(Reuters) - Canada on Sunday announced a two-year extension to a ban on foreign ownership of Canadian housing, saying the step was aimed at addressing worries about Canadians being priced out of housing markets in cities and towns across the country.
Canada is facing a housing affordability crisis, which has been blamed on an increase in migrants and international students, fueling demand for homes just as rising costs have slowed construction.
Foreign ownership is a bit of a blind, you need to ban corporate ownership as well
Well you see we can’t do that because the lawmakers are the ones in charge of those corporations
I don’t like paying property taxes on my 150 single family rental properties. Perhaps I should go into politics to change policies allowing me to profit more on denying people the ability to purchase property, since people like me bought all of the supply.
quite so, quite so, however this ban on foreign ownership has put them them in quite the pickle as they can no longer blame dirty foreigners. And with people starting to cotton on to the “immigrants and international students” tactic I look forward to the uptick in articles on “african gangs” (or the canadian equivalent) to angry up the blood.
How do you define ‘corporate’ ownership? If you can own 100 properties as an individual, does that count as ‘corporate’? If it doesn’t, that seems like an easy loophole. If the intent is to ban large quantities of homes owned by single entities, then doing it by quantity sounds more sensible.
That might redistribute old homes, but it doesn’t necessarily solve the drip feeding of new homes that we have going on right now. For example, the UK used to build 250k+ houses every year during the 1950-1980s period. 50% of that was government built council houses for those in need. It’s estimated that we need to build 250k more homes than we currently do in the UK, and the private housing industry has not done its part.
Why you acting like we can only do one of these things?
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ban company/ corporate ownership of standalone housing.
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increased scale of taxation on any property past PPR. One house gets you 10% increase. Two gets you 20%, etc. oh it’s empty? Now you got an empty property tax as well
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fuck up developer scarcity. Set hard time limits between land purchase and development / sale. Give land use laws teeth
Why you acting like we can only do one of these things?
I’m not, please don’t assume that. It sounds like we’re in agreement here, so I’m not debating you, but rather adding to your post, I suppose. It sounded like you wanted to extend the conversation towards solutions to the housing crisis in general.
all g I realised that came across a bit more antagonistic than intended. I meant it more as “let’s do ALL of it mwahhahaa”
Why you acting like we can only do one of these things?
Because it’s a common tactic used to confuse an issue and get the discussion bogged down in irrelevant details and “hah! Gotcha!” moments.
…Yeah i’d read the rest of the thread before throwing that around
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You’re the kind of person who sits on their hands and only gets off of them when you tell others to sit on theirs.
How do you define ‘corporate’ ownership? If you can own 100 properties as an individual, does that count as ‘corporate’?
It’s how you report the income. A corporation pays corporate tax rate on profit. An individual pays income tax. If someone wants to pay the individual income tax on 100 properties, that’s awesome. 33% over 250k. Corporate tax rate can easily be half of that.
Plus filing your taxes is waaaaaay easier having a corp hold all the assets and generating revenue, and the individual as an employee who draws a salary. If you’re just an individual with 100 properties and you get audited, you’re in for a bumpy ride trying to pick apart personal vs rental purchases
Ban amateur landlords.
You want to be a landlord? Better buy a purpose built unit like a triplex or larger that will encourage densification and stop fucking over families just trying to find a place to raise their family.
If both corporate ownership and amateur landlords are banned, then doesn’t that severely limit what a landlord can be?
I mean, that might not be a bad idea…
For single family homes - yes! I’m fine with corporate ownership of purpose built units. We need way more of them, and the idea that “mom and pop” investors would fill that void is silly.
I don’t think the differentiator should be corporate versus “mon and pop” landlords, but rather single family homes versus multi family buildings.
In my view, single family dwellings should generally be owned by the occupant, with very few, very rare exceptions.
I don’t see the issue
Has there been any data on whether the approach is working?
Assuming price is driven by supply and demand this definitively would reduce demand (unless foreigners are not buying), another thing that should also be done is to ban corporations from purchasing homes.
My bigger question is why haven’t construction companies been able to pick up the slack. Anyone working in that field should be making a killing right now
AFAIU contribution companies are already working to capacity. Canada has a significant shortage of skilled trades, so that’s a limiting factor.
Another factor (that politicians have been much more vocal about) is the planning process that construction companies have to comply with when building new developments or infill.
EDIT: and the relatively high interest rate makes it hard to get financing.
It’s my understanding as little as a year ago raw materials were also still suffering a shortage, though I’m not sure that’s the case now.
They are. I have had multiple contractors tell me they don’t want to even bid on building my back-house because I live on a different side of town. They are turning down $50k jobs because they are at capacity in their neighborhood without having to fight traffic getting to mine. And we’re only talking 15 miles here.
And my general construction go-to guy has almost tripled how much he charges for small jobs.
Among the other answers, material costs (lumber, etc.) have also gone up, making construction more expensive.
Yep I’m sure that was the theory. Was just curious if anyone had been checking on how it’s going in practice.
This is the official answer :
Personally speaking I don’t think it’s suppose impact prices much. In fact they were so concerned about it they started adding in exemptions almost right afterwards.
In itself there is a lot of Canadian wealth tied to housing so unless there’s some magical situation where affordability happens in a vacuum people will fight hard to against any policy that hits their wallets. My proof for this is that in 2021 when we had a election 80% of people decided that having the two parties that brought us through decades of housing costs going up was who they wanted to run the country.
I don’t get the impression that the Canadian government wants to do anything about its housing crisis.
Yes there are unsustainable levels of immigration, but the levels are set deliberately to keep the housing bubble alive and to suppress local wages. 1
Foreigners are also easy targets to blame when the housing “crisis” is really just a depraved economic scheme.
Corporate ownership aside, owners outnumber renters in every province. Canada has a large population that will not support affordable housing because it hurts the appreciation of their property. 2
1 Adding 1.1m new people with only 200k new housing units skews the demand and supply on the housing market to jack up the cost of housing to $2,500 for 1 bedroom at a minimum wage of $16.55, so you’re looking at negative $600 per month of income for full time work after taxes and rent.
The Canadian government extended 10,000 visas to failed H1B applicants in 2 days. I think it is safe to assume 10k tech jobs weren’t added in those two days.
Apparently one thing they intend to do is cap the number of international students. Not saying that’s much, but I guess it is one thing.
Looks like the house on arrested development lmao.
It’s only light treason, Michael. How bad can it be?
I live in an area in Central California, and almost all the new houses are being bought by Indians from India. Like, how the fuck are they doing it? My wife and I have saved our entire lives to by a home, and we’re barely doing it. Meanwhile, all my neighbors are Punjabi Indians in their mid 20’s…it’s crazy.
