(Reuters) - Canada on Sunday announced a two-year extension to a ban on foreign ownership of Canadian housing, saying the step was aimed at addressing worries about Canadians being priced out of housing markets in cities and towns across the country.
Canada is facing a housing affordability crisis, which has been blamed on an increase in migrants and international students, fueling demand for homes just as rising costs have slowed construction.
Foreign ownership is a bit of a blind, you need to ban corporate ownership as well
How do you define ‘corporate’ ownership? If you can own 100 properties as an individual, does that count as ‘corporate’? If it doesn’t, that seems like an easy loophole. If the intent is to ban large quantities of homes owned by single entities, then doing it by quantity sounds more sensible.
That might redistribute old homes, but it doesn’t necessarily solve the drip feeding of new homes that we have going on right now. For example, the UK used to build 250k+ houses every year during the 1950-1980s period. 50% of that was government built council houses for those in need. It’s estimated that we need to build 250k more homes than we currently do in the UK, and the private housing industry has not done its part.
Why you acting like we can only do one of these things?
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ban company/ corporate ownership of standalone housing.
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increased scale of taxation on any property past PPR. One house gets you 10% increase. Two gets you 20%, etc. oh it’s empty? Now you got an empty property tax as well
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fuck up developer scarcity. Set hard time limits between land purchase and development / sale. Give land use laws teeth
Why you acting like we can only do one of these things?
Because it’s a common tactic used to confuse an issue and get the discussion bogged down in irrelevant details and “hah! Gotcha!” moments.
…Yeah i’d read the rest of the thread before throwing that around
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Ban amateur landlords.
You want to be a landlord? Better buy a purpose built unit like a triplex or larger that will encourage densification and stop fucking over families just trying to find a place to raise their family.
If both corporate ownership and amateur landlords are banned, then doesn’t that severely limit what a landlord can be?
I mean, that might not be a bad idea…
For single family homes - yes! I’m fine with corporate ownership of purpose built units. We need way more of them, and the idea that “mom and pop” investors would fill that void is silly.
I don’t think the differentiator should be corporate versus “mon and pop” landlords, but rather single family homes versus multi family buildings.
In my view, single family dwellings should generally be owned by the occupant, with very few, very rare exceptions.
Well you see we can’t do that because the lawmakers are the ones in charge of those corporations
I don’t like paying property taxes on my 150 single family rental properties. Perhaps I should go into politics to change policies allowing me to profit more on denying people the ability to purchase property, since people like me bought all of the supply.
Has there been any data on whether the approach is working?
