If only we had a government that could stop the rich and corporations from buying houses posted at under 1M (and index it to minimum wage or something)
The way to do that is to tax them.
Price controls don’t work–there’s a long and ugly list of examples of why–but increasing marginal taxation certain does work. We just stopped doing it because…mumble…mumble…supply-side…mumble…trickle-down…mumble…job creators…mumble.
You simply tax the things that harm society until those things go away.
Corporations owning residential homes should get taxed an extra 1% on the total value of the home every year, increasing at 2x the rate of inflation every January 1st. Do that for 5 years, then apply the tax to individuals who own more than one home, same deal - 1% + 2x the rate of inflation.
Combined with actual rent controls, this solves the problem, and it won’t shock the system and cause a housing crash, because various homes are at different stages of profitability.
I’m just some idiot on the internet. Why can’t some idiot in government come up with a similar plan?
Making your mortgage more expensive to “lower inflation”
Making mortgages unaffordable for the people buying and sitting on multiple investment properties, because the government refuses to do anything about it.
Yes, just forget about all the regular people who bought homes to live in. They can all fuck off too, because you’re mad at greedy landlords. The issue is more complicated than you think. Most recent homeowners are regular, fiscally response people who decided to buy a home they need to live in, and did so by passing a very stringent stress test, which was how you are supposed to approach buying a home. Now because the government does nothing about inflation, it’s up to the BoC to raise rates because that’s literally the only thing they can do.
And people like you cheering from the sidelines as regular people get thrown under the bus, because you hate greedy property investors
You think higher rates are going to hurt wealthy investors while completely ignoring the fact that they will hurt regular homeowners who live in their homes a LOT more.
I mean, really, all I want is a home to live in, and if that means all the people who overleveraged mortgages to buy up the entire market with no intention of living in them have to put these homes back into the market, I’m game.
The greedy landlords can just crank up the rent, which is why an average 1 bedroom in Ontario is now $2k/month.
That’s more than my mortgage payment and home insurance, and I bought during the pandemic.
Is there any evidence that landlords are colliding on prices? That usually doesn’t happen in a market with a sufficient (non-ologopoly) number of sellers.
They don’t need to collude, if you own a mortgage on a home and you’re renting it, a rate hike has just increased your costs and so you need to increase your price.
It’s pretty well established that there’s a housing shortage.
I’m just a little confused by your “greedy landlords” descriptor. The price is dictated by the market, not any particular party. After all as you say, there’s a housing shortage, so prices are up.
I mean yeah. Once other “financial assets” become more attractive (bonds at 5.5%?) maybe less parasitical activity will happen in the housing market. The whole thing started going off the rails when rates dropped to essentially nothing.
If you think current home owners have it bad, imagine anyone trying to get in the market now. Not only are mortgages 3X the price, but the houses are 2X the price they were before. The entire thing is completely unsustainable, and yet the Feds have done fuck all. Well no, actually they have made it worse every single step of the way (see the first time home buyers savings account for the latest idiotic idea).
I am imagining anyone trying to get in the market. They are in a similar position as those who need to renew. Raising rates will not help either of them. I know that the low rates created a problem but raising them isn’t going to solve it because the problem is that we do not tax the rich adequately, which contributes to inflation. We give them tools to avoid taxes. The more they spend on things like housing, the less tax they pay.
We need to fix that or else nothing will improve for regular people if we just leave it to the BoC to fix it, which is how this problem was created in the first place with the low rates. We left the BoC to lower rates during economic slowdowns, instead of taxing the rich
