Pretty sure it's companies like Blackrock
this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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It's both really, but investment firms are certainly a bigger, growing, threat
Is the solution not incredibly obvious? Ban non-owner occupied purchase of SFH. You want to get in the market? You need to create purpose built units with high density.
Yes, but that's not gonna fly with the capitalists.
Also less high density, more medium density please. That's how you get dense but livable places like Montreal.
It was the mo across the entire current and former Commonwealth before 1980.
In the 70s rental properties made up less than 10% of London's housing, and it was more crowded then than now, where a London's looking at 60% rentals. With more housing to people than ever before... And yet... Something about capitalisms efficiency...idr.
Thatcher, Reagan, Hawke, Rogers, Pinochet etc all fucked the kids. All of em, kid fuckers. I said it, Imma leave that hanging riiiiight there for everyone to digest.
What's been done can be undone. Every hierarchy can be over thrown. There's not a goddamn thing about society that reflects us in our state of nature, therefore, it all needs our permission to continue. It's ALL vulnerable.
Don't leave Canada behind, poor Mulroney doesn't want to feel alone in his grave when he could be with his buddies partying at the gender neutral bathroom!
Elder Trudeau opened the floodgates, did he not? My understanding is that Mulroney might have driven the stake but Trudeau planted the cross...to be a wee bit dramatic in my metaphors.
You won't get a rebuttal from me, fuck that guy, or as he once told the striking postal workers: eat shit.
Shit I didn't even realize we were talking to each other in 2 different threads til I tagged you as "real-ass mofo".
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Can we just IPO humanity already? I want to buy puts.
I'll repost a comment I made before again here:
If you have half the population each have 1 investment property. You must have the other half renters. You literally want to create two classes. Those with investment properties and those with no property. One class above another. Youβre just using billionaires as a shield. You want to put yourself in a class above other people.
We should all work so that each person has one home.
And the βI donβt want to work until I dieβ should be covered by social insurance/social security instead of making someone else a renter.
context: https://lemmy.ca/comment/4927203
Capitalism is literally moving us back into feudalism. Everything is for sale. Even democracy, it seems. Perhaps fascism would be more profitable? Market is bullish on fascism!
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I don't know how I feel about the "mom-and-pop" characterization, but yes.
It always rubbed me the wrong way when the previous housing minister made a point of saying we needed to protect the Mom and Pop investors. Like - no, we absolutely should not.
Right? We need to protect mom and pop renters
I absolutely agree. I'll repeat a comment I made separately.
Iβll repost a comment I made before again here:
If you have half the population each have 1 investment property. You must have the other half renters. You literally want to create two classes. Those with investment properties and those with no property. One class above another. Youβre just using billionaires as a shield. You want to put yourself in a class above other people.
We should all work so that each person has one home.
And the βI donβt want to work until I dieβ should be covered by social insurance/social security instead of making someone else a renter.
context: https://lemmy.ca/comment/4927203
Robert Kavcic, senior economist at BMO Capital Markets, told Global News βas much as a quarter to maybe a third or slightly more of certain markets are being bought up by multiple property purchasers or investors. So (that is) adding another layer of competition to first time buyers that are actually looking to get into the housing market for a place to live.β
If true that's fucking nuts. That sort of thing needs to be taxed so hard to no longer make it profitable. We all understand that you don't go for seconds until everyone has eaten, but when it comes to a basic human need like shelter, people say FYGM.
There's a lot of people saying it's the corporations fault which isn't exactly untrue and they do have significant sway politically with lobbying.
But it's the people who keep bringing back politicians that clearly don't want to lower housing prices because a segment of a population is to heavily invested into it. If anything the current tax system clearly incentivize people to invest into housing, imagine if we treated water like housing and people would buy up then vote for anyone that'll make the prices go up.
No, corporate buyers and lack of regulation is pricing out first time buyers.
I feel like I'm missing something. Don't we have a housing shortage, not merely an "owner-occupied" home shortage or a "rental" home shortage? Somebody please tell me what I'm missing.
If too many homes were owned by investors and rented out, why aren't rented homes more affordable? If you say, "greedy landlords," are you suggesting that the roughly 1.4 million landlords in Canada (source) are all effectively colluding? I find that highly implausible.
If we had sufficient housing supply for the demand in general, wouldn't that result in lower prices to both rent and own, depending on what's right for each individual?
are you suggesting that the roughly 1.4 million landlords in Canada (source) are all effectively colluding?
I don't know about Canada, but in the U.S., yes, that's happening
AirBnB's a significant part of the issue. Short term rentals don't provide a place for people to actually live, while often providing a higher return over the short term than a long term rental unit.
Real estate speculators, too, add extra pressure to the housing market. Speculators often don't rent the property out at all, and attempt to treat housing as a raw commodity, buying up homes and just waiting for real estate prices to increase as the bubble continues to grow.
There may be real housing constraints in the country, but they're severely exacerbated by the view of housing as capital, rather than as homes.
Look, capitalism works. There are no problems and everybody is happy. As long as we keep pumping out children and just build build build, and then skim some off the top and invest in lawyers and lobbyists to change democracy for the better, we will all be rich and also ok.
When investors buy properties and set higher rent prices, non-investor landlords raise their rent prices to whatever the artificially-inflated market rate is for the area. Not all 1.4 million landlords have to be actively working on fucking the populace, but they all end up participating in it because no one is going to charge lower rent out of the goodness of their heart.
And when the "non-investor" landlords raise their prices high enough, they quickly find they have enough money to consider investing in a second rental property, out bidding people who have trouble saving after paying artificially inflated rent.
Did you know that the original version of Monopoly was called "The Landlord's Game", and was used as a teaching aid to teach the poor about the inherent immorality and inevitable loss of freedom and equality land ownership entails? Then a capitalist came along, stole the whole thing, rebranded it Monopoly, and made a shitload of money.
and then turned it into a nostalgia delivery system for anyone that will buy anything with their favorite IP slapped on it.
non-investor landlords
Isn't that an oxymoron? A landlord is by definition, an investor. Maybe you mean something else...
Nobody is homeless waiting for a home to be built they can purchase. There isn't a physical housing shortage.
Are you suggesting that building affordable homes wouldn't help anyone escape homelessness?
Homeless people aren't usually the class that can secure a mortgage or have the cash to purchase a home regardless of the affordability of the home.
Right, but you can also rent affordable housing...
Theres no one single issue, but all of the above happening at once AND a population boom at the same time to top it off. We need an all-of-the-above approach to fix it too. Remove zoning restrictions, make lending for multiplexes easier, build public housing as fast and as much as possible, and found new towns... to name a few.
More builds won't solve anything until we get investors out of housing.
Having enough supply isn't as profitable
Rule 1: Make money.
Rule 2: There is no rule 2. Go nuts!
It's both.
If you just look at supply and demand graphs.
Where S is supply, D is demand, N is number of people, I is number of investors, and P is price you'd have:
- S[=N+0]=D[=N+0], P-
- S[=N+0]<D[=N+I], Pβ²
- S[<N+0]<D[=N+0], Pβ²
- S[<N+0]<D[=N+I], Pβ²
- S[>N+0]>D[=N+0], PβΌ
- S[<N+I]<D[=N+I], Pβ²
- S[>N+0]>D[=N+0], PβΌ
- S[>N+I]>D[=N+I], PβΌ
The root cause is the supply not keeping up with demand. Any proposed solution that does not include building like mad is ultimately going to fall short.
The problem really is twofold: yes, it is supply, but there's also an extreme amount of reticence to do anything about both supply and speculation.
This is largely because the profits of the current system accrue to people who bear experience none of the pain of it (which is also why healthcare is broken, and why transit is broken, and why nothing gets done about climate change). Taxes are kept low, assets keep going up and it takes very little effort to stay rich. And money talks.
"Building like mad" isn't going to happen because "building just enough to stop people from rioting" is more profitable. No builder is going to build public housing when they can make more on McMansions and condos, and no homeowner or speculator wants to see policies that would increase their tax burden or decrease the value of their asset.
Building like mad would help, but you'd achieve similar effects by smacking down the investment side of the problem, without requiring the government to, eg, directly buy equipment, supplies and employ tradespeople to build homes, which they'd have to do as bribing developers to do it doesn't seem to work. Plus, if you tax speculation hard, maybe you can use that tax revenue to build?
The real, core issue, though, is housing in Canada at the moment is the perfect neoliberal failure, and our policymakers are so wedded to neoliberal orthodoxy that the solution (massive, direct public investment) isn't just heretical, it's inconcievable. Most of our MPs/MPPs/MLAs and civil servants don't even remember a pre-Reagan/Thatcher era of massive public investment. They don't seem to understand it's even an option.
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