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qhat
Jul 6, 2015


Fwiw the "demand" for homes is always there, and by demand I refer to people wanting more and more of it, regardless of ability to pay. In this sense there is rarely ever a complete absence of intense demand for real estate, even during deep recessions. The defining predictor for how high home prices can actually go however is how much credit is available to people. If there was no credit then home prices would plummet because nobody would be able to afford it. This has happened every time in history when banks decide to stop lending money, usually because their existing loans are going bad. Credit multiplied by wanting equals price in the housing market, and assuming everyone wants it all of the time, you're left mostly with credit as the thing which dictates price.

qhat fucked around with this message at 21:45 on Feb 9, 2022

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Crow Buddy
Oct 30, 2019

Guillotines?!? We don't need no stinking guillotines!

I can imagine all the construction of sub-500sqft maybe one bedroom condos filling a metric which means we are “building”, while simultaneously not solving any actual demand. Though I guess our 20 something unmarried bachelor(ette)s are the best served market.

Mantle
May 15, 2004

Crow Buddy posted:

I can imagine all the construction of sub-500sqft maybe one bedroom condos filling a metric which means we are “building”, while simultaneously not solving any actual demand. Though I guess our 20 something unmarried bachelor(ette)s are the best served market.

It's like the "jobs created" metric or "kms of bike trails". Who gives a poo poo if they're livable wage jobs or trails that actually go anywhere. NUMBER GO UP

leftist heap
Feb 28, 2013

Fun Shoe
"Actually going by dwellings per resident for the whole country things are fine" is probably cold comfort to people in markets with vacancy rates hovering near 0.

tagesschau
Sep 1, 2006
Guten Abend, meine Damen und Herren.

leftist heap posted:

"Actually going by dwellings per resident for the whole country things are fine" is probably cold comfort to people in markets with vacancy rates hovering near 0.

That's a hell of a straw man. What I've actually been saying is that since the amount of housing we have per person is about the same as the United States, it very clearly is not a relative shortage of housing that's causing the price-to-income ratio on this side of the border to take off into the stratosphere. That leaves

qhat posted:

how much credit is available to people
and the fact that the past decade and a half of policy decisions on this side of the border have only bent in the direction of fake "affordability" via letting people borrow more and more money while eschewing any effort to bring prices back to sane levels.

Oakland Martini
Feb 14, 2008

D&D: HASBARA SQUAD
THE APARTHEID ACADEMIC


It's important that institutions never take a stance like "genocide is bad". Now get out there and crack some of my students' skulls.
A supply shortage decades in the making can't possibly account for prices rising 20-30% in a single year. It's obvious that changes on the demand side are responsible. That said, it's important to recognize that the highly inelastic nature of housing supply plays a big role in explaining why shifts in demand can have such large effects on prices.

COPE 27
Sep 11, 2006

Guys the supply and the demand are both hosed and no one will do anything to fix it

Femtosecond
Aug 2, 2003

tagesschau posted:

The U.S. has no shortage of hot markets, and the prices in them are still not as astronomically high as they are in Canada, because there hasn't been an uninterrupted decade and a half of letting people borrow absurd amounts of money they have no hope of paying back in the absence of massive capital gains (which, in the average homebuyer's case, there is no reason to believe will reliably materialize). If all you've got is "the OECD is wrong because I don't believe that they're right," then I'll take that opinion for what it's worth.

I'll assert that OECD is wrong because Stats Can is right.

It can't be both true that there's plenty of surplus housing as OECD says and that rental vacancy is at insanely, unhealthy low levels as Stats Can says.

OECD and Stats Can are contradicting one another and so one of these metrics must be wrong.

Given that there's lineups of applicants to rent an apartment and rents keep going up and up, it is most likely that Stats Can is correct here.

qhat
Jul 6, 2015


My rent hasn't really gone up all that much tbh, and I've moved like 3 times in the past 5 years. I've also never "lined up" physically for a rental in Vancouver (I've only ever done private showings), and finding one is definitely not the complete poo poo show that winning a bidding war on a house is. Rents in Vancouver, compared to other major cities, are actually extremely low relative to home prices and anyone who says otherwise I would immediately recommend they move to London or NYC and try to find a 1bedroom apartment for anything less than 2500/month. At the very least, rents have definitely not kept pace home prices to the point where I'm pretty sure every single landlord is putting up with god awful yields in return for gambling on meteoric capital gain.

Mantle
May 15, 2004

qhat posted:

every single landlord is putting up with god awful yields

"I can't continue to subsidize your rent"

tagesschau
Sep 1, 2006
Guten Abend, meine Damen und Herren.

Femtosecond posted:

I'll assert that OECD is wrong because Stats Can is right.

You'd first need to show that Stats Can disagrees with the OECD on this point. To do that, you'd need to cite something that contradicts the OECD's dwellings-per-population number or its claim that the situation is not markedly different on the other side of the border. "Vacancy is low" and "rents keep going up" do not, by themselves, challenge either of those.

Entorwellian
Jun 30, 2006

Northern Flicker
Anna's Hummingbird

Sorry, but the people have spoken.



qhat posted:

My rent hasn't really gone up all that much tbh, and I've moved like 3 times in the past 5 years. I've also never "lined up" physically for a rental in Vancouver (I've only ever done private showings), and finding one is definitely not the complete poo poo show that winning a bidding war on a house is. Rents in Vancouver, compared to other major cities, are actually extremely low relative to home prices and anyone who says otherwise I would immediately recommend they move to London or NYC and try to find a 1bedroom apartment for anything less than 2500/month. At the very least, rents have definitely not kept pace home prices to the point where I'm pretty sure every single landlord is putting up with god awful yields in return for gambling on meteoric capital gain.

I've known about 10 people in the last 6 months who were paying lower rents, get evicted from their place because the landlord is "moving back in" for three months, sold to a family member, then returns on the rental market for $1200-1600 per month more than the previous rate.

Femtosecond
Aug 2, 2003

tagesschau posted:

You'd first need to show that Stats Can disagrees with the OECD on this point. To do that, you'd need to cite something that contradicts the OECD's dwellings-per-population number or its claim that the situation is not markedly different on the other side of the border. "Vacancy is low" and "rents keep going up" do not, by themselves, challenge either of those.

Vacancy is low and there being "enough" houses seem like completely contradictory statements.

If Canada has the same amount of houses per population as the USA then why does the vacancy in the USA seem so much healthier?

Like vacancy in Seattle was 5.4% in 2019, it's now tightened to 3.8% in 2020. Vancouver has actually increased to a recent high of 2.6% whereas it was previously bottom dwelling at ~1%. Seattle btw being a market that is considered to be a dysfunctional and tight real estate market as well. Everywhere else the vacancy number is bigger.

Maybe there's different ways of measuring I dunno.

Canada even has more people per household (2.9 vs 2.6 USA) so with that taken into account that means that if we were like the USA our housing shortage and vacancy situation would be even worse.

Rental vacancy and house supply for sale seem like so much more relevant metrics given that the measurement is tightly localized to metro regions. The country wide OECD number in contrast is so much more vague.

Why do we even have to look at the OECD number when we have rental vacancy and supply for sale data?

The only reason to look further than rental vacancy is if we're suggesting that the rental vacancy metric is flawed because there's empty houses out there, but this has been so extensively studied and no one has found this "dark matter" of empty homes that's enough to explain anything. IMO it's been debunked and the rental vacancy number is the gold standard measurement for how we're tracking on supplying the housing we need.

tagesschau
Sep 1, 2006
Guten Abend, meine Damen und Herren.

Femtosecond posted:

If Canada has the same amount of houses per population as the USA then why does the vacancy in the USA seem so much healthier?

It doesn't seem that way, though. I see tons and tons of posts about how it's impossible to find an apartment where I grew up and people's rent has jumped by 30% in the past couple of years. The pre-pandemic situation was less insane in the U.S. than in Canada, but that's entirely attributable to the Harper government making cheap and easy credit available in 2008 to make sure number didn't go down, and the Trudeau government continuing that policy, which became popular when it made people look rich when they weren't.

Again:

qhat posted:

The defining predictor for how high home prices can actually go however is how much credit is available to people.

the talent deficit
Dec 20, 2003

self-deprecation is a very british trait, and problems can arise when the british attempt to do so with a foreign culture





it's 100% expanded access to credit in the form of virtually free helocs. it probably also drives inflation because it's sure not rising wages driving that

qhat
Jul 6, 2015


Entorwellian posted:

I've known about 10 people in the last 6 months who were paying lower rents, get evicted from their place because the landlord is "moving back in" for three months, sold to a family member, then returns on the rental market for $1200-1600 per month more than the previous rate.

Really? Because I’ve literally been looking at places for the last 6 months and honestly they don’t seem to have gone up by what people are saying. The biggest jump has been from 1bed to 2 bed, but I’ve always been able to get viewings, and the landlords have always seemed to like me. Idk, whenever I hear someone say something that implies “there’s no rental housing”, I just roll my eyes and look at my $1725 a month lease 1bed that I signed 18 months ago on 12th and Granville.

Femtosecond
Aug 2, 2003

The low interest rates are def having a scaling impact on prices. More people have access to more money and so the amount of people that can compete for a higher price point has increased. Accordingly the price has gone up.

The cheap money is an amplifier on the consistent underlying trends.

If interest rates were higher we'd still be seeing the same underlying frictions and shifts in the market, but the price inflation would be less.

We'd still be talking about a huge shift away from Toronto and toward small Ontario towns. We'd be saying "wow this teardown house in Guelph sold for 15% more than last year" instead of "25% more than last year."

If interest rates were lower, houses would be increasing in price at a lower rate, but you'd still have the same amount of miserable people in suboptimal living situations, trying and failing to buy a house because there's not enough of them.

The core thing as well is that Interest Rates are not controlled by government policy so fixing affordability by increasing interest rates is not a tool the government has in its toolbox.

Government needs to tackle the underlying problems, which are the things that are driving people to try all bid up the same limited handful of housing products.

Femtosecond
Aug 2, 2003

Like I'm in total agreement here with people here that prices are high because of easy lending, I feel like there's been a consensus on this in this thread for a long time, but independent of that, we now have a shortage of homes for sale because sales have been so strong.

Why are people all of a sudden are people buying up single family homes? (and paying more than ever, enabled by easy lending)

Are Torontonians going out and deciding to buy a house in Guelph on a whim because their banker called them and said You're Richer Than You Think! Or are there underlying demographic trends at play here that are pushing Torontonians out of the city and elsewhere?

The CI thesis was that Canadians were buying houses because they were dumb, but I think they are buying houses because they have real problems with their current housing situation and are trying to fix them.

Femtosecond fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Feb 10, 2022

tagesschau
Sep 1, 2006
Guten Abend, meine Damen und Herren.

Femtosecond posted:

The low interest rates are def having a scaling impact on prices. More people have access to more money and so the amount of people that can compete for a higher price point has increased. Accordingly the price has gone up.

The cheap money is an amplifier on the consistent underlying trends.

If interest rates were higher we'd still be seeing the same underlying frictions and shifts in the market, but the price inflation would be less.

We'd still be talking about a huge shift away from Toronto and toward small Ontario towns. We'd be saying "wow this teardown house in Guelph sold for 15% more than last year" instead of "25% more than last year."

This phenomenon started only after a lot of people determined that the pandemic meant they'd never have to go back to an office full-time. (I can't say whether they're correct in that view.) The same thing happened in the U.S.

The major difference is what happened between 2007 and 2020: the Great Recession popped the U.S. housing bubble, but Harper and Flaherty did everything in their power to stop house prices from cratering too much on this side of the border. This number-go-up policy proved to be popular, so it was continued long after it was necessary, and long after it became actively harmful. Governments who want to win re-election will do anything to stop number from falling back in line with economic fundamentals.

Owning a house or a condo in New York or San Francisco at least gets you geographic proximity to a lot of high-paying jobs. Toronto housing is at least as expensive, but without commensurate wages.

Femtosecond posted:

Are Torontonians going out and deciding to buy a house in Guelph on a whim because their banker called them and said You're Richer Than You Think! Or are there underlying demographic trends at play here that are pushing Torontonians out of the city and elsewhere?

The major issue I see at this point is that condos are incredibly unattractive, because they're being listed for prices that are only slightly lower than significantly larger (but still smallish) houses, and saddle you with eye-poppingly high maintenance fees to boot. Any condo that's not a glorified hotel room is barely cheaper than a house, so you might as well pick the option where the rooms have actual doors instead of sheets of smoky plastic that slide around on tracks.

COPE 27
Sep 11, 2006

In a rare small bit of good news, the local soup kitchen got a surge of donations after getting harassed by chuds in the Ottawa Freedumb Convoy. They are using the money to move 105 clients out of the shelter and into purpose built apartments.

https://twitter.com/sghottawa/status/1491807387136806913?t=4D2w9vOVBJFw9vGoKkqbYg&s=19

the talent deficit
Dec 20, 2003

self-deprecation is a very british trait, and problems can arise when the british attempt to do so with a foreign culture





Femtosecond posted:

Like I'm in total agreement here with people here that prices are high because of easy lending, I feel like there's been a consensus on this in this thread for a long time, but independent of that, we now have a shortage of homes for sale because sales have been so strong.

Why are people all of a sudden are people buying up single family homes? (and paying more than ever, enabled by easy lending)

is there actually a significant shortage though? there's definitely a 'work from home' factor pushing people to desire bigger spaces in more remote locations that's causing issues in some communities but it's not like it was ever easy to find a place in whistler or peachland or nelson. however, it's not like there's a massive increase in homelessness or people having to move back in with family as far as i know. people are unhappy about the availability of housing at a price they are willing to pay. that's not the same as a lack of availability of housing

Baronjutter
Dec 31, 2007

"Tiny Trains"

the talent deficit posted:

is there actually a significant shortage though? there's definitely a 'work from home' factor pushing people to desire bigger spaces in more remote locations that's causing issues in some communities but it's not like it was ever easy to find a place in whistler or peachland or nelson. however, it's not like there's a massive increase in homelessness or people having to move back in with family as far as i know. people are unhappy about the availability of housing at a price they are willing to pay. that's not the same as a lack of availability of housing

It's regional. In Victoria there absolutely is a massive shortage. Homelessness skyrocketing, the local university saying students are dropping out due to not being able to find any sort of housing. Rents have gone up 300-400 across the board over the last year or two. Massive increase in tenant abuse by landlords as it's a "landlord's market". It's incredibly and extremely bad and very measurable.

It's really useless to talk about housing on a national level when it comes to thinks like supply and vacancy rates as all those things are very very regional. National rates of X and Y don't matter because people don't just move cities and provinces every year to optimize their rent. You have to look at cities and regions and see where the shortages are. On the national level it is important to look at things like mortgage policies and such which are of course also incredibly important. The big problem in Canada right now is that we have many cities with extreme housing shortages and the government solution has been to simply give people access to more debt. And it's not just debt, tons of people are buying via inter-generational wealth, wealth that's come entirely from the current housing situation.

If 10 hungry people want a can of corn but there's only 9 cans, simply giving everyone more debt will do nothing but inflate the price of those 9 cans as the 10 people bid them up using more and more debt. The shortage doesn't even have to be that big so long as the debt is there to keep the bidding going. Cracking down on the debt without making sure there's enough corn for everyone though still won't help as the result will be the same, just with lower numbers. We really need to do both, but ultimately the most important thing is actual supply in areas of shortage.

COPE 27
Sep 11, 2006

Someone at my company just posted a resignation letter specifically referring to housing prices as the reason to move back to her country of origin

Slotducks
Oct 16, 2008

Nobody puts Phil in a corner.


There was a reddit thread on /r/canadahousing about his company having trouble hiring people because of the cost of living in Toronto (they were also underpaying the role by about 45k ish)

But ultimately when 3&2s in KW or further west from Toronto are all going for 650+ I literally start to question where any of this money is coming. Like no one pays enough to service these payments

Lead out in cuffs
Sep 18, 2012

"That's right. We've evolved."

"I can see that. Cool mutations."




Slotducks posted:

There was a reddit thread on /r/canadahousing about his company having trouble hiring people because of the cost of living in Toronto (they were also underpaying the role by about 45k ish)

But ultimately when 3&2s in KW or further west from Toronto are all going for 650+ I literally start to question where any of this money is coming. Like no one pays enough to service these payments

Just a reminder that there are also giant corporations throwing literally billions of dollars into buying up SFH with a view to turning them into rentals.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7950579/developer-buy-1-billion-homes-canada-housing-market/

I have no idea whether that actually makes sense in terms of what the rental market will support. My understanding on the returns on rentals is that they are not great. But that is a thing that's happening.

the talent deficit
Dec 20, 2003

self-deprecation is a very british trait, and problems can arise when the british attempt to do so with a foreign culture





i'm not arguing that there is no housing shortage. there obviously is. i just don't think it's driving price increases. home ownership is the key to unlocking virtually free money in the form of helocs and heloc capacity is limited by home equity so it's rational to not only spend as much as you can on housing it's also rational to want others to spend as much as they can on housing once you own to keep your own access to helocs as expansive as possible. it's a destructive cycle that constantly ratchets up home prices. building 1 million new homes would put a temporary dent in home prices as the market got flooded but then you'd see the ratchet go right back to work

tagesschau
Sep 1, 2006
Guten Abend, meine Damen und Herren.

Slotducks posted:

I literally start to question where any of this money is coming. Like no one pays enough to service these payments

It's pretty clear that a lot of parents are borrowing against their own real estate to give their kids down payments, but they think it's risk-free because real estate only ever goes up.

edit:

Lead out in cuffs posted:

Just a reminder that there are also giant corporations throwing literally billions of dollars into buying up SFH with a view to turning them into rentals.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7950579/developer-buy-1-billion-homes-canada-housing-market/

I have no idea whether that actually makes sense in terms of what the rental market will support. My understanding on the returns on rentals is that they are not great. But that is a thing that's happening.

It's one thing to think that purchase prices can decouple permanently from local incomes/GDP/any other measure, and lax lending practices can make it look true for a good long while, but rents are pretty much inextricably linked to local incomes.

It seems to be a common belief that landlords can decree how much rental income their property will bring in, but they really can't. Any landlord who attempts to ignore tenants' actual ability to pay runs the risk of having a property that's bringing in no money because they can't find tenants. Or worse, a property that's bringing in no money despite having tenants.

tagesschau fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Feb 11, 2022

qhat
Jul 6, 2015


tagesschau posted:

It seems to be a common belief that landlords can decree how much rental income their property will bring in, but they really can't. Any landlord who attempts to ignore tenants' actual ability to pay runs the risk of having a property that's bringing in no money because they can't find tenants. Or worse, a property that's bringing in no money despite having tenants.

You see this a lot on social media with landlords saying stupid poo poo like "if property taxes go up I'm just going to pass it on to my tenants". Yeah, good luck with that dude. The truth is if landlords actually could dictate prices, they already would be doing it. The implication they want you to believe is that right now they are being generous, gracious infact, and that they are only waiting for costs to increase before increasing the rents.

Anybody in business seeks to charge exactly what the market can pay, no more and no less. Unless landlords are some kind of decentralized organized autonomous cartel, there is zero chance you will be able to just "pass the cost" down without reducing the amount of people wanting to view your property. It is in fact more likely that your rental yield will go up by pure virtue of house prices decreasing due to other landlords being unable or unwilling to pay the costs any longer and selling.

Mantle
May 15, 2004

qhat posted:

Anybody in business seeks to charge exactly what the market can pay, no more and no less.

A few years ago, I was working for a company that sold window installations. One of our sales guys got wind of the $5000 rebate the Ontario government was planning to offer and we were ready to go as soon as it was formally announced. What I learned from seeing it from the business side is that the rebate isn't really a subsidy for the homeowner, it's a subsidy for the vendor. We, the business, were the ultimate beneficiary of the rebate.

By changing what the market could pay, window businesses got a huge windfall from Ontario taxpayers.

Subjunctive
Sep 12, 2006

✨sparkle and shine✨

This is like the NDP proposing to raise rents by ~$400/mo by granting renters a $5000 annual tax credit.

COPE 27
Sep 11, 2006

Lead out in cuffs posted:

Just a reminder that there are also giant corporations throwing literally billions of dollars into buying up SFH with a view to turning them into rentals.

https://globalnews.ca/news/7950579/developer-buy-1-billion-homes-canada-housing-market/

I have no idea whether that actually makes sense in terms of what the rental market will support. My understanding on the returns on rentals is that they are not great. But that is a thing that's happening.

Then why aren't there any sfh rentals

Femtosecond
Aug 2, 2003

the talent deficit posted:

is there actually a significant shortage though? there's definitely a 'work from home' factor pushing people to desire bigger spaces in more remote locations that's causing issues in some communities but it's not like it was ever easy to find a place in whistler or peachland or nelson.

Seems like we're at literal all time historic record lows for homes listed for sale. This has got to be a shortage if we're at all time lows.

quote:

The supply of homes listed for sale across B.C. is at a historical low, according to the British Columbia Real Estate Association (BCREA).

There were 19,214 active listings in October across the province, down nearly 40% from October 2020, and an all-time record low, the BCREA reported.

In Metro Vancouver, active listings fell to 8,034 in October, a 35.3% decrease compared with October 2020 and down 13% from September 2021.

Home inventories have fallen for five consecutive months in both Metro Vancouver and the province.


Dropped even lower in Jan.

quote:

With sustained high demand, available home listings in British Columbia at the beginning of 2022 started at an all-time record low of 12,179 units, representing a 41% drop over the previous year.

Less than 2000 homes were for sale in Metro Vancouver in Dec?!!?!

quote:

The Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver says January home sales in the area slowed from a record-setting pace last year as the number of properties available dropped.

The B.C. board says home sales totalled 2,285 last month, an almost five per cent decrease from 2,389 in January 2021 and a 15 per cent fall from 2,688 in December 2021.

However, the board says sales last month were 25.3 per cent above the 10-year January average.

The board also recorded 4,170 new listings last month, down almost seven per cent from 4,480 homes last January, but more than double December 2021, when 1,945 homes were listed.

the talent deficit posted:

however, it's not like there's a massive increase in homelessness or people having to move back in with family as far as i know. people are unhappy about the availability of housing at a price they are willing to pay. that's not the same as a lack of availability of housing

I work with a young person who WFHs from their parents house out in the valley. They were telling me they just finally might be moving out into a friends' basement. When I was their age I had my own $730 1 bed Mount Pleasant apartment. This is the impact of the housing shortage and how the impacts stay hidden. Young people not able to leave home, not able to live in Vancouver if they wanted to, people having to stay in unsuitable housing because they have no option to move to anything better.

the talent deficit posted:

i'm not arguing that there is no housing shortage. there obviously is. i just don't think it's driving price increases. home ownership is the key to unlocking virtually free money in the form of helocs and heloc capacity is limited by home equity so it's rational to not only spend as much as you can on housing it's also rational to want others to spend as much as they can on housing once you own to keep your own access to helocs as expansive as possible. it's a destructive cycle that constantly ratchets up home prices. building 1 million new homes would put a temporary dent in home prices as the market got flooded but then you'd see the ratchet go right back to work

I'm on the same page with you on HELOCs. Housing is a great investment and preferentially handled by the government. No wonder people want to get in on this.

The question is though: Are we seeing people wanting to buy homes to live in (also inherently investments) or secondary homes as investments? If we're experiencing a real shortage of homes and the dominant amount of people are people that are competing for homes are simply trying to buy a bigger home for their kid and golden retriever that's a still big problem regardless of the heloc aspect. It's a big problem if Canadians are competing against each other for homes, recklessly bidding up and skipping inspections and people are losing out on suitable housing they need because there's not enough available.

There's always been a ton of housing investment in Canada and so I have no doubt that there's investors playing a role as well. It would be interesting to see if we're getting above that 20% mark of people owning second homes. Is anything changing or are we still at the same level of investment activity. Maybe the recent census will shed some light on this and could indicate whether the speculative demand for homes is coming primarily from new homeowners or corporate investors.

evilpicard posted:

Then why aren't there any sfh rentals

Great point. Again, rental vacancy remains low low low.

Femtosecond fucked around with this message at 20:23 on Feb 12, 2022

Mandibular Fiasco
Oct 14, 2012
Let’s face it - no one is going to do anything to solve this. The masses owns real estate (or want to own it) so governments will prop it up however they can, until they can’t. I still think that devaluation of the currency and inflation of wages in the context of declining purchasing power will be the way forward for government as there is way too much debt in and no way to ramp up productivity at a rate that is otherwise needed.

Thirty years of terrible economic policy is going to smack us in the face. Don’t get sick or need other government services anytime soon, they’re not going to be there pretty soon, if they are there at all right now.

Personally, I’ve given up fighting. I’ve written a dozen letters and met with elected officials. When I give them an armament of policy changes, they do the typical bullshit of ‘this will be hard and people won’t like it”, to which my response is “so then you accept the inevitability of a declining standard of living and a precipitously declining fertility rate that can only be solved by stealing the educated from poor countries and laundering the money of criminals the world over.” Their silence in response speaks volumes.

Country’s hosed. Institutions have utterly failed. Might as well get onboard to extract what you can and protect your family. And we had such potential.

Hubbert
Mar 25, 2007

At a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

Mandibular Fiasco posted:

Let’s face it - no one is going to do anything to solve this. The masses owns real estate (or want to own it) so governments will prop it up however they can, until they can’t. I still think that devaluation of the currency and inflation of wages in the context of declining purchasing power will be the way forward for government as there is way too much debt in and no way to ramp up productivity at a rate that is otherwise needed.

Thirty years of terrible economic policy is going to smack us in the face. Don’t get sick or need other government services anytime soon, they’re not going to be there pretty soon, if they are there at all right now.

Personally, I’ve given up fighting. I’ve written a dozen letters and met with elected officials. When I give them an armament of policy changes, they do the typical bullshit of ‘this will be hard and people won’t like it”, to which my response is “so then you accept the inevitability of a declining standard of living and a precipitously declining fertility rate that can only be solved by stealing the educated from poor countries and laundering the money of criminals the world over.” Their silence in response speaks volumes.

Country’s hosed. Institutions have utterly failed. Might as well get onboard to extract what you can and protect your family. And we had such potential.

yes but for a short and glorious time, we created so much value for True Post War Era Home Owning Canadians

Hubbert
Mar 25, 2007

At a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
content time


Upzoning Metro Vancouver’s Low-density Neighbourhoods for Housing Affordability - BY MARC LEE - February 2022 posted:


SUMMARY

TO ADDRESS THE TWIN CRISES OF HOUSING AFFORDABILITY and climate change, Metro Vancouver
needs more housing. Specifically, the city needs more “missing middle” housing between the
extremes of detached homes and large condo towers. This paper proposes a framework of
conditional upzoning, a regulatory shift away from detached housing to allow higher-density
development across the region, while requiring that all new housing development contributes
to greater affordability. In particular, we aim to enable a growing stock of affordable non-market
rental housing (rents set at 50–80 per cent of median market rent):

1. Open up detached housing zones across the region. The vast majority of land in Metro
Vancouver is zoned for low-density, detached housing. Some 80 per cent of the land
base is occupied by 35 per cent of households. In these areas, we would permit double
to triple the current densities (measured as buildable area per lot, or floor space ratio).

2. Focus on the missing middle. New developments should include a range of housing
types, from row housing and multiplexes to small apartments, and alternative tenure
arrangements like co-ops, community land trusts and co-housing. The emphasis would
be on small-lot development with minimal land assembly and parking requirements.

3. Ensure market development contributes to affordable housing. In market developments,
one-third to one-half of units would be designated as affordable ownership or rental.
Alternatively, developers would pay an affordable housing levy that could be used to
build affordable housing elsewhere. This measure would help keep land prices in check
so that gains from upzoning would not disproportionately go to existing landowners.

4. Support non-market development. Non-profit housing developers, whose mission is to
create more affordable housing, can build dedicated rental units at a much lower cost.
A stronger public sector presence in developing new affordable housing is also rec -
ommended. Non-market (including public and co-operative housing) developments
would be prioritized, with waived fees and expedited approval processes.

5. Develop a robust system of renter protections. Existing affordable rental apartments
should be protected as much as possible. A fair process should be implemented for any
renters adversely affected by redevelopment in detached-housing neighbourhoods (in
particular, secondary suites) including rights of first refusal, temporary accommodation
and buyouts.

-

Complementary policies and support from the BC government could accelerate this transition
and overcome hyper-localized politics. Initiatives should include:

Zoning mandates. To break the impasse at the local government level, the BC govern-
ment should step in to implement the type of framework cited above across Metro
Vancouver or even province-wide.

•Public land. Make existing public land available for non-profit developers to build
genuinely affordable housing. In addition, new public land should be acquired for the
purpose of building new dedicated affordable housing.

• Progressive property taxation. Change tax rates and incentives to rebalance inequities
in the housing system, encourage density and fund the acquisition of public land. This
should include increases in property taxes, greater taxation of owners of multiple prop-
erties and shifting taxation to land versus buildings/structures.


:hmmyes:

It’s time to build the housing we need for the future. The region’s population will continue to
increase over the coming decades. The decisions we make now will have an impact for many
decades down the road. An aggressive build-out of affordable housing region-wide is central to
creating a more fair and vibrant economy that also rises to the challenge of the climate emergency.

Hubbert fucked around with this message at 20:04 on Feb 13, 2022

Mandibular Fiasco
Oct 14, 2012

Hubbert posted:

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Some good ideas here, but most are total non-starters. The outrage over the suggestion that the Homeowners Grant be eliminated tells you all you need to know about the probability of changes to property taxes. The situation is just too far gone. If the politicians are afraid of a few dozen right wing truckers, I can’t imagine them ever doing something that affects millions of property owners.

jettisonedstuff
Apr 9, 2006
The insane resistance to allowing even slight increases in density in low density sfh neighborhoods is genuinely baffling to me. Allowing for double/triple lots to be converted into 2/3 houses would increase the value of these properties substantially.

COPE 27
Sep 11, 2006

But it would change the character of the neighbourhood (they might have to look at a poor)

jettisonedstuff
Apr 9, 2006
It really wouldn't tho. Seen lots of infill with 2/3 houses replacing one and they sell for pretty much the same as all the other houses in the neighborhood. Poor people still can't afford to own houses even when they're pretty cheap.

At this point if we went nuts building houses in the major cities for 10 years, it would most likely result in prices staying about where they are for 10 years, especially if immigration rates stay as high as they have been.

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iv46vi
Apr 2, 2010
Poverty level is what, around 30k a year. Times five is around 150k mortgage estimate. Are there many potential properties for sale at this neighborhoods for under 200k?

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