Housing Crisis In Canada's Largest Province Gets Fix Plan

[Economy 52,837]

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/globalnews.ca/news/8721314/ontario-housing-supply-market-bill/amp/

 

Ontario has announced legislation aimed at boosting housing supply and reduce price pressures to try and improve the severe housing Crisis

 

Ontario needs another 1.2 Million housing Units just to reach the average housing to population ratio of the rest of Canada which itself is a terrible bar to go by because Nationally Canada has a severe shortage as it is

 

The plans include:

 

1. Raising foreign buyers tax to 20% and apply it to whole Province not just the Toronto metro

2. Cutting red tape to reduce major delays in housing project approvals

3. Provide access to financing for NON-Profit housing project agencies

4. Make municipalities and Province directly discuss major projects at the same time to be on same page and reduce unnecessary delays

 

The Federal Government has also announced plans earlier in the year to directly invest more money in affordable housing construction which should help the situation

 

 

[Economy 52,837]

#3 and #4 to me I think are kind of meaningless...

 

It's nice to make more financing available for non profit groups but realistically they are too small a part of the market to make a big difference. 

 

As for engaging with municipalities more that's a very undetailed pledge that in practice probably won't happen that often when different levels of government get busy with other stuff and never have time to meet

 

But reducing red tape to boost speed of construction and taxing speculators more I think may yield some results in a few years

[Babel 41,637]

Maybe they should try make it illegal for a single person to own 30 000 houses?

 
 

[Economy 52,837]

20 minutes ago, Babel said:

Maybe they should try make it illegal for a single person to own 30 000 houses?

 
 

I'm sure that doesn't help since these kinds of investors can always win bids and force bids higher in the market. I definitely am not pro making houses a major investment commodity cuz it should be first and foremost about having a place to live not speculating and making a quick buck... However the majority of houses aren't in this boat tho and I don't think that is the main core issue, I think it's more of an icing on a cake

 

The vacancy data and dwellings per capita suggest there is indeed a severe shortage and I think that supply issue is the biggest issue of all

 

Landlords being investors or not, either way they do not have power to overprice houses like this if a shortage did not exist as houses would simply go unsold and become a buyers market

[YourEvilTwin 1,384]

Tax the **** out of second homes - yes that includes corporate owners. And profits on any homes sold period.

Take zoning laws entirely out of the crummy little hands of the city council.

There. Problem solved.

[StarstruckIllusion 53,562]

1 hour ago, Economy said:

I'm sure that doesn't help since these kinds of investors can always win bids and force bids higher in the market. I definitely am not pro making houses a major investment commodity cuz it should be first and foremost about having a place to live not speculating and making a quick buck... However the majority of houses aren't in this boat tho and I don't think that is the main core issue, I think it's more of an icing on a cake

 

The vacancy data and dwellings per capita suggest there is indeed a severe shortage and I think that supply issue is the biggest issue of all

 

Landlords being investors or not, either way they do not have power to overprice houses like this if a shortage did not exist as houses would simply go unsold and become a buyers market

Why is it to hard to get immigrate a bunch of house builders or something? Ban single family units, maybe make a whole new city up north with high a speed rail connection to Toronto so people don’t feel like they’re far from the action? Im not an expert obv but wow the bag has been fumbled so badly and there seems to be 0 solution other than to leave  

[Economy 52,837]

22 hours ago, StarstruckIllusion said:

Why is it to hard to get immigrate a bunch of house builders or something? Ban single family units, maybe make a whole new city up north with high a speed rail connection to Toronto so people don’t feel like they’re far from the action? Im not an expert obv but wow the bag has been fumbled so badly and there seems to be 0 solution other than to leave  

One major argument getting made more and more (I am not an expert on the complicated laws so I cannot say if the arguments are true or not) is that Canada over the decades has little by little laywered the building codes with a very slow and beaurocratic process for approving housing and zoning laws are restrictive also and home builders keep complaining it slows them down too much and raises to total cost to build also because delays cost money. The Provinces own findings as they look into this also found duplicated processes that are having to be repeated for different levels of government

 

Apparently a typical condo in Toronto may take up to 10 years to go thru the complete approval then building process because it's so many stages of application and permits followed by delays in a yes or no answer from government

 

Canada did also apparently rank 34 out of 35 on competitiveness for building suggesting we do indeed have a very inneficient process to approve and then build something

 

Canada also has by far the lowest amount of housing Units in the G7  relative to population needing another 1.4 million units just to hit the average.

 

The counter argument being made now to this is that Canada's households are larger so we don't actually need as many units to population as other G7 Nations to which experts in turn respond that if housing is too expensive it will naturally result in bigger households in the first place as children are forced to stay with parents longer or single people having more room mates to afford the rent so bigger households in themselves don't prove we don't need more housing