The prime minister is meeting with his youth advisory board this week to hear its most ‘pressing concerns,’ with the aim of informing future policy decisions.
Implement a Singapore housing tax and you’ll get my vote:
For the lazy https://www.mnd.gov.sg/newsroom/press-releases/view/measures-for-a-sustainable-property-market
Seems reasonable to me, just glad i’m not a land-lord; wish i knew what the taxes were on.
Sincere question: how would this help renters? It seems to me that this would discourage people from buying investment properties to rent out, and increase the supply available to buyers. While this would make it cheaper to buy, it seems like it would make it more expensive to rent, unless one or more of the following is true:
- A significant number of units are sitting empty, owned by speculators, rather than being rented. out (plausible, but I haven’t seen proof - is there any?)
- Landlords are colluding to keep prices high (unlikely given that there are hundreds of thousands of independent landlords per StatsCan)
- For some reason besides collusion, free-market pricing is otherwise inapplicable to rent prices (why could this be?)
If you or anyone else would kindly shed some light on this for me, I would gladly join your cause. As it stands, I’m currently more of an advocate for building public housing to increase the supply of both rental and purchase units, rather than adjusting the bias of what units we already have towards ownership over rentals.
Someone buying an investment property doesn’t increase the amount of housing available. Sure, it’s one more rental available, but it’s also one less home available to be purchased by someone planning to live in it. I won’t claim to be any kind of expert, but it’s pretty obvious that it having a middle man extracting profit increases housing costs overall.
The type of investors that do increase housing are developers. In the tax model above, the developers can apply to have the tax reduced to 5% which seems to make it much more lucrative than buying individual houses to rent as is.
If they don’t increase the amount of housing, then they don’t decrease it either, right? They effectively move a house that would be bought by a home buyer, to a house that would be rented by a renter.
I can see how given the argument that landlords generally make profit, that they are a needless middleman, and therefore they contribute to higher housing costs. Is there any evidence that this impact is so substantial that regulating independent landlords will be a boon for consumers of housing?
I appreciate you sharing your perspective! I remain open to be informed as to how such a policy would help the housing crisis.
It appears the average Singaporean home was $1.2MM in March, $1.6MM in June, and $2MM as of a week ago. I’m surprised he hasn’t adopted it already!
Housing would be nice, but how about electoral reform?
Or, you know, fucking actually do something instead of endless committees, boards, surveys and studies. You know what you need to to:
- Build housing directly (like, employ people, buy land and buy equipment, don’t subcontract)
- Tightly regulate the market
- Tax the rich to pay for it …but you won’t do it because it would cost your donor class money.
I’m sick of this. This government didn’t need a study when they bought a pipeline for Alberta, and they didn’t need a study to buy fridges for Galen Weston. They only need studies when they don’t want to do something.
Want a model of what to do? Look at Doug Ford. That corrupt mobster-wannabee just straight up sold government land for pennies on the dollar and netted his daughter’s wedding guests billions. Did he have a committee or a study? Nope, just git’r’done.
Holy shit, you’re the goverment. You can print money. You can even claim all sorts of Keynesian multipliers as to why it’s worth doing. Just fucking do it.
Ignorance isnt nearly a credible argument for a government this size and 100% looks, smells n tastes like shit to me.
Then why didn’t doug for have to use some infinite knowledge to stick his dick in our environment? I can only image the size of the environmental models and studies he went through to gsurentee the safety and wellbeing of the Canadian people right?
Or did he want another boat.
I’d agree with you to a point, but I think the issue is partially technical expertise, but mostly a lack of will. Whether that’s cronyism, cowardice and/or a lack of political capital I’ll defer to insiders.
We’re into year eight of Liberals’ mandate, and they had at nearly five years unencumbered by COVID or interest-rate concerns to address an issue that economists had been red-flagging–for the GTA and GVA–since at least Martin’s government. They chose not to do anything except for some very modest controls because it wasn’t politically palatable.
Putting money back into the CMHC to build public housing at scale was always an option, it just wasn’t done. And again, it’s a matter of will; the government has shown they have the will to intervene when they want to, they just…don’t want to.
Trans-Mountain is a particularly good example of this: no one in the area wanted it, oil prices didn’t support it, the private sector wasn’t going to pony up for it (you’d think they would, if the business case was so solid), it ran directly counter to the government’s climate goals and it wasn’t going to win votes in western Canada anyway, but the government still bought it for five billion dollars. Five. Billion. Dollars.
Without particularly much in the way of committees or commissions; it took four months from announcement to completion.
Think about how much housing we could have built for five billion dollars in 2018, especially if it was done directly, instead of filtered through developers’ bank accounts. And TMX’s cost has ballooned well past that since then. Housing has been an issue for far longer, the solution isn’t nearly as controversial, and yet we have…studies.
Again, I agree with you that the government doesn’t really have the expertise to tackle the issue right now, but I do think they don’t *want * to: it’s all cost, there’s no upside (I mean, except for regular people…) and no way to make rich people richer. And I think that’s really the issue: our policymakers and bureaucrats are no longer psychologically equipped to do anything that doesn’t involve neoliberal, market-based incentivization of the wealthy. The idea of direct intervention at scale is something we can’t even conceive of.
But pointless though aye. Kinda knows what they want yet won’t do anything since it’s costly and would likely harm his voters base.
Reminds me of the time he said he’d change First Past the Post voting and then had a committee investigate possible alternatives. After a year or two the committee presented him with their report to which he ignored entirely, changed nothing, and never talked about it again.
I get the feeling this is just to give the impression that he cares.
Pretty much every politician. Ask for a report from public. Get experts in to look into options and then decide that it’s either too expensive or that it’s not viable.
Explain again what the point is in politicians. They have no discernible talents. Could save a lot of money and probably humanity if we replaced them with the experts.
Politicians seem to be middle men that add nothing to the situation and yet they muddy the waters and cost a fortune
My initial thoughts after this and their cabinet retreat are: Are they looking to do something or just looking like they’re doing something?
My kids will never move out. My neighbor just built a bunkie from a kit in preparation of his kid never being able to move out in this batcrap market.
Build as much housing as you possibly can.
Now, you may be reading that as “build a lot of housing”. But that’s not what was written.
Build as much housing as you possibly can.
/RonSwanson
Seriously, if you’re not considering the feasibility of putting sheds on the moving roof of the sky dome, you’re not taking this seriously enough. If you’re not considering tearing apart a million-dollar MRI machine for scrap metal for roofing, you’re not taking this seriously enough. I want you to take the NIMBYs, flay them, tan the skins, and use them to make tents for homeless people.
A politician pretending to give a fuck again. What else is new?
