According to a new report from Rentals, In July, the Canadian rental market hit a record high with an average asking rent of $2,078, marking an 8.9 per cent annual increase.
Here’s your reminder that Ontario expects disabled people to live on 13k a year.
If they are lucky. Getting disability anything requires 90% luck and a doctor who “has the time” to sign a few documents.
In the US, they assign doctors to evaluate you, only to see you literally struggling to walk/balance yourself, and be told you could “probably work at least 4-8 hours a week, no disability for you, moocher”.
Nevermind that even if said mythical 4-8 hour/week, remote job existed, the pay wouldnt cover jack shit…
There is such a big divide between homeowners and renters. The average mortgage is 12.5years in, meaning payments are based on home prices from 2010, when canadian homes were 300k on average. That means that homeowners probably pay on average, 1200 a month while renters are paying double that amount. Younger generations are fucked.
Mostly millennials and GenX. It’s easy to blame boomers but they aren’t the ones buying most of the houses.
Edit: looks like this hit close to home with the “muh boomers are the root cause of all evil” crowd. This is your reminder that the youngest boomers are now 60 years old. You’re also out of your mind if you think homeowners aged 35 to 59 wouldn’t scream bloody murder if the government somehow managed to suppress home prices.
I’m an older millenial and me and my cohort didn’t have property in 2010. Took us to ~2015 to start having enough cash. Now I see people saying “that is rent is double my mortgage payment”! Not mine. Mine is still higher. Can’t wait to have to re-sign with the higher interest rate.
Not a “boo hoo, my life is hard” thing, I see what side of the rift I managed to get on, but it’s not totally rosy either for us late movers.
Millenials and GenX are still working on their 40-50 year mortgages. Boombers paid off their 20-30 year mortgages ages ago. Housing prices have to stay high, because that is Boomer’s retirement investment. If housing prices crash, instead of homeless young people we have starving Boomers.
I’m in the 35-59 year old bracket and desperately want home prices to drop. I’ve done everything our parent’s generation said to do to succeed and the goalposts move faster than I can make money.
When two adults making low six figures can’t qualify for an average home, something is deeply deeply broken in this country.
The shitty part is there’s no one in government who gives half a shit about it to actually do something.
My landlord pays 1200$ for her mortgage and I pay 1000$ fir renting the mold infested basement !
In the last year my mortgage has ballooned by over 1k a month from 1600$ to 2700$. In that same period my basement tenant has seen her rent increase 0$.
Why? Because mortgage rates and affording my house are not her problem. That’s the responsibility I assumed when I bought the house. I don’t intend to raise her rent now or any time in the future.
Sadly, I keep being painted with the same brush as all the other quite frankly shitty people that call themselves landlords.
I dont think you can be seen as a very bad landlord like the scum some are if you rent your basement in a fare manner. I believe owning multiple homes to rent them AND get a return on your “investment” when you sell them due to crazy inflation since all the homes are owned by the same groups makes them bad. I don’t know your situation so I don’t judge… Yet. lol.
When you sell that house, what percentage of the sale will you be offering to your tenant? Their income has been helping to build your equity, and mitigating your financial burdens after all.
Being “one of the good ones” only counts for so much when the very nature of what you’re doing is exploitive.
Yes, because landlords as a very base idea should not exist. Sure you’re being a “good” landlord, but the concept itself is having other people pay for the thing you own, while they get nothing of that investment.
What we need to do is de-incentivize the commodification of housing entirely. Really make it unprofitable to deal in homes while passing the risk for your “investment” on to the people you’re exploiting.
I’m talking about an outright ban on all corporations, foreign and domestic, from owning single family homes — corporations need offices, not homes, and shell corporations and LLCs don’t even need those. Give a one year grace period, then tax all rental income collected from single-family homes at 100%. Maybe fine them each year too until they shape up.
I’m talking about regulating rental prices on short-term rentals, and capping the annual income allowed from short-term rental units to a value indexed against minimum wage (or preferably the area’s living wage, determined not by any level of government itself but by valid third party organizations).
I’m talking an annual federal tax on properties not occupied full time by the owner or their immediate blood relative. Parent, sibling, or child. Something insane, maybe 400-800% of the home’s property tax. Multiply it exponentially for each hoarded home. Throw in an exception for a second home if it’s far enough from the first (people who own cottages aren’t the problem, and shouldn’t be penalised). But only for the second home — nobody needs two or three or four “vacation homes”.
That’s how we force land-rich boomers out of the housing “market” and get homes into the hands of people who need them, who should have a right to stable housing, who are currently being blocked from the market by vampiric land leeches.
Rental income is taxed at 100%, FYI.
I think carrot works better than stick. Instead of punishing everyone who made an investment, and spending god knows how much money to enforce it, just offer a one time capital gains exemption on any investment single family dwelling that has rental income for more than a year. But make that exemption dependent on the sale going to someone who doesn’t already own a home. (No landlords scooping up extra properties) this puts sellers in connection with buyers and since the seller is getting a big payout they can do the extra leg work. I bet many of the properties get sold to existing tenants.
The government gets an easy cost effective way to free up supply, and it doesn’t actually take money out of their pocket. (Just removes future tax income). Limit the program to no more than 3 years. Anyone who is a casual landlord will jump to get out. Boomers in retirement will jump at it as they will have owned these properties for years. This will free up supply in months, not years. Everyone I know who owns rentals that I discussed this with said they would sell if they could avoid capital gains.
That’s my $0.02. FWIW
Instead of punishing everyone who made an investment,
You’ve already lost me. They’re the ones trying to treat homes as a commodity fit for investing. Investments carry risk. Passing the cost of that risk to tenants, or giving them a free pass because they’re being forced to play by real rules instead of the rigged game they’ve been taking advantage of, doesn’t sit well with me.
They made an investment that by its very nature exploits people. They should shoulder the consequences of that decision.
That’s because you aren’t interested in solving the problem. You just want to punish people that you think are evil. You would rather throw everyone you don’t like under a bus than actually help the people that need help now. Which is the vibe I get from many people on this site. The problem with what your want to do is it will never happen. There is no support. My solution plays into the hands of those in control but still gets the job done.
At this point I think I’m with Singapore on land and housing being a publicly controlled good
As it stands now our housing market is just an inflation resistant bank for the wealthy
They just named the price they’re willing to rent it at its entirely secondary to their goals and so it doesn’t serve the housing market
I’d be fine with all rental housing being entirely owned and controlled by a government body.
Housing is already controlled by a government body, both implicitly and explicitly. The only thing that holds up the housing situation as we know it is that government body – our collective willingness to recognize and abide by it. If we don’t like it, we can change it on a whim. We are the government.
Why should where I get shelter from be a market exactly?
That’s the question. Why not pick a house you like and move in, its owner be damned? The answer, I’m sure, is because you know the government will soon come and kick you out. By brutal force, if need be.
It takes people like you and me to bring that force. We are the government. If we don’t like housing being a market, why are we bringing the force? It’s certainly easier to do nothing.
the people we’re complaining to would have some incentive to give a fuck about us.
Why not complain to them now, then?
This is fake GDP. Investing in land value is unproductive. Unlike a business, nothing of value is added.
In Canada, spending a million dollars to open a restaurant or found a tech start up is a worse bet than just buying a house. Not to mention these businesses are simply harder to keep open when real estate expenses are so high. This is terrible for our economy and one of the biggest reasons why our GDP-per-capita is falling behind peer countries.
Your solution focusing on increasing the supply of single family homes is questionable. Single family homes are incapable of supporting affordable housing markets in high demand areas like Toronto, Quebec, Ontario, and Vancouver, which are where most Canadians live. North America needs more flexibility and capital to support upzoning the housing supply we already have from the overused SFH to missing middle multiplexes, or from those to low rise apartments, or from those to 5 over 1 style buildings, or from those to towers. The rigid Euclidean zoning policies of North America mean that even if all housing stock was privately owned by residents, there would still be a shortage in the high demand places where most people live, leading to continued high prices. Especially because we have so much trouble building quality public transit that would open up more land as desirable for development. High speed rail between Windsor and Quebec City could spread out the demand to existing supply in smaller low-cost cities while providing a boon to those cities’ economies, but Via Rail has pretty definitively shut that down in favor of HFR at this point for cost reasons
Rental highrises are not single-family homes. What we need there are more stringent rent control and to move the majority of such rentals from for-profit property developers to non-profit housing cooperatives.
We could also prohibit property developers from purchasing highrises from each other altogether. You want a new high-rise? Build one. You don’t want one of the ones you own? You get to sell it to a cooperative for a heavily regulated maximum price, and might get to break even.
Or at the very least, the focus could go into de-commodifying rentals so that everyone always has a fall-back option for safe, clean, affordable places to live even if they can’t buy a house/condo. Nobody should be seeking profit in a manner that endangers people’s safety.
So Bob sees your tax, looks at the Ahmed family renting his unit. Says “oh crap, uh, Ahmeds, you’re out, I need to put my brother Doug in there to dodge this tax!”
Result: Brother Doug moves from a tiny apartment to living in Bob’s house.
The Ahmeds cannot find another place, because half the Bobs are doing a similar scam, and the other half the Bobs are doubling their rents because they can see they now have a good that’s in even shorter supply and they don’t feel guilty at all for this because they’re now paying triple property tax.
The Ahmeds now live in their car and eat cat food.
You know when the number of rentable units goes down, rental prices go up, right? I’m all for going after people who leave units vacant, and for taxing the income people get from these investments, but taxing rental units means making the rent price worse.
But if Bob moves Doug into his second house, then he’s now either a) exploiting his brother instead of a stranger, which most landleeches are less likely to want to do, or (more likely) b) giving his brother a better rent to avoid exploiting his brother… and is thus making a much smaller profit than when he was exploiting the Ahmed family. And if not, then at least Bob only has so many brothers he can rent to, so the worst kinds of Bob will eventually have to sell off some number of properties.
But the goal of the immediate family exemption is to allow families to help each other own homes that aren’t beholden to some shit stain developer or daywalking asshat. Specifically to let boomer and gen-x parents provide struggling millenial or gen-z children with homes, but I’m sure I could come up with a handful of other semi-likely relevant situations as well.
Back to your example though, the lack of profit he’s now making pushes Bob to sell the place. And because all his landleech buddies are making less and less money per hoarded home, they’re also more likely to be unloading their surplus stock at the same time. And if these people all lose money on the sale of their extra homes as prices come crashing down, fucking good.
And as prices come down, more people who are currently renting because buying is prohibitively expensive are able to stop renting and move into a place they own, this freeing up rental spaces.
Of course I’d also support going much more simple and literally forcing landleeches to give their hoarded homes on pain of prison time, but I figured that’s a little more radical than the general population could ever come close to supporting.
I get your angry, but your comment about housing prices crashing is going to fuck over so many good hard working people that bought houses in the last 5 years. You would subject those people to holding hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt (say if they had to move for work); just to satisfy your need for revenge?
That’s substantially more than my mortgage payment.
$2000+ a month for rent on average is crazy, but rent has always been higher than most mortgage payments, though. Often by a lot.
The biggest benefit to renting is that it doesn’t require a $50,000+ down payment and $10,000+ “repair bombs” every once in a while 😵
Yeah, it wouldn’t even make sense for renting to be cheaper than buying. Most renting is from for-profit landlords. Obviously they have a mortgage, too. They’re obviously going to try to make a profit. Plus mortgage is only part of the cost of owning. There’s also property taxes and maintenance, which renting includes in the rent price.
The problems are mostly that there’s not enough supply (most commonly due to bad zoning), homeowners oppose anything that could help (cause that would reduce the value of the home they already own), and that most of these landlords are for-profit. Being for profit means they aren’t just going to charge more, but they also have a vested interest in making sure it’s more expensive and less tenant friendly.
Why wouldn’t it make sense for renting to be cheaper than buying? Would I prefer to pay $3000 in rent or $3100 in mortgage+all other fees? Even though I’d be cash flow negative by $100, I am building equity. At the end of 30 years, one person owns a home and the other doesn’t, for the difference of just $100/mo.
Renting is in fact cheaper than buying in places like Vancouver, where wages are low but real estate prices are high.
Almost double mine. Meanwhile, my home’s value has increased by like 50% since 2019. It’s insane, untenable, and unjust.
Right? Basically everything you buy to actually use does not appreciate in value over time. I get that mortgage is lower than rent because every problem with the house is your problem which also cost money. But it’s insane to me that after you payed your mortgage you basically have more value than you paid for.
But honestly, good on you.
Landlords should be outlawed. They provide no service to society, only harm
They’re supposed to fill the gap for people who can’t afford to buy, or for whom it doesn’t make sense to do so (i.e. people in town on a temporary job).
The problem is that “landlords” these days are more towards the class of “investors” who expect rents to cover the cost of their mortgage plus additional profit
There are lots of ways that gap could be filled. Landlords exist to make profit by filling that gap. They have a financial incentive to maximize returns and minimize expenses, and have the leverage to do so to an exploitative degree.
Another way to accomplish that would be through cooperatives, which are non-profit corporations that exist to provide housing. They have a mandate to maximize utility to their tenants, and have no profit incentive leading them to exploit their tenants.
I wouldn’t mind seeing more of those, but I do also remember a day when there were a lot more landlords who charged reasonable rates without becoming overpriced slumlords.
There’s always incentive to “make a profit” but often enough it was just somebody who had extra space after the kids moved out etc and got a little extra pocket money or even just a slightly less “empty nest” feeling. Some lived in half the house (usually upstairs with a basement suite rented) and a smaller few did get another, smaller place while keeping the “family home” for their kids’ return after university or whatever.
Then people started buying second, third, etc places as investments, and it became about “maximizing investment”. These kinds act like sharks, while serial bad-tenants similarly preyed on the more nieve “good” landlords causing more of them to get out of renting.
Co-ops can definitely be part of the solution, but having better controls and adequate staffing at rental regulatory boards etc would be beneficial to both sides, as well as removing pure-profit incentives.
I’ve got a house currently but I’d be ok with seeing the so-called “market values” drop to something people can afford. I’d welcome better regulation on both sides so that my kids don’t end up paying in gold for mold, but also so that I could potentially find somebody decent/trustworthy farther into the future that I could rent space to (in my home) even the kids move out - for a reasonable rate - without having to worry that they’ll destroy the place and steal the plumbing the moment they move in while I wait on 12mo for arbitration.
Looking at the current rents people are asking, I’d say a “reasonable” rate would be ½ or even ⅓ of what most are asking, but at the same time advertising low rents seems to attract a lot of sketchy people. It’s crazy.
Always has been.
If you buy a 4plex for 2 million now, you have no choice to charge a high rent. But all the 8plex or 16plex from the 80s that are paid in full for years, there is no reason to go from 500$/month to 2000$/month just because
100% agree. Nothing pisses me off more than seeing somebody who bought at decades-old prices trying to justify charging thousands, while at the same time not having invested in maintaining the property (and triple that if they pushed out an existing renter or jacked up the rents on them to “keep up with rates”)
They are the reason why people cant afford to buy. Thats a looot of buildings going for sale if you get rid of landlords. Plummeted prices and mortgage payments. Then we should be focusing from the bottom up afterwards, make sure everyone has some place to live with public housing.
Yup, so take away the ability to grossly profit off the backs of others and allow the scales to balance. There’s no reason we can’t do both by disincentivizing gouging and slumlording while at the same time increasing the creation of more affordable housing.
Hell, if a sliding-scale of fees against # of properties/profit were implemented they could use the revenue from that to help fund more affordable housing, while discouraging house-hoarding at the same time.
While I don’t completely agree with an outright ban imo there should be strict limits to the amount of residential property a person or corporation can own.
No one should be making significant profit off of something so essential.
Make property ownership a shit investment.
Cap revenue from rent to 5-10%. Tax the living fuck out of empty properties so they’ll take someone, anyone. Tax higher the more properties they own.
Also outright ban AirBnB and make it so corporations are not allowed to own houses.
So in your mind all those new grads out getting their first jobs should just be homeless for 30 years until they can afford to buy a house? That’s a pretty harmful idea.
Youre looking at this from the current situation, corporare landlords are running amok buying all the property and only renting, decreasing the supply of houses available to buy instead of rent.
Outlawing landlords means all rental property goes up for sale, and only for people that will live there. Add on some pressure that current landlords have to sell within a few years or it goes to the state, and youre gonna have plenty of cheap houses for sale.
