Politicians keep saying “affordable housing” then have zero scruples about selling a large portion of whatever housing they make, at bargain basement prices, to landlords.
I’ve seen this play before.
How about this, if any one person owns more than two “single family” dwellings, their property tax on the third property is 1000% increased… And add a zero for every additional property.
It won’t fix the problem, but it will sure as shit make it harder for a handful of people to own a nontrivial percentage of the residences in a city.
I agree. It is really hard to justify why a person might need 3 or more homes.
I know a lot of people have summer cabins and whatnot, so I wouldn’t want to really crank up the costs until you have 3+.
I figure anyone rich enough for three homes for themselves can afford the extra costs, and anyone looking to buy a home as an income property will get fuckered.
At least, that’s the idea.
If someone wants to buy one home for themselves and one to rent out, that’s acceptable losses IMO. It at least limits how many homes are going to become rentals.
But I’m being silly. I’m addressing the underlying issue of people buying up all the affordable housing so they can rent it out at a premium… That’s not what the government wants to do. They want to give money to their construction contractor buddies, who can give a small discount to their property management buddies who will buy up all the homes and rent them out.
Everyone wins in this situation… You know, except the poors.
But who cares about the Poor’s. They only pay for everything through taxes because the rich can afford to dodge all the taxes they would otherwise have to pay, and we have no wealth tax, so they’re getting away Scot free, and the rest of the population is left footing the bill.
“All of that money doesn’t go to the government agency,” Carney said. “It goes to private developers who are going to be building this out. So for those listening: If you’re a developer on housing, this is going to be a great time."
So just more shoveling public money into big business, great. They’re not even trying to be subtle about it anymore.
“Hey Carney, what if I’m trying to afford a house?”
“Who are you?”
Liberal supporters who volunteered and donated in shambles.
Carney is a believer in trickle down economics and the ongoing lie that private industry is fundamentally more efficient.
It’s trickle down housing affordability… I’m sure it’ll work this time!
Kidding aside though, I’m personally a bit curious to see how it works out – I’m cautiously optimistic simply because it is, ultimately, a different sounding approach than anything I’ve seen in my few decades of voting. Personally, I’d love the idea of getting a customised eco-friendly sustainability oriented pre-fab home that I could plop down on some land somewhere for a reasonable price – I’d likely trade in my vancouver condo for it if I could at this point.
Like even the idea of having the opportunity to have a say in the design of your home, would be a huge improvement to the current setup for home owners, especially those in Strata. Like older buildings are often a bit more affordable upfront, with higher maintenance costs due to the age. They’re also often way behind in terms of general amenities (shared laundry is still a thing, in a $600k+ vancouver condo building!), and security/climate preparedness features (lobby cams/key fobs, earthquake resilience, fire resistance, AC, Heat pump options, solar panel options, floor drainage in bathrooms, etc). If people had an affordable way to get decent sized ‘new’ units with modern amenities, it’d likely go a long way to improving the overall quality of life of many Canadians… so even if I’m skeptical Carney’ll get us there, I’m still going to be cautiously optimistic as he seems to be aiming in that direction, even if his approach is a bit heavy in leaning on the private sector to fill this gap
Ive seen similar stuff for sale in ontario and i think they’re shipping them in from an eastern province. They aren’t all eco-friendly but you can often ask for specific things like better glass or installation of a heat pump. They’re often 800-1200 sq ft and can be trailered to a lot. They are often for sale in more rural cottage/hunt camp type areas.
Maybe a better overall plan would be investing in companies that want to build simar stuff locally in each province. Try to provide local producers to make lots of em and encourage municipalities to be open to backyard suites and more lot splitting to plop them down faster.
Well, the noise he’s making doesn’t rule out having a fab site in each province, or a few even. Also, the work they’re describing in terms of streamlining the bureaucratic side, would likely be working towards the backyard suite option etc. He explicitly mentions working towards sorting out municipal roadblocks, if I remember right? The real question mark for me is what price point propping up the industry with gov investment will bring overall – like right now, many of the ‘decent’ sized prefabs I’ve seen start at like $200-300k. That, ontop of the really high land cost in the metropolitan areas, means its likely still outside the reach for most locals working local jobs. You’d either need to use inherited land and redevelop it, redevelop it for higher density, and/or build outside the major metropolitan areas (it’d be interesting to see if they got housing back down to reasonable levels in many of the small-medium sized towns/cities, if we’d see a migration of people… I’d be in favour of that, just not sure how it’d play out).
Like personally, I have a parent who’s likely to move into a home soon, potentially selling his property in the lower mainland. If there were an “easy” option to instead redevelop that property (cause the house is ancient/not great), and drop down a few modular units for the main resident + 1 or 2 renters, I’d happily drop some money on that, prolly be able to convince my siblings to kick in too as the combo of main property + renters would eventually be some passive income to pay down any loan required to finish it off even quicker. I think that’s the sort of ‘shift’ that Carney’s approach would generally encourage, or that they want to try and encourage, as it opens up additional housing space. The question is whether they can get it to a price point that it makes sense to invest in it, especially as many people are fairly tapped in terms of financing these days it seems.
Oh boy, more luxury condos for Carney’s buddies at Blackrock to scoop up and sit on.
This article from Sept 14th has more details: https://www.torontotoday.ca/national-news/build-canada-homes-aims-to-build-4000-housing-units-on-federal-land-carney-11210234
I’m cautiously optimistic, I’m glad to see ample ambition from the feds to get involved.
My main concern is we have no clear picture of what the government’s idea of “affordability” they are aiming for.
Carney has made me, well, not optimistic but certainly less gloomy about my chances of buying a proper home.
Which is better than I’ve felt about it in almost 2 decades or so.
Let me say this, as an “elder” millennial. This isn’t the first time government puppets have touted some plan for affordable housing.
You know what I’ve seen throughout all of those adorable housing plans? Prices going up, property sizes shrinking, materials becoming cheaper and less durable, houses becoming less unique.
So you “get to” buy a smaller home, that looks like every other home, that was built poorly and will need repairs sooner, and for all of this, you get to pay more for the “privilege”.
I hope I’m wrong, but I’ve heard this song before.
The only way you will ever get an affordable home is when someone you know, who owns a home, dies, and leaves it to you in their will.
If that happens to anyone, my advice: take it, keep it, fix it, and never leave it. You’ll only fuck yourself over if you do. I don’t care how much the house is “worth” on the market. Never sell. It’s literally the only way you’ll own a home outright, without killing yourself with working overtime to afford it.
Hey fellow oldie!
I feel, the song is similar but much louder and more coherent this time. Harper really had nothing besides some mucking about at the margins, Trudeau tried a bit but like a lot of things he tried, didn’t get all that much done. This one at least feels like a fairly coherent, federal through to municipal approach on the government side, with a bunch of private sector ideas.
That being said, I think the key is what you mean by affordable. I am hopeful they can lay the foundations to get housing back to something like just pre-pandemic (and hopefully just keep going!), which still wasn’t great for many people. I’m lucky enough that I think I’d be okay to buy something I want in that scenario.
But overall, yeah I think housing standards are just going to be different for us than our parents and similarly, between us and the youngings coming up now. I live in Vancouver, it’s almost doubled in size since 1990! The single detached houses a 10 minute bike ride from downtown that a middle class couple could easily afford? Probably not happening again.
I don’t mean to rain on your parade, but it ain’t happening.
Housing prices will not drop relative to incomes from this plan. At best it’s going to keep that ratio level, but if you can’t afford one now that won’t help.
I’m curious, what makes you so confident in that prediction?
I’m not saying I’m confident it will happen, but it seems like a reasonably coherent and significant push at the problem. They’re investing in more tradespeople, being a guarantor for new technologies and approaches and attacking it from every possible regulatory angle, I don’t really have much to fault with it.
(Admittedly, I could live with 2019 “affordability” which isn’t true of everyone maybe even most.)
What the government is doing isn’t bad, it just isn’t significant enough to matter.
The simple answer is that in order for houses to be affordable, prices need to drop. Even to reach 2019 you’d have to see the value of ALL houses drop by 20%.
How many houses would you need to build in order to have prices drop by 20%?
I can tell you the answer, it’s way more houses than we could possibly build even with new tradespeople and new tech.
Current housing prices aren’t reflective of their availability, they’re mostly reflective of their value as investments (including for single home owners). Until that part is removed from their pricing, they will never become affordable again.
We need to implement one of the following to actually fix the problem:
a) Just have the government own all the land, and only lease it to people and companies. They then get to set the prices to whatever they choose. This is a fairly extreme option, but it does work somewhat although it does have it’s own issues, see Singapore.
b) Implement a 100% capital gains tax on the land value of a property. When you sell, you essentially get no value from the land becoming more desirable. You still benefit if you developed the property (new buildings, renovations, etc.) so developers wouldn’t really care. This has less immediate effect, and still has issues with people just holding land forever.
c) Implement a land value tax, again only on the land value of a property. This is a monthly/yearly tax for a significant portion of the value of the land. Essentially “rent” being paid to the government for use of the land, but you still exclusively own the property. This tax needs to be set high enough that the land can never appreciate in value more than the amount paid. The net effect of this would be a significant drop in land value, so that the tax becomes low enough people could afford it. The neat thing about this, is that it encourages densification, because the tax is only on the land, if you have 6 town houses instead of 1 home, the tax is now spread between 6 families. In an urban setting, putting up multiple units becomes the only viable option unless you’re extremely wealthy.
In all of these situations, I would like to see the tax money raised do two things. Reduce personal income taxes for anything below the median income to 0, and/or then be equally distributed to citizens in a basic income. The country IS the land, the benefit from the increase of value of the land should be recognized by everyone, not private land owners.
How many houses would you need to build in order to have prices drop by 20%?
According to the CMCH, double the housing starts. Which is what the government is aiming to do.
Current housing prices aren’t reflective of their availability, they’re mostly reflective of their value as investments (including for single home owners). Until that part is removed from their pricing, they will never become affordable again.
This would always have been true, housing didn’t suddenly become investments in 2020.
And yet, houses were at 2019 prices in 2019, regardless of their ability to act as investments. And that happened without any of the radical proposals outlined. Why would these proposals not have been necessary in 2019 to hit 2019 prices but suddenly are required regardless of how much we build?
According to the CMCH, double the housing starts. Which is what the government is aiming to do.
Except the CMHC said you would need to double the housing starts between when they released that report and 2035 for that to happen. The report came out last year.
Did we double housing starts in 2025? Nope. Will we double it in 2026? Also no.
In fact, how long would it take to even train 100% more workers than already exist in that industry?
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/71-607-x/71-607-x2020016-eng.htm Here’s the statscan data on new registrations for apprentices… I looked at plumbers and electricians specifically, but If you google around for total numbers of people working in those fields. It appears that even with the latest huge post-covid push of new apprentices it will take… 10 years to double the number of workers, and that assumes not a single existing one retires in that period.
So the reality of the situation is that we CANNOT build twice as many houses each year between now and 2035 to return the pricing level to 2019 affordability ratios. We realistically can’t even come close to doing such a thing.
This would always have been true, housing didn’t suddenly become investments in 2020.
And yet, houses were at 2019 prices in 2019, regardless of their ability to act as investments. And that happened without any of the radical proposals outlined. Why would these proposals not have been necessary in 2019 to hit 2019 prices but suddenly are required regardless of how much we build?
I don’t know how young you are, but housing has been getting more unaffordable for my entire life, it wasn’t affordable in 2019 either and it wasn’t unaffordable because we didn’t build enough houses. There are far more bedrooms in Canada than people (I did the math a while back), and that doesn’t even account for the fact that lots of couples and kids share a room. There’s more than enough housing for everyone, the problem is the distribution of housing. Home owners making money just living in their home, completely unearned. That is money that has to come from somewhere, and it’s always been coming from the next generation of buyers. It’s the largest pyramid investment scheme in history.
That’s one of the reasons I like the land value tax idea I mentioned above, if you use more land than you should for a given area desirability, you have to pay a larger amount of tax. This will cause a massive amount of downsizing for empty nesters, freeing up those larger homes for people who currently have children or even just for re-development into condos in urban areas. The re-distribution of the tax to offset income taxes/or a basic income make it more affordable for current workers and families to afford those bigger units because they’re still working and will collect more money from having more family members.
Except the CMHC said you would need to double the housing starts between when they released that report and 2035 for that to happen. The report came out last year. Did we double housing starts in 2025? Nope. Will we double it in 2026? Also no.
They released an updated version this year, here’s the CBC write up on it. Essentially, 4.8 million homes are needed by 2035 to get housing costs back to 2019.
I assume Carney can do basic math. If you watch the interview in the post, he notes that we’re only going to have a small number initially as we start scaling up new processes, companies and the like.
10 years to double the number of workers, and that assumes not a single existing one retires in that period.
Sure but again, part of the push is to move into new ways that require fewer workers etc. That’s the push with modular/prefabs.
it wasn’t affordable in 2019 either
Like I said, totally fair. For me, 2019 levels are workable. I know that’s a very lucky position etc.
That being said, all the factors and processes that get the country to 4.8 million by 2035 don’t suddenly stop. Coupled with population decline or maybe staying roughly steady, that means prices should continue to fall slightly.
I assume Carney can do basic math. If you watch the interview in the post, he notes that we’re only going to have a small number initially as we start scaling up new processes, companies and the like.
Housing productivity hasn’t improved at all over the last 50 years, in fact it’s gone down. https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/the-strange-and-awful-path-of-productivity-in-the-us-construction-sector/
Carney can do basic math, but the reality is that he is lying to people. He doesn’t actually want house prices to go down. Voters would actually be quite unhappy with a 20% drop in prices that occurs too quickly and doesn’t have an external event to blame. The Conservatives would eat his breakfast in the next election if he dropped the value of homes by 10% before then. That’s the retirement savings for a lot of voters, they have far more money in their homes than they do in stocks and retirement portfolios.
Which is why every government is just picking some key items to say “look at what we’re doing, but it’s going to take time” knowing that they will get voted out before that lie starts to become apparent. The liberals launched a “National Housing Strategy in 2015”… it’s 10 years later and things are just significantly worse. Harper wasn’t any better before that, here’s their strategy from the 2006 election. https://www.poltext.org/sites/poltext.org/files/plateformesV2/Canada/CAN_PL_2006_PC_en.pdf where they acknowledged the problem, and agreed to do… almost nothing. The only reason that Harper didn’t have a massive explosion of the housing prices during his term was because the global financial crash nuked the real estate market right in the middle of his time in office, and they still managed to go up 15% in total.
Coupled with population decline
This one is a bit of a strange egg since it will happen completely unevenly when it occurs. Go look at housing prices in Japan over the last 10 years. Most rural houses are effectively worthless and practically ghost towns, while places like Tokyo are still up in prices despite completely flat population growth. Not particularly helpful for most people.
I have a lot to brush up on, but I’m looking forward to the push for mass timber projects.
