over the next 10 years, when we're no longer accountable for our failures"?
I'm tired of mediocrity being celebrated because the alternative is societal regression. So yes, I'm complaining. Oh no, how terrible.
Hold that thought in your heart, then organize after the election with other people that have that same thought. Go to your MP and have them introduce private member's bills to get the change you want to see. Send petitions to the new government. Volunteer in your community or work in areas you want to see change.
If that doesn't work, bring forward change in our political system ahead of the next election, not when we have to pull away from the brink of fascism.
Not good enough is a stepping stone to good enough and a great starting point for done.
Reward what works, disengage what doesn't, and promote ideas that can grow.
Sceptism is important, dissent is healthy, but recognizing what will progress society and putting effort into that is what's needed now.
Part of the problem is traditional suburban zoning tends to be too expensive in the long run for cities to maintain due to lots of infrastructure and low density for taxation. Moving away from prioritizing suburbia and focusing government efforts more on density could spur the changes we need and build more homes from the government investment. It could add more housing while minimizing the additional infrastructure costs the city has to take on to accommodate the housing.
The problem is building an insufficient number of homes, below the rate of population growth, at government expense, costs taxpayers money without solving the problem. Worse, it takes the place of effective solutions.
When we learn more about this proposal, we can understand if it would lower the cost of housing. Until then, skepticism is warranted.
I think it doesn't matter whether new construction is funded by taxpayers or not. We all end up paying either way through various channels. I think what matters is how much money is collected as profit due to what we build, how we build it and how much we build.
What other effective solutions are being explored by the government? Let's platform those.
The fact that they're creating a crown corporation to build homes on public and private land is huge. This includes prefab and modular homes too. They're even committing to using Canadian lumber.
We cannot contunue to rely on capitulating to and deregulating private developers and expecting them to act in any way other than own self-interest. They have no incentive to bring down the cost of homes. It is now crystal clear that the neo-liberal solution does not work.
A crown corporation that exists to create housing rather than maximize shareholder value is a massive step in the right direction. Frankly, I'm surprised Carney is doing this but happy about it all the same.
I expect Carney to get pushback from Doug Ford who is firmly in the pocket of private real estate investors.
There is no significant amount of federal public land sitting unused where people want to live. Only 4% of the total land in the provinces are federally owned, and most of that is parks and military bases.
The provinces themselves have some public land, but even most of that isn't in or near cities where people want to live. They could build entirely new cities from scratch in slightly less desirable locations, but that's about it.
The cost to buy private land to do this would be impossibly expensive.
It's a great concept, but it simply doesn't work in reality.
Redeveloping public owned lands in cities should be a start. I've been to community meetings to discuss redeveloping federal land in Ottawa.
Ottawa has a significant amount of federal land. Transforming unused federal office space to mixed used residential will be a game changer.
There is a crown corp that now owns public federal land and is either redeveloping for mixed use or for tourism:
They also own the CN Tower. Beefing this up would be great.
I mean, even in Ottawa is there actually enough federal land for that to matter? And if it's not enough there, there definitely isn't enough in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Victoria, etc.
We cannot contunue to rely on capitulating to and deregulating private developers and expecting them to act in any way other than own self-interest. They have no incentive to bring down the cost of homes. It is now crystal clear that the neo-liberal solution does not work.
I'm hoping to see more details about how production will be split. The article/release describes the new organization as both overseeing and building. I really want the emphasis to be on building, since that will allow them to push down sale or rental costs of the final product. .
OK, this sounds like a real plan. I really like they are paying attention to prefab construction.
Prefab is not as useful as it sounds. Houses are already factory made - they just bring the factory to the site on a truck. Most of the parts are already pre-cut in a separate factory, only a small minority need to be cut. They just take parts and put them together.
Most prefab attempts are cheaper only because quality standards are lower.
? Woodframe construction starts with lifts of lumber dropped onsite after a basement is poured, you cut what you need as you go off the prints. You'll probably get a truss package and chances are you'll have your trilam and silentfloor joists delivered at the correct lengths or slightly long, that's about it for pre-made pieces. I've helped a relative frame new houses over the winter for the last 5 or 6 years.
The vast majority of your lumber will be standard 92-5/8 or 104-5/8, he first sized to fit standard 4x8 sheets of drywall, the second a different size (I forget what) which is also available. They plywood is mostly 4x8 sheets where you cut only the edges and around windows.
Oh I was referring to prefab for multistorey buildings, where concrete elements are prefabricated.
Which is about as prefab as the studs in a stick frame house which is also shipped to the site the correct size.
Either way the point is most of the useful prefab innovations have been done decades ago and are normal.
double Canadaβs rate of residential construction housing over the next decade to nearly 500,000 new homes per year.
So it sounds like the goal is 500k houses a year at the end of a decade. I assume that means 230k-ish this year, slowly ramping to 500k in 2035. It only needs to be an extra 27k/year to make that goal.
CMHC says we need ~3.5 million houses by 2030 to get housing costs back to reasonable levels. I really want this proposal to be good, but it doesn't seem like it will be enough.
Is it better than nothing? That depends on who controls the final prices, and how much gets built.
with this one?
Do you know if the CMHC analysis considers decreasing the housing costs by increasing supply till the market is forced to decrease prices, or whether it's considering public intervention like building low cost housing and selling it at cost?
I'm under the impression that it's simply increasing supply to flood the market and meet demand. I don't believe that CMHC analysis included price controls. It's been a while since I read it though.
Assuming that they've only looked at that, then by introducing useful, at-cost units on the market (rental or real estate), it might be possible to depress prices through fewer units. E.g. units like the 2-3 bedroom ones in cheap, brown multistorey buildings the CMHC used to build before condos became popular. A smaller flood of such units would bid prices down directly.
The article says it'd oversee "affordable housing construction" so we'll have to wait and see how they intend to make it affordable.
The plan announced today by the Liberals would create a new federal housing entity that the party says would oversee affordable housing construction, speed up construction and provide financing to homebuilders.
Carney says the new agency, Build Canada Homes, would act as a developer to build affordable housing at scale, including on public lands, and develop and manage projects.
I really want to see the details on this one.
The second paragraph suggests BCH would do the building, while the first paragraph's "oversee" suggests existing developers would do the work. If BCH will finance construction, control where/what gets built, and control the final cost to buyers, then this has the potential to sell decent housing at below-market prices. That could start diffusing the housing crisis (although other reforms are necessary to improve costs in the near term).
That would be very different from what the Liberals and CPC have been proposing so far, which is to ask developers to pwetty pwease lower sale costs by making it easier and cheaper to build. It's hard to be optimistic given their track record.
Would love if the government is finally going back to its strategy from the 70s and taking charge here to build affordable housing instead of waiting for magical altruist developer unicorns to swoop in and save us.
In the video this article is based on, Carney says he will create an entity called "Build Canada Homes" that "will act as a developer on new, affordable housing projects."
couldn't couple this point...
Sounds like the new entity would do all of the above. Which makes sense. If they're builders willing to build what the government wants, they'll gett the money. But the government won't wait for such developers to volunteer. Instead it'll start the development itself, perhaps hiring developers to execute the actual building.