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Femtosecond posted:I suppose the bull case for housing continuing to go up is that while we may have decoupled from some of these metrics (eg. wages) the reasons for the decoupling relate to housing being more fundamentally coupled with other metrics, namely land use. Even if you account for this, the prices don't make sense. Condos are still being listed for prices that don't match local incomes, and homes of all types well outside the downtown core are not selling for an appreciable discount. There just aren't enough high earners around to pay these asking prices, and there's no prospect of there ever being enough. tagesschau fucked around with this message at 20:19 on Feb 21, 2023 |
# ? Feb 21, 2023 14:31 |
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# ? Jun 8, 2024 15:06 |
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Cold on a Cob posted:Interest is rent you pay to the bank. Maintenance is rent you pay to the condo board and/or home depot. Insurance is rent you pay to the insurance company. Property taxes are rent you pay to the city. Yeah, buying is quite often not a better plan financially speaking than renting. For people who aren't "investors" the benefits are that you can do whatever you want to do with the house (within the law), and make it your own. As well as some semblance of stability in your shelter situation. Home ownership comes with its own set of stress points but you generally don't have to worry that you could just be made homeless with 3-month notice.
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# ? Feb 21, 2023 14:47 |
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Fidelitious posted:Home ownership comes with its own set of stress points but you generally don't have to worry that you could just be made homeless with 3-month notice. I think overall it's the last point that is a deciding factor for renters like me. My previously nice old building was bought by a corporation and now I pay rent to "Real Estate Investment Fund III". I've had friends renovicted or threatened with renoviction and the idea of going through that when I'm (ever) retired is terrifying. While it might not make financial sense to buy, the increasing lack of stable long-term rentals makes the decision increasingly weighted even for people like me who saw themselves as forever renters.
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# ? Feb 21, 2023 17:06 |
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Segue posted:I think overall it's the last point that is a deciding factor for renters like me. My previously nice old building was bought by a corporation and now I pay rent to "Real Estate Investment Fund III". I've had friends renovicted or threatened with renoviction and the idea of going through that when I'm (ever) retired is terrifying. Yeah this is pretty much the only reason I've _ever_ wanted to buy. Getting evicted so the owner can reset rents to market sucks. And even worse in markets w/o rent control, like when my rent doubled in Calgary one year.
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# ? Feb 21, 2023 17:15 |
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Tim Hortons franchisee in P.E.I. evicts tenants to make way for temporary foreign workers Hahahahaha wow
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# ? Feb 21, 2023 17:26 |
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Fidelitious posted:Yeah, buying is quite often not a better plan financially speaking than renting. For people who aren't "investors" the benefits are that you can do whatever you want to do with the house (within the law), and make it your own. As well as some semblance of stability in your shelter situation. Home ownership comes with its own set of stress points but you generally don't have to worry that you could just be made homeless with 3-month notice. Yeah almost everywhere I've rented was cash flow negative for the landlord. Even if you factor in capital appreciation it's not really a better investment than a stock market ETF. The part that pisses me off is being forced to waste 100's of hours and 1000's of dollars every couple years because someone is allegedly moving in.
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# ? Feb 21, 2023 18:18 |
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COPE 27 posted:Yeah almost everywhere I've rented was cash flow negative for the landlord. Even if you factor in capital appreciation it's not really a better investment than a stock market ETF. The part that pisses me off is being forced to waste 100's of hours and 1000's of dollars every couple years because someone is allegedly moving in. I have to imagine it will begin to shift as this generation realizes that property is not the magical, perfectly safe investment they were always promised it was.
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# ? Feb 21, 2023 18:20 |
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tagesschau posted:Even if you account for this, the prices don't make sense. Condos are still being listed for prices that don't make sense, given local incomes, and homes of all types well outside the downtown core are not selling for an appreciable discount. There just aren't enough high earners around to pay these asking prices, and there's no prospect of there ever being enough. This is def true and so the takeaways have to be either 1) We're pricing in multiplexes broadly across the city but for some reason not skyscrapers or 2) the valuation model actually has nothing to do with speculation (despite how much people shake their fist at "speculators") and in fact has more to do with a combination of what incomes the property can produce + what a buyer can borrow. For context again we're basically talking about the fact that you have this Vancouver Plan here where Vancouver has pretty much big time hinted like, "hey we think Strathcona & Kits should probably be like 30+ story residential towers at some point "soon" meanwhile they do not suggest the same for other areas of the city. You would think then that there'd be some uptick in prices for these near downtown dark purple areas? Yet we haven't really seen it. Now in the stock market when you have a company announcing its intention to buy another at some set price (eg. MSFT announces it would like to buy ATVI at $80 a share) the stock price for the buyee immediately spikes but only near that price target and the gap between that price and the buyers' stated price is essentially the risk that the market is calculating that somehow the sale doesn't actually go through, and time is factored in here, so the closer one gets to the sale date, the closer these numbers approach. Could be that with these sort of future looking zoning expectations there are similar things at play, where even though everyone knows that eventually there's going to be 30+ story apartment buildings here, there is so much uncertainty about how and when that will happen, that the price doesn't gap up remarkably. There is also the fact that the city does have it's Community Amenity Contribution (CAC) concept that tries to claw back land lifts in rezones, and that this is actually very effectively depressing the value of the land, which is literally what it is designed to do. All that being said, man if I had a $2M+ house in one of these light yellow zones, I feel like the best thing I could do for my ancestors would be to trade that for a $2M house in one of those darker zones that will inevitably be upzoned for some tower development. Even with CACs in mind you have to figure the ultimate payout will be bigger. So yeah interesting thought experiment but given that we've seen remarkable price appreciation in like South Vancouver of all places it suggests that other factors are dominant. Most likely income generation and borrowing ability dominate, and these things are related, as if you have an income generating rental suite, the amount you can borrow for that house increases, and then after that fuzzy subjective "Canadian Dream" related demand for detached homes. And on the topic of income generation, the fact that extractable rents from basement suites are continuously increasing means that that revenues from a SFH are continuously increasing, which means that the mortgage underwriters are increasing the amount that people can borrow to buy these revenue generating SFHs. As Vancouver shifts toward fourplexes, we should expect the prices to gap up, as we've shifted from a revenue generating capacity of two (three if building a laneway home is possible) to four units, and this ability will enable mortgage underwriters to allow for even larger mortgages. If we don't see a remarkable gap up it could be because that the market had already priced in the notion that all these properties would be fourplexes soon? Femtosecond fucked around with this message at 18:48 on Feb 21, 2023 |
# ? Feb 21, 2023 18:43 |
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COPE 27 posted:Yeah almost everywhere I've rented was cash flow negative for the landlord. Even if you factor in capital appreciation it's not really a better investment than a stock market ETF. The part that pisses me off is being forced to waste 100's of hours and 1000's of dollars every couple years because someone is allegedly moving in. I use housesigma and its got some really good data in there. They show listings that are best for schools, yearly increase in value and also best for rentals. Looking at their top listing in my area of metro Vancouver is a place that is cashflow negative of 535 bucks a month, second best is negative 662 per month. Truly the cream of the crop. Having said that, people were buying because the value of the place goes up not the mortgage coming down. Now these investors want help because the numbers don't work otherwise.
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# ? Feb 21, 2023 19:40 |
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Femtosecond posted:what incomes the property can produce + what a buyer can borrow By this metric, though, the vast majority of SFHes in Toronto (and I'm not even including the 905 here) are laughably overpriced. Borrowing has been heavily curtailed, and potential renters simply don't earn enough to make the cap rate on a rental SFH better than just sticking your money in a GIC without the obviously unsustainable capital appreciation that was made possible only by cheap mortgages that aren't coming back anytime soon.
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# ? Feb 21, 2023 20:35 |
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Femtosecond posted:There is also the fact that the city does have it's Community Amenity Contribution (CAC) concept that tries to claw back land lifts in rezones, and that this is actually very effectively depressing the value of the land, which is literally what it is designed to do. Community Amenity Contributions: Balancing Community Planning, Public Benefits and Housing Affordability – March 2014
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# ? Feb 21, 2023 21:02 |
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Search sucks in this dogshit website but has anyone posted this yet: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-canada-build-housing-immigration/ And does anyone think this is putting the cart before the horse and maybe immigration can be turned off for a while until things get sorted out for actual Canadians? 🤔
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# ? Feb 21, 2023 21:37 |
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Internaut! posted:Search sucks in this dogshit website but has anyone posted this yet: Sorry but you just committed a racism by questioning Trudeau's policies.
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# ? Feb 21, 2023 21:42 |
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Stopping immigration is an incredibly stupid idea that would put Canada’s economy directly on the road to turbofucked. Building more houses is something that should have been done ages ago, but wasn't and now we're seeing the consequences.
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# ? Feb 21, 2023 21:44 |
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COPE 27 posted:Sorry but you just committed a racism by questioning Trudeau's policies. Is it racist to proclaim I actually do not want to sell off my family's quality of life to the third world so that MP landlords can get even richer? (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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# ? Feb 21, 2023 21:45 |
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McGavin posted:Stopping immigration is an incredibly stupid idea that would put Canada’s economy directly on the road to turbofucked. Building more houses is something that should have been done ages ago, but wasn't and now we're seeing the consequences. Ah yes what Canada needs in this era of unprecedented automation and productivity is *shuffles neoilib talking point flash cards* more unskilled foreign workers.
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# ? Feb 21, 2023 21:46 |
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It has nothing to do with unskilled foreign workers and everything to do with needing more people working to support the incredible burden aging boomers are going to put on our healthcare and social welfare system. There are nowhere near enough old stock Canadians to do that.
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# ? Feb 21, 2023 21:50 |
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McGavin posted:Stopping immigration is an incredibly stupid idea that would put Canada’s economy directly on the road to turbofucked. Building more houses is something that should have been done ages ago, but wasn't and now we're seeing the consequences. Can we not, like, consider immigration and housing policy jointly given how tightly intertwined their effects seem to be? It's obvious at this point that the optimal immigration policy is conditional on the expected growth of housing supply. Plowing ahead with 500K immigrants per year regardless of whether we're building enough housing for them is idiotic. No one is advocating to shut off immigration completely forever. But bringing it back down to 250K per year or so until we get our poo poo together on housing is totally reasonable.
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# ? Feb 21, 2023 21:59 |
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Oakland Martini posted:Can we not, like, consider immigration and housing policy jointly given how tightly intertwined their effects seem to be? It's obvious at this point that the optimal immigration policy is conditional on the expected growth of housing supply. Plowing ahead with 500K immigrants per year regardless of whether we're building enough housing for them is idiotic. No one is advocating to shut off immigration completely forever. But bringing it back down to 250K per year or so until we get our poo poo together on housing is totally reasonable. Think of the land owning class, how could you do this to their equity?
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# ? Feb 21, 2023 22:00 |
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Internaut! posted:Is it racist to proclaim I actually do not want to sell off my family's quality of life to the third world so that MP landlords can get even richer? Sir, please reset your irony detector.
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# ? Feb 21, 2023 22:03 |
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Hubbert posted:Community Amenity Contributions: Balancing Community Planning, Public Benefits and Housing Affordability – March 2014 Man this is a really good link. I'd heard all these things discussed and debated in other places, but wasn't aware that there was an (old!) government report that literally spells out all the pros and cons of CACs clearly. The report clearly sets out the sort of problems that CACs introduce when you have an environment like Vancouver where property is already very expensive and people don't really need to sell. (Effectively the situation in Strathcona/Kits that I just laid out) quote:Land Owner Incentive to Sell is an Important Consideration This is the mechanism by which CACs could result in projects becoming unviable, which results in less housing, which results in higher rents. We already know that people are perfectly happy to buy some house in East Van for $2M just to live in themselves. Therefore a developer needs to pay a premium to buy the property. If the CAC would depress the value of the land to $2M (or below!) then the developer has no ability to encourage the existing owner to sell, and so the developer cannot acquire the property and the development doesn't get built. Another big warning in the report: quote:Negotiating CACs Based on Property Value “Lift” I wonder who happens to do CACs based on property value lift? Of course it's Vancouver. Amazing how the report recommends so strongly "do not do this." The broad takeaway of the report seems to be like "sure do CACs, but be modest because you can definitely gently caress people over by making any and all new development unviable." We've seen over in Ontario a lot of discussion around limiting the cities' abilities to put charges on developers in order to get rid of this problem and encourage as much development as possible. Maybe not the best solution, but this report spells out some of why one could see that as a solution. I believe the more recent BC task force on housing affordability report also suggested reigning in CACs and making them more straight forward and predictable. All of this makes sense to me though it's nonetheless enormously frustrating to see like the only way (barring full communism now) to ensure that new homes are created, that development actually happens, is to reward and guarantee big profits to rich established land owners that speculated on land values increasing. img_he_cant_keep_getting_away_with_it.jpeg I don't blame activists and city planners at all for feeling like surely there is a way to tap and tax this unearned wealth, and I think there is, but seems to me like the implementation details really matter here.
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# ? Feb 21, 2023 22:15 |
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Oakland Martini posted:Can we not, like, consider immigration and housing policy jointly given how tightly intertwined their effects seem to be? I don't remember if it was posted here already, but as a perfect case in point a Tim Hortons owner in PEI is evicting a bunch or renters to make room for TFWs.
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# ? Feb 21, 2023 22:23 |
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Faced with the decision between allowing people to build residential buildings that accommodate more than one household and stopping immigration, I'm afraid the choice is clear: We're going to need to stop immigration.
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# ? Feb 21, 2023 22:49 |
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Oakland Martini posted:Can we not, like, consider immigration and housing policy jointly given how tightly intertwined their effects seem to be? It's obvious at this point that the optimal immigration policy is conditional on the expected growth of housing supply. Plowing ahead with 500K immigrants per year regardless of whether we're building enough housing for them is idiotic. No one is advocating to shut off immigration completely forever. But bringing it back down to 250K per year or so until we get our poo poo together on housing is totally reasonable. Currently immigration levels are required to just maintain Canada's population. Any population growth is almost entirely dependent on a ton of immigration continuing into the future. If you gently caress with that, Canada's population will rapidly age and actually decline as the boomers die off.
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# ? Feb 21, 2023 23:19 |
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Here's the article to avoid the paywallquote:Canada needs to boost home building by 50 per cent to keep up with immigration, report says Hmm given that the Feds are the ones increasing immigration so much, maybe they could help out with the housing problem somehow. Hey look the Minister for Housing just announced something. Let's have a look. quote:Feds announce $6.7 million for rapid housing projects in Saskatoon wow 33 whole units in Saskatoon. I'm sure we'll have this problem fixed up in no time.
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# ? Feb 21, 2023 23:20 |
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Looking at Canadian population pyramids is always wild because you look at basically every generation under like 16 and you're like holy poo poo we do not have enough people, we are turbofucked. Then always get a bulge in the 25-30s where we successfully convinced hundreds of thousands of foreigners to fill in the gaps and gifting us another ten years of prosperity. The problem for homegrown Canadians is not the immigrants, it's the boomer generation has made life so loving expensive for Gen-Z and Millennials that it doesn't really make financial sense for them to have kids, so we have to keep importing people to fill out our consumption and tax base. In short, if you want to shut the immigration taps off, then start eviscerating all the benefits the boomer generation is currently reaping at the expense of the young, and also maybe have like 4 or 5 kids yourself to set an example for everyone else.
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# ? Feb 21, 2023 23:31 |
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Perusing their half-assed platform for last election, the Liberals did:quote:Launched [the] National Housing Co-Investment Funding to build new housing and repair or renew the existing community and affordable housing supply. Part of the latter half is trickling in to TCHC, for example. Something like $110M/year. That's not enough to cover the current repair backlog but it's something. quote:Our plan will invest $4 billion in a Housing Accelerator Fund which will grow the annual housing supply in the country’s largest cities every year, creating a target of 100,000 new, middle-class homes by 2024-25. Per this article, this has turned into: quote:The government issued a statement to the Daily Commercial News this week indicating the fund “will construct 100,000 new homes by clearing up roadblocks to construction at the municipal level.” There was also a bit on converting offices to housing, which as far as I know is costly and not as practical as it sounds. No clue if anything has actually happened with that: quote:As the demand for retail and office space has changed due to COVID-19, some landlords, particularly in major urban cores, are facing higher vacancies. This is an opportunity for property owners and communities to explore converting excess space into rental housing, enhancing the livability and affordability of urban communities. So as usual, too little, too late, and begging the question why they're continuing to increase immigration annually now when the half-assed plans to expand housing and support new immigrants are years away. To which I'd say that the likely answer is that corporate overlords demand cheap labour and do not really care how that labour subsists. On that note, the other day there was an article on Fiera Foods having yet another scandal, this time for tax avoidance/evasion/who gives a poo poo it's 100% fraud. They're an industrial bakery notorious for hiring (mostly recent immigrants) through temp agencies, giving them inadequate training in dangerous conditions, causing three deaths in the last decade or so: one crushed inside a dough mixer, another run over by a truck, and a third having her head scarf sucked into an improperly guarded machine, strangling her. And they're still loving operational! Precambrian Video Games fucked around with this message at 23:42 on Feb 21, 2023 |
# ? Feb 21, 2023 23:37 |
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The way I had it explained to me once is that immigration policy is ultimately decided by the federal government, because the federal government cares more about the longer term health of the tax and consumption base of Canada as a whole. We need immigrants because Canadians aren't having children, it's unarguable, and that is completely regardless of whether there's housing there waiting for them. Housing policy however is not decided by the feds, that is the domain of the individual provinces and municipalities who, in the cities with all the great jobs and social networks, are full of NIMBY fuckwads sitting on massive mostly empty houses and refusing to back any projects that might increase housing availability. In short, if you want someone to blame for the cost of housing in your area, go speak to your local government.
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# ? Feb 21, 2023 23:55 |
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Bring back the CMHC we had in the 40's. With the tax rates we had in the 40's.
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# ? Feb 21, 2023 23:59 |
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qhat posted:The way I had it explained to me once is that immigration policy is ultimately decided by the federal government, because the federal government cares more about the longer term health of the tax and consumption base of Canada as a whole. We need immigrants because Canadians aren't having children, it's unarguable, and that is completely regardless of whether there's housing there waiting for them. Housing policy however is not decided by the feds, that is the domain of the individual provinces and municipalities who, in the cities with all the great jobs and social networks, are full of NIMBY fuckwads sitting on massive mostly empty houses and refusing to back any projects that might increase housing availability. In short, if you want someone to blame for the cost of housing in your area, go speak to your local government. Local governments are entirely a creation of provincial governments and are really neither designed nor equipped to expand desireable housing on their own. Left to their own devices, they either promote sprawl (where still possible) or preserve the interests of existing FYGM residents above all else, because... what else would you expect them to do? I'm happy if Victoria is a good counterexample, but it's a federal responsibility to provide (funding for) basic services for everyone. Setting immigration levels based on perceived labour needs and then saying VOTE locally if you all want adequate shelter at some point in your lives is a bad joke.
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# ? Feb 22, 2023 00:11 |
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qhat posted:The way I had it explained to me once is that immigration policy is ultimately decided by the federal government, because the federal government cares more about the longer term health of the tax and consumption base of Canada as a whole. We need immigrants because Canadians aren't having children, it's unarguable, and that is completely regardless of whether there's housing there waiting for them. Housing policy however is not decided by the feds, that is the domain of the individual provinces and municipalities who, in the cities with all the great jobs and social networks, are full of NIMBY fuckwads sitting on massive mostly empty houses and refusing to back any projects that might increase housing availability. In short, if you want someone to blame for the cost of housing in your area, go speak to your local government. Also, the difference between someone moving from Delhi to Vancouver versus Saskatoon to Vancouver is literally an arbitrary line on a map. A person who was born a Canadian citizen has fundamentally no more moral right to move to a place to which they have absolutely no real connection than a permanent resident or naturalized citizen. Is there a moral right to not be essentially gentrified out of your own home? Arguably, yes, there is; but intra-national migration ought to be viewed no differently than international migration in that respect.
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# ? Feb 22, 2023 00:12 |
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There's a bunch of detached from reality egg heads in Ottawa that are like "ah yes well thanks to our elegant federal division of powers, the Provinces will respond to the increased demand that we've caused by spiking immigration by unleashing the power of the Free Market to build more supply, therefore we here in the Federal government don't need to do anything" but meanwhile the Mayors are like "why the hell should I stick my head out to do something that will be unbelievably unpopular?" and the Province is caught flat footed by the realization that they actually have to do something, and are similarly weary of upsetting residents in key urban ridings. So we're all hosed apparently. Does seem like the Provinces are realizing they need to do something, but are stuck in the making reports and evaluating reports stage, making change oh so slowly and most of it so far much to timid to have any real effect. It seems like it will be years before something notable happens. End result of all this is that voters are gonna look around, realize their lives have become a lot worse, and blame the Federal government and vote them out. Femtosecond fucked around with this message at 00:32 on Feb 22, 2023 |
# ? Feb 22, 2023 00:29 |
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COPE 27 posted:I don't remember if it was posted here already, but as a perfect case in point a Tim Hortons owner in PEI is evicting a bunch or renters to make room for TFWs. Literally on this page I posted it, yes Cold on a Cob posted:Tim Hortons franchisee in P.E.I. evicts tenants to make way for temporary foreign workers
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# ? Feb 22, 2023 00:33 |
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lol man I thought the government back tracked on allowing TFW for like fast food and poo poo but I guess they quietly went back and allowed it again.
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# ? Feb 22, 2023 00:41 |
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no u see employing Canadians as fast food workers would mean paying them a living wage, which would be inflationary.
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# ? Feb 22, 2023 00:46 |
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Femtosecond posted:lol man I thought the government back tracked on allowing TFW for like fast food and poo poo but I guess they quietly went back and allowed it again. Ah, sweet summer child: quote:Temporary foreign workers and international students have become an integral part of the labour force
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# ? Feb 22, 2023 00:48 |
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I'd be really curious what new immigrants think of the situation. Are they feeling like they were lied to when it comes to Canada being prepared for them. Are they telling family back home it's a poo poo show? Imagine picking up the family and heading to Australia cause you see ads saying move to Sydney and then you get there an line up to view a rental property with 100 other people.
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# ? Feb 22, 2023 00:55 |
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Purgatory Glory posted:I'd be really curious what new immigrants think of the situation. Are they feeling like they were lied to when it comes to Canada being prepared for them. At least for the international students / provincial nominees a lot of them feel they feel like they were lied to and taken advantage of, but they can't go back because everything is riding on them. I see a ton of anxiety and depression because of this too.
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# ? Feb 22, 2023 01:04 |
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eXXon posted:Local governments are entirely a creation of provincial governments and are really neither designed nor equipped to expand desireable housing on their own. Left to their own devices, they either promote sprawl (where still possible) or preserve the interests of existing FYGM residents above all else, because... what else would you expect them to do? I'm happy if Victoria is a good counterexample, but it's a federal responsibility to provide (funding for) basic services for everyone. Setting immigration levels based on perceived labour needs and then saying VOTE locally if you all want adequate shelter at some point in your lives is a bad joke. It's not even an incentative from a democratic view, because only Canadian citizens can vote so why bother diverting resources to make the lives of the PRs/TFWs better. Homeowners are a huge bloc in these cities and are mostly Canadian, so even if the fed did come down and dump a Brink's truck in parliament to be used to spew housing everywhere, any policy that doesn't prop up house prices is political suicide so it still won't happen. This is the paralysis that exists at the heart of housing policy in Canada, and that's without the federal government's pandering to homeowners itself with perpetually low interest rates and policies explicitly designed to encourage housing frenzy. That still however doesn't change the fact that Canada needs immigrants. The fact that we need immigrants is a purely symptom of Canadians not having children, which is a symptom a government whose only concern is the accumulation of wealth by the older generations. The sooner you stop pandering to people who provide nothing to the economy in 2023 except keeping the realtor commission as a % of GDP stat high, the sooner you can start shutting off the taps.
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# ? Feb 22, 2023 01:04 |
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# ? Jun 8, 2024 15:06 |
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Toronto and Vancouver are the only places making an honest effort to have immigration services. There are some niches elsewhere but it's not as broad. The federal government needs to make immigration services available outside of big cities, or people moving here need to be able to do a cursory examination of the internet to find out that they can't afford to live in one of two cities, and they can't easily live outside them.
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# ? Feb 22, 2023 01:05 |