If you don’t profit from sitting on land, then real estate is not a profitable investment. Prices should be flat. Still lots of reasons to own your own home, but leaching the productivity of others isn’t one of them.

Explain.

Land has value, and sometimes it goes down, but it usually goes up. Whether you are actively using the land is completely irrelevant because someone will pay you to make use of it.

I don’t think that people should be allowed to hoard large amounts of land for the purpose of selling it later on, so there should be regulations put in place to prevent this.

But calling a farmer who isn’t actually using their land and who wants to sell it at a profit to some developer “leaching” seems harsh.

Every expert across the political and economic spectrum, from left to right, thinks that there is a housing affordability crisis. It’s scary that people like you, who deny that there is even a problem, exist.

That’s unfair. I’m going by the universal definition of “affordable housing” set by these experts, while using Stats Canada data to illustrate that the majority of Canadians can afford housing (rental).

You can disagree or claim that I deny there’s a problem, but perhaps we are using different criteria here.

What definition of “affordable housing” are you going by, and what data are you using to support the idea that Canadians can’t afford housing?

I find that the biggest challenge to discussing affordable housing is that some people have wildly different ideas of what that means.