Housing is one of the most expensive purchases most people will ever make. Are you saying everybody must be able to commit to that to have a place to live?
That’s an issue, but it’s not the whole issue. You’re not going to get a reasonable home down to the price of a budget vehicle. It’s not just home prices alone that have gone up over 60 years, it’s most essential goods combined with stagnating wages that means people need to spend a greater portion of their of their income on basic essentials and don’t have as much left to save for future big purchases.
Don’t get me wrong, homes need to be more affordable, but arbitrary reductionist ideas like let’s ban landlords don’t really work.
Some other ideas might be to increase minimum wages, yes this increases inflation but the people at the lower end of the wage scale still come out ahead. Have a crown corp for housing, even if it needs to be subsidized. Give people affordable and reasonable quality options and make private industry have to compete against that. Some better benefits for tradespeople, like lower the exemption on the trade tools tax credit to make construction more affordable. Though there’s a weird thing that happens where companies bring in big crews of apprentices for cheap labour and then lay-off the journeypeople so they don’t have to pay Journeyperson wages. I guess this keeps costs lower, but it’d be nice to see something combat this so there’s better job prospects for people that complete their apprenticeships.
You’re saying a large complex issue has many ways of tackling it to improve it? And that some random 3 paragraph response suggesting we improve the system by trying anything isn’t a full write up on the exact policy choices we should implement down to the letter of the law?
/s
Yes, obviously improving wages would help people afford things. Yes, helping construction workers improve their process would help make housing costs cheaper. There’s a thousand easy to implement ideas that would help the problem. ONE of those is “don’t treat housing like an investment vehicle akin to stocks”. Housing should be for housing, not for the wealthy to make a steady stream of income off of relatively poorer people. Landlords serve no function except for in a society where owning and trading homes is an expensive, slow, and bureaucratic process. Landlords are simply a means for money to transfer from the less wealthy to the more wealthy. They are an unnecessary cost that inflates the price of housing to the benefit of an extremely small number of people.
To be extremely clear, this is not the only solution. This may not even be a silver bullet. I am not listing the 1000 page legal proposal you can implement in your country tomorrow. My goal is to simply shift the common perception of landlords from “they totally have to exist and wow I love giving them money every month for absolutely nothing - boy owning things sure seems like a burden, thankfully I’ll never have to worry about that because I couldn’t afford to own something even if I wanted to” to “of course landlords are bad for society.” Or even “landlords are by and large capitalistic parasites that slow progress towards a more equitable society by draining people with less wealth of their means of becoming wealthy. Society doesn’t need them, even if you can think of reasons to have temporary housing there are better means than some rich person raising the rent every year on you.”
When you look at housing as a cash flow expenditure that most people pay in perpetuity the only defining factor being who’s name is on the mortgage the whole thing is criminal lol
I would argue that landlords provide a service in providing a relatively predictable monthly cost of housing. On any given month a homeowner(and/or landlord) could have anywhere from $0 to thousands of dollars of unexpected expenses, things like a major appliance failing or plumbing/electrical issue. Plus there’s intermittent expanses that can be planned for, things like replacing shingles or proactively replacing an appliance approaching its end of life.
It also seems like a market with relatively free competition, given that the cost of purchasing a rental property can be relatively low compared to opening another kind of business. It’s relatively low risk since most of the expense is an appreciable asset, but also relatively low return (historically and over an extended period) than other market investments. Many would actually come out ahead by renting their home and putting the equivalent of what would go to toward their home’s equity into something like a mutual fund.
I think the biggest issue is just lack of good options at the lower end of the housing market. So much new construction is above the average home pricing because that’s where the builders are able to make a reasonable return. The more affordable properties are usually older units, often with significant issues. The Canadian government seems to be on the right track to getting more affordable units built. We don’t need more 1500+ ft^2 units, we need more units in the 500-700 ft^2 range. Something that a single person or young couple with minimal possessions can use as a starter home to build equity. Even if it gets bought by someone to use as an investment property, it can still have a relatively affordable rent while still providing a landlord a reasonable return on their investment.
More affordable units also reduces demand for the currently available units, bringing down prices for the mid-range market as well.
Its a valid argument but discounted when the general public has a high enough financial literacy to budget for “unexpected” expected expenses it’s not really unexpected when you’re 25 year old roof leaks or your 10 year old water heater fails.
The idea that rental property is historically a safe investment is the mentality that reinforces the speculative inflationary cycle that real estate is experiencing. Housing as an investment instead of a basic right is a failure capitalism has burdened us with in the sense we can’t correct it properly without ruining the equity of every homeowner unwittingly complicit in ownership.
It’s true supply and demand cause inflationary pressure on property but it doesn’t include perspective on what drives the demand. Huge influxes of immigration to fill gaps in the labour market primarily exploited by companies offering minimum wage creating a class of workers doomed to be reliant on the rental market or pool resources to purchase a property… the amount of homes I see with multiple families or extended family or rooms rented in these communities is a whole different can of worms but that’s the point of the universal income rant it sounds good in a vacuum but there are too many variables that it doesn’t account for
Sure, but to some extent you could say the same about any necessity. Groceries, clothing, healthcare, etc… Then we could extend that to the things that are required for those necessities, transportion, natural resources, sections of the labour market, etc… Maybe housing does actually have a larger gap between input costs and market rate, and it’s probably the single largest expense for most and particularly those at the lower end of the income scale so it’s good place to start making changes.
If we trusted most people to manage their budgets we wouldn’t need things like EI and CPP, people would just be setting aside enough to cover that. People also need time to build those emergency or planned upgrade funds so telling someone who’s only been on their own to make sure they have enough se aside to cover a major repair isn’t very practical.
Agreed it is a huge bag of worms and financial literacy in the form of education is the only meaningful prescription.
Just important to acknowledge our systemic shortcomings rather than frame our situation as one where land lords add any real value to the equation. They profit off of other persons ignorance. Which is fine when that’s your choice and simplicity is valued but when it becomes the default because housing for an entire generation has been over levered and over financialized to the point it’s out of reach for most without a privileged start.
Sorry if my passion plays tone deaf I just can’t drink the business as usual coo-laid at this point 😅
Housing is one of the most expensive purchases most people will ever make. Are you saying everybody must be able to commit to that to have a place to live?
Imagine if owning a house was the same price as buying a car. That a loan was a 3 year ordeal not a 30.
60 years ago a janitor salary could buy a house in their 20s. Landlords only making house more expensive, not less - and exponentially so.
That’s an issue, but it’s not the whole issue. You’re not going to get a reasonable home down to the price of a budget vehicle. It’s not just home prices alone that have gone up over 60 years, it’s most essential goods combined with stagnating wages that means people need to spend a greater portion of their of their income on basic essentials and don’t have as much left to save for future big purchases.
Don’t get me wrong, homes need to be more affordable, but arbitrary reductionist ideas like let’s ban landlords don’t really work.
Some other ideas might be to increase minimum wages, yes this increases inflation but the people at the lower end of the wage scale still come out ahead. Have a crown corp for housing, even if it needs to be subsidized. Give people affordable and reasonable quality options and make private industry have to compete against that. Some better benefits for tradespeople, like lower the exemption on the trade tools tax credit to make construction more affordable. Though there’s a weird thing that happens where companies bring in big crews of apprentices for cheap labour and then lay-off the journeypeople so they don’t have to pay Journeyperson wages. I guess this keeps costs lower, but it’d be nice to see something combat this so there’s better job prospects for people that complete their apprenticeships.
You’re saying a large complex issue has many ways of tackling it to improve it? And that some random 3 paragraph response suggesting we improve the system by trying anything isn’t a full write up on the exact policy choices we should implement down to the letter of the law?
/s
Yes, obviously improving wages would help people afford things. Yes, helping construction workers improve their process would help make housing costs cheaper. There’s a thousand easy to implement ideas that would help the problem. ONE of those is “don’t treat housing like an investment vehicle akin to stocks”. Housing should be for housing, not for the wealthy to make a steady stream of income off of relatively poorer people. Landlords serve no function except for in a society where owning and trading homes is an expensive, slow, and bureaucratic process. Landlords are simply a means for money to transfer from the less wealthy to the more wealthy. They are an unnecessary cost that inflates the price of housing to the benefit of an extremely small number of people.
To be extremely clear, this is not the only solution. This may not even be a silver bullet. I am not listing the 1000 page legal proposal you can implement in your country tomorrow. My goal is to simply shift the common perception of landlords from “they totally have to exist and wow I love giving them money every month for absolutely nothing - boy owning things sure seems like a burden, thankfully I’ll never have to worry about that because I couldn’t afford to own something even if I wanted to” to “of course landlords are bad for society.” Or even “landlords are by and large capitalistic parasites that slow progress towards a more equitable society by draining people with less wealth of their means of becoming wealthy. Society doesn’t need them, even if you can think of reasons to have temporary housing there are better means than some rich person raising the rent every year on you.”
When you look at housing as a cash flow expenditure that most people pay in perpetuity the only defining factor being who’s name is on the mortgage the whole thing is criminal lol
I would argue that landlords provide a service in providing a relatively predictable monthly cost of housing. On any given month a homeowner(and/or landlord) could have anywhere from $0 to thousands of dollars of unexpected expenses, things like a major appliance failing or plumbing/electrical issue. Plus there’s intermittent expanses that can be planned for, things like replacing shingles or proactively replacing an appliance approaching its end of life.
It also seems like a market with relatively free competition, given that the cost of purchasing a rental property can be relatively low compared to opening another kind of business. It’s relatively low risk since most of the expense is an appreciable asset, but also relatively low return (historically and over an extended period) than other market investments. Many would actually come out ahead by renting their home and putting the equivalent of what would go to toward their home’s equity into something like a mutual fund.
I think the biggest issue is just lack of good options at the lower end of the housing market. So much new construction is above the average home pricing because that’s where the builders are able to make a reasonable return. The more affordable properties are usually older units, often with significant issues. The Canadian government seems to be on the right track to getting more affordable units built. We don’t need more 1500+ ft^2 units, we need more units in the 500-700 ft^2 range. Something that a single person or young couple with minimal possessions can use as a starter home to build equity. Even if it gets bought by someone to use as an investment property, it can still have a relatively affordable rent while still providing a landlord a reasonable return on their investment.
More affordable units also reduces demand for the currently available units, bringing down prices for the mid-range market as well.
Its a valid argument but discounted when the general public has a high enough financial literacy to budget for “unexpected” expected expenses it’s not really unexpected when you’re 25 year old roof leaks or your 10 year old water heater fails.
The idea that rental property is historically a safe investment is the mentality that reinforces the speculative inflationary cycle that real estate is experiencing. Housing as an investment instead of a basic right is a failure capitalism has burdened us with in the sense we can’t correct it properly without ruining the equity of every homeowner unwittingly complicit in ownership.
It’s true supply and demand cause inflationary pressure on property but it doesn’t include perspective on what drives the demand. Huge influxes of immigration to fill gaps in the labour market primarily exploited by companies offering minimum wage creating a class of workers doomed to be reliant on the rental market or pool resources to purchase a property… the amount of homes I see with multiple families or extended family or rooms rented in these communities is a whole different can of worms but that’s the point of the universal income rant it sounds good in a vacuum but there are too many variables that it doesn’t account for
Sure, but to some extent you could say the same about any necessity. Groceries, clothing, healthcare, etc… Then we could extend that to the things that are required for those necessities, transportion, natural resources, sections of the labour market, etc… Maybe housing does actually have a larger gap between input costs and market rate, and it’s probably the single largest expense for most and particularly those at the lower end of the income scale so it’s good place to start making changes.
If we trusted most people to manage their budgets we wouldn’t need things like EI and CPP, people would just be setting aside enough to cover that. People also need time to build those emergency or planned upgrade funds so telling someone who’s only been on their own to make sure they have enough se aside to cover a major repair isn’t very practical.
Agreed it is a huge bag of worms and financial literacy in the form of education is the only meaningful prescription.
Just important to acknowledge our systemic shortcomings rather than frame our situation as one where land lords add any real value to the equation. They profit off of other persons ignorance. Which is fine when that’s your choice and simplicity is valued but when it becomes the default because housing for an entire generation has been over levered and over financialized to the point it’s out of reach for most without a privileged start.
Sorry if my passion plays tone deaf I just can’t drink the business as usual coo-laid at this point 😅