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Mr. Mercury posted:So say you're renting a house that falls in these zones, are you gonna have to move soon? Is this more "properties can have up to x amount of units" or this area is now no longer zoned for SFH? If you're renting in a SFH you were already at risk of it being turned into a duplex, or more recently a multiplex. There is now no such thing as SFH-only zoning in Vancouver. That said, the stock of SFH greatly exceeds the construction industry's capacity to turn it into multiplexes or apartments, so it could be decades before you get renovicted. It's a lot more likely the house will be sold and the owners will want to move in. There is no such thing as security of tenure when renting SFH in Vancouver.
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Dec 1, 2023 05:28
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Femtosecond posted:If rich folks want to spend their money building a single big mansion that is fine by them and their right as owner of the land. Lol see also the River District. Right at the furthest corner of the city, with only the most minimal of public transit or amenities, but 19-24 storeys are just fine. Heaven forbid we should do anything similar to Shaughnessy.
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Dec 6, 2023 00:29
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Femtosecond posted:God this thing was the worst decision. I'm genuinely curious about Suzanne Anton's role in it. Re: hotels, there are a few down Kingsway, the motel at Main/6th, and a few bigger ones near the hospital. But none of those were built within the last 3-4 decades.
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Dec 6, 2023 17:37
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Femtosecond posted:BC government has released its guidelines around how municipalities should interpret its new rules and how to restructure their zoning to align with the new Provincial minimums. The experts are still going through things and trying to make sense of it, but sounds like the Province has gone dramatically further than what even the most "ambitious" missing middle reforms that Vancouver just passed. This is pretty good actually. I've seen property listings in Vancouver for SFH in the most random places asking $4-$5M because the lot is just big enough to do a 6-plex. I'd be very happy if all SFH were on an equal footing and stayed at current prices (which already account for land assemblies in a lot of cases).
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Dec 9, 2023 00:28
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I mean, the new laws coming in allow for a ton of big stuff around transit. But yeah, would be good to allow eg low-rise apartment buildings everywhere. (They're kinda just not feasible in terms of land costs right now.) But also yeah about not building tons of housing in the middle of nowhere. We were visiting friends yesterday who lived in a six-storey building on the far side of Langley, and it is astonishing how much density is being built out there, with basically zero transit. Gigantic towers and everything.
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Dec 18, 2023 22:26
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Yeah the infrastructure argument breaks down as soon as you consider that people are coming, whether you like it or not. The question is just whether they live eight to a runny basement suite or can have rooms and apartments of their own. But either way, they will be pooping and showering and sending their kids to school, and you're gonna need to build the infrastructure to handle them.
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Dec 19, 2023 22:03
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Cold on a Cob posted:
With intensive growing methods and a vegan diet, you can push it to a tenth of an acre (of growing area) per person, so you could do a family on half an acre. Maybe an acre, given our shorter growing season. But the point stands - basically nobody who actually owns the necessary acreage is setting it up for subsistence farming.
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Dec 21, 2023 08:09
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MeinPanzer posted:Let me counter your anecdote with my own. In my time living in Canada I knew three different foreigners who obtained their medical degrees abroad and then began working in the medical system in Canada without "a restart." They mostly got jobs (two in medical-adjacent industries, the third in an unrelated industry), passed their exams, got experience in practice-ready assessment programs, and began practicing within a few years. You can argue that it's not fair that they have to spend time, money, and effort to go through the process, and I would agree--we should subsidize the process more--but your assessment is wrong. TBF "a few years" is the duration of med school, so it kinda is a complete restart? Not disagreeing about the artificially limited admissions though.
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Dec 24, 2023 22:33
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The real issue is with Canadian medical schools and residencies artificially limiting admissions, and that needs to be addressed. But cutting back on certifying standards for foreign doctors wanting to practice in Canada is not the right way to do things.
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a primate posted:The last time I had a Canadian-trained doctor was when I was a kid. Since then, they’ve been from India, Nigeria, the UK, etc. IIRC there's also a trend amongst doctors towards "having a life" and "actually seeing their kids" which is also decreasing the supply because they aren't willing to work the insane hours anymore (and are happy with the pay cut that comes with that). Like it's not the whole picture, but it's part of it.
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Dec 25, 2023 04:01
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Mr. Apollo posted:They all have "rental agreements" with friends/relatives that they use as proof of residence, and yeah it's primarily for (not paying) income tax purposes. Lol I'm pretty sure our landlords are doing this, and they're not exactly friends. Just the landlord's agent being "if there's any mail for the landlords, please pass it on to me". That mail includes all kinds of things - mail from MSP, mail from Revenue Canada for some corporation, property assessments and empty homes tax declarations from the City, etc. I'm pretty sure they're also taking advantage of that thing where the Province gives you an interest-free loan to defer your property taxes if you have kids, because that came up when I searched the land title before signing the lease. They haven't actually lived in Canada for at least three years.
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Jan 4, 2024 18:15
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Femtosecond posted:Despite there being some YIMBYs in caucus like Scott Aitchison, I don't think they have any real power at all. IIRC the Conservative proposal is to try to force municipalities / provinces to relax their building codes. Which probably isn't legally possible, but also seems like a pretty terrible idea.
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Jan 14, 2024 23:00
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Square Peg posted:drat that's really edging into "the bank has a problem" levels of unpayable debt. It's still standing and full of tenants. And eh, the assessed value is roughly equal to what's owed to the bank, so the building is pretty much theirs, now. But yeah, it's pretty unlikely that anyone is gonna buy it from them in the current construction environment, and $2M/year in rental income on a $100M property is not exactly an enormous ROI. (Also, as femtosecond says, there are better places to build a new condo tower than demolishing a perfectly-good 7-storey rental building with 160 units). Lead out in cuffs fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Jan 17, 2024 |
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Jan 17, 2024 19:32
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Femtosecond posted:I wonder if 11044227 BC Ltd donated to Councillor Peter Meiszner to get him to put forward a motion to get rid of the specific view cone that makes their property worth only ~90M. I don't think we're going to find out. Lol I was doing some Googling and this Kang Yu Canning Zou guy (aka 11044227 BC Ltd ) seems like quite the piece of work. https://supremeadvocacy.ca/2023/07/20/scc-today-10-dismissed/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=scc-today-10-dismissed Bailing out his struggling development corp by just taking $30M from another international company that he totally wasn't the director of: quote:1115830 B.C. Ltd., et al. v. Treasure Bay HK Limited, et al., 2022 BCCA 380 (40562) Defrauding his co-investors out of their stake when buying Grouse Mountain on behalf of the Chinese government (yes, for three years this guy owned 60% of Grouse Mountain, with the other 40% being owned by CMIG, a parastatal of the PRC): https://today.line.me/hk/v2/article/MkXzJa (It was later unloaded by CMIG when they ran into financial difficulties, and returned to being owned by Vancouver-based evil business tycoons instead). Looks like this is his overall investment corp: https://cmpartners.ca/portfolio And their portfolio is (was): Grouse Mountain, this property, and a consignment furniture store in Washington State. So I guess they're down to the furniture store now.
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Jan 17, 2024 20:25
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Baronjutter posted:In Victoria the vast majority of our rental stock wasn't build by a handful of huge developers, it was built by individuals or small groups of friends. 3 dentists could get together, buy a couple old houses, and put up a cheap simple 4 story apartment building with fairly off the shelf plans. The approval process was quick and easy, the plans and construction was practically standardized mass housing, and the tax structure made it attractive. It was so attractive that so many "small groups of dentists" build so much housing that by the late 70's landlords and single family home owners were screaming at the city to downzone because we had too much cheap rental housing and it was hard to rent it all out. Femtosecond posted:lol yeah I recall reading about all this. It sounded from what I read that a huge amount of this derived from beneficial tax breaks from the Feds. Basically for very high income earners, ie. Dentists, there was some way to pay less taxes by funnelling money into apartment development. Apparently they were barely profitable but it was worth doing for the tax lowering aspect? If that's the case no wonder other developers were mad. Going by how much of the wood-frame low-rise in Vancouver was built in the 1960s/1970s, I'd 100% believe that it was a similar situation here.
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Jan 17, 2024 20:28
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a primate posted:Can someone sell me on bike lanes? They seem like the dumbest possible use of funds in a country with actual Winter and the support tends to boil down to “better than car infrastructure spending”. With the amount of bike lanes put in Toronto, for instance, we could have had dedicated bus lanes instead. Lol Denmark has a very similar climate to most of Canada and one of the highest cycling rates in the world. Bike lanes are vastly cheaper to build and maintain than roads, and pay for themselves in societal benefits including reduced pollution, reduced road traffic and reduced healthcare costs. Edit: here's the SFU study backing up that last point: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0246419 Lead out in cuffs fucked around with this message at 21:25 on Jan 24, 2024 |
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Jan 24, 2024 21:22
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a primate posted:Nah you can’t really do that. There are deliveries, contractors and service vehicles that need to move around the city. It’s not all Teslas driven by tech bros. Removing one lane of car traffic is a different thing than banning all car traffic.
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Jan 25, 2024 21:58
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Baronjutter posted:Another thing I'm trying to bully Ravi into doing provincially is close some loopholes on leases. My friend rented a cheap 2br apartment for like 10 years with his girlfriend at the time. They broke up and he moved out while my friend stayed behind because this 2br was still way cheaper than being a fresh tenant at any victoria 1br. landlord though could technically evict my friend because apparently if 1 person on the lease leaves, it voids the lease and it's up to the landlord to renegotiate and thus bump up the rent to current market rates (would double his rent). So now, because they're still on good terms, his ex will come by now and again to make a show to the landlord and pretend they're both still living there. This seems like an absolutely insane loophole. If someone on the lease leaves and the remaining person can still pay, landlord should not have any special avenues to evict or change rent. Yeah this happened to a friend of mine too. Roommate graduated and moved out; boyfriend moved in; landlord bumped up their rent by $1K/month. All totally legal within the current RTA.
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Feb 6, 2024 05:03
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Cold on a Cob posted:well i might have got my wish, lol gently caress that sucks. Yeah ignoring the email sounds like a viable option, actually. If they want you out 70 days from now they gotta get your n12 to you in writing before the end of the month. Also it's a requirement that they have a signed offer before they can do that. So it seems likely that the do? Like you can still probably threaten to force them to evict you if they don't n11 you, but I don't think tenants are usually a condition of agreements of sale, so it most likely won't spike the sale. You'll just be fighting with the new owners.
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Feb 19, 2024 04:39
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At the very least, this was just a pilot, and for projects moving forward they're vetting buyers much more thoroughly. (And they undertook an audit to claw back the condos from the fraudulent buyers.) I was surprised that it was so loosely run the first time around, but then I realized I'd skimmed over this sentence: quote:Initially brought in under a B.C. Liberal government, the program had few rules when it was launched, he said. Oh, well duh I guess.
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Mar 7, 2024 02:24
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Also lol at the paraphrasing of the court filing by that realtor who brokered all this fraud. She didn't personally profit in any way from brokering the sale of $3M+ of property, or from buying a condo for herself at 12% below market! Also the condo she bought is totally her primary residence. She definitely doesn't live in any of the other $2.5M of housing she owns! Also she just doesn't understand English very well. This was all a big mistake resulting from miscommunications.
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Mar 7, 2024 03:06
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Cold on a Cob posted:spotted in Mississauga https://bunkielife.com/bunkie-with-loft/ A sub-200qsft "house" apparently.
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Mar 11, 2024 22:46
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Rockstar Massacre posted:letting people sub-develop their yard into slum residences is probably the closest we'll ever come to fixing suburbs, short of a continent-wide rash of large fires TBF the more formal version of this is already well underway, at least in places like Vancouver. Laneway houses and legal basement suites have been part of the mix for over a decade, and the new hotness is multiplexes that look like SFH to keep the NIMBYs happy. Vancouver just passed laws allowing the latter, and the province of BC passed laws requiring most other municipalities to do the same.
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Mar 15, 2024 22:01
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Hubbert posted:If you thought Sen̓áḵw was fun, wait until we get deeper into the Jericho Lands project. Yeah really. ʔəy̓ alməxʷ/Iy̓ álmexw is also the poster child for indigenous-led high-density development. gently caress anyone who comes out and says that this isn't what the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh people want, or that it isn't in line with their cultural values. quote:What Was Heard https://syc.vancouver.ca/projects/jericho-lands/jericho-lands-phase-4-public-engagement-summary-digital.pdf
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Mar 18, 2024 23:49
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MickeyFinn posted:What does any of this matter? The renter can sue and, in 2-5 years, get a private apology not to exceed 3 sentences and a $20 gift card to Tim Horton? I mean the RTB does actually have teeth in terms of bad faith evictions, but the guy may be screwed by having gone along with it in the way he did.
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Mar 19, 2024 16:40
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I don't know how true that is. There are a lot of duplexes in Vancouver that got built and never sold. I don't think the margins are that much better, and the construction window is only like a year or so less. And right now the duplexes going up were based off 2020/2021 land prices. At the 40-50%-increased current land prices, high density starts to look like the only thing you can build and stand any chance of making any money.
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Apr 8, 2024 20:03
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They found tenants I'd imagine. The empty homes tax pretty much ensures it. I dunno - looking at the solds vs expireds for duplexes it looks like maybe three quarters sold. The one I was watching closely across the alley from where I used to live sold one half but the other sat on the market for 220 days before expiring. This was a case where they bought the "land" in 2021 for $1.4M, spent probably $1M+ on construction (never mind carrying costs) and were trying to sell the two units for $1.5M each.
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Apr 9, 2024 03:14
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Mantle posted:Ah yes, the fabled "existing homeowner", the class of society most deserving of financial support If you have a mortgage amortization period that exceeds your expected lifespan, are you really a homeowner or just paying rent to the bank?
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Apr 12, 2024 00:03
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COPE 27 posted:So CRA has decided that renter peasants should be forced to be their lords' taxes lmao So apparently this poo poo isn't new -- there are articles about it going back to 2020 -- but it is definitely still poo poo. https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-ag...quirements.html quote:If you receive rental income from real or immovable property in Canada, the payer (such as the tenant) or agent (such as the property manager) must withhold non-resident tax of 25% on the gross rental income paid or credited to you. https://www.mondaq.com/canada/withholding-tax/921234/rental-income-and-tax-requirements-for-non-canadian-residents JFC nobody loving knows about this. It is also batshit insane to treat the relationship between a tenant and a landlord like they're employer and employee, with the tenant being the employer.
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Apr 13, 2024 00:24
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Cold on a Cob posted:it's easier to gently caress over the people without power instead i guess My understanding of the ruling (and the CRA advice on their own website, and various articles by lawyers over the past few years) is that the issue is with the legislation itself. Parliament wrote the law this way, and Parliament has to fix it. So the question I have is, which law, and which Parliament wrote it? (This is also kinda relevant to me because my landlord is definitely not resident for tax purposes, and while there is a property manager, a. he's a personal friend of the landlord, and b. I don't think the law absolves you as a tenant of liability just because there's a property manager. I don't even think you're supposed to allow the property manager to be the one withholding the tax. The way it's written you as tenant always have to do the withholding.)
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Apr 13, 2024 16:51
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Yeah good luck getting declarations from your landlord in a rental environment where you have to send in a dossier including testimonials to the character of your children just to get to the top of the pile of applicants for a unit. Maybe once the lease is signed, but then you're having to basically make threats. "Hi I'm going to need a certificate from the CRA showing that you're a tax resident of Canada or I'm going to have to start withholding 25% of my rent."
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Apr 15, 2024 15:41
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Segue posted:https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/housing-prices-affordability-real-estate-1.7170775 Yeah when I mentioned to my father-in-law about friends who want to move to Calgary from Vancouver because houses cost about 2.5x less than in Vancouver and they could actually afford to buy one, his response was to harp on about "oh I wouldn't do that, the Federal Government doesn't like oil, and the property prices are just going to go down further in Alberta". Like sure dude, but I can 100% guarantee that my friends give zero fucks about the value of the house as an investment. They want a SFH with a backyard, and Calgary is how they see that happening for them. He's made a ton of money on housing, and just can't conceive of it *not* being an investment vehicle.
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Apr 15, 2024 18:32
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I think basement suites are ok if they're up to code (a lot aren't and enforcement is patchy). But I'd like to see them taxed as rental income rather than the CRA being "oh it's just part of your primary residence". The funniest thing about them is how all the suburban municipalities' main requirement for a suite to be legal is that there has to be an off-street parking spot. Just totally allergic to increasing density.
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Apr 15, 2024 21:00
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Femtosecond posted:The other thing about two beds and three beds is that because they're so much more expensive than a tiny 500 sqft apt, relatively few people can buy them and they take a lot longer to sell. And this is problematic because bank financing means and even provincial rules (!!!) mandate that you need to sell a certain amount of units before you can start construction. So this means that it's actually so risky to sell slow to sell, expensive large units that it could sink your entire building. So developers are selling the tiny stuff that moves quickly because it's too financially risky to do otherwise. Yeah there's kind of a fundamental problem that real estate prices alone don't really convey: even building the shittiest, tiniest condos, and even selling at the current vastly distorted prices, it is borderline impossible to actually make the financials work. And that's a function of land, labour and materials costs. Never mind trying to build housing that people actually want to live in, or at a price that actually matches incomes. And don't even think about trying to do both. And I don't really see a way out of that without something on the scale of the Vienna model. quote:This is kind of the main thing really. Why are there so many 1 beds? It's because they're in incredible demand. At some point it would be possible for developers to build too many 1 beds such that single people would be pretty satisfied and there would be more demand for larger units, but given the constraints on construction, we're nowhere near that. Therefore developers keep trying to meet the demand for 1 bedroom apartments, and everyone who needs a 2 bed or more is stuck having to compete with single people for the same product. I mean, some of this is people who genuinely want one bedrooms, but a lot of it is that it's all they can afford, and they're desperate to stop renting / start climbing the "property ladder". And in the past, it's paid off. A lot of people buying townhouses or actual SFH are using gains from a condo that doubled or tripled in value to bring the price into a range they can afford. The problem is that now, instead of 20-something professionals buying 1BRs, it's 30-something families trying to cram two adults, an infant and a dog into that space, because there is nothing else they can afford.
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Apr 26, 2024 08:05
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Femtosecond posted:No real surprise? I mean even telling the CRA that you sold your home wasn't required until just a few years ago and not avoiding taxes is practically a badge of honour amongst the rich business set. Eh, the taxes helped, but it's always been clear that enforcement is the bigger issue, and that's squarely a federal responsibility (even though the issue is local).
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May 15, 2024 20:15
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