Rent is going up more than $100 a month right now — with the average asking price a record $2,117

Housing should be a human right, but now it's not even a utility; it's a luxury good for the wealthy that even the poor must find a way to afford.

Housing should be a human right
It is. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, of which Canada is party to, made it as such.
- Unfortunately the UDHR is not enforceable...

I am in a small Ontario town of 12,000 people. Covid caused many rich people from Toronto to come down here and buy up property so they could rent it. I was paying 1000$ for a 3 bedroom that was just built about 5 years ago. It was a nice place and a great price, owned by a guy my father in law works with. He never raised the rent since we moved in.

Some guy from Toronto shows up and buys the property. Instantly raises our rent to the maximum allowed limit. Then when we moved out last year, he listed the place for 2500$... Who the fuck can afford 2500$ rent in a small town that doesn't even have a fucking movie theatre.. Our biggest employers are a fucking warehouse and regional federal government office.

Something needs to be done about this shit. About all this investment property BS.
- The only thing that will truly fix it is to start building housing faster than the demand for new homes, which means developing denser housing. Unfortunately that will require changes to zoning rules in cities, and most cities are being run by people who benefit from the current system.
- I have very low faith because the people in power with lots of money probably own several properties and use them for either current monetary gain through rent, or retirement funds when they sell.

A reminder: rent is the purest form of supply/demand in the housing market. Nobody rents multiple units to sit on them the way people do to buy them. If prices are going up, that means vacancy is low and there just aren't enough units to rent compared to the number of people who are looking for a unit. Landlords hiking prices are hiking prices because somebody will pay that higher price.

The solution has to involve either building a crapload more units, or having less people who need housing (as always, Malthusians are invited to go first). Anybody who is proposing other approaches to this problem is either a con-man or an idiot. You cannot redistribute your way out of a shortage.

I need you in every housing thread I post here.
- I honestly try to be That Guy on this subject but I am getting tired of the swarm of downvotes from "well this is dumb we just need to do the simpler thing and abolish capitalism" contingent.
You cannot redistribute your way out of a shortage.
There are more empty buildings than homeless people. There are "investment properties" sitting empty all over.
The problem is the greed of the parasitic landlord class.
- There are more empty buildings than homeless people
  This is a myth. What "empty building" studies usually cover is buildings that have no usual occupant. That includes things like student houses where the occupants still have a "home address".
We don't need to build more investment and luxury homes. We need to focus on affordable housing.
- "We" - as in the government or the taxpayer - don't build investment or luxury homes at all. Private businesses build them. All they need is permission to build them.
  And they want to build them because there's demand for them. If you don't let them meet that demand, it will be met in a worse way: by rich people buying the homes of poor people and converting those into luxury investment housing. You can see that everywhere - flips, teardowns, gentrification, etc. That's what happens if you don't let enough new luxury housing get built: you think the luxury buyers are gonna stop buying?
  So to solve the housing crisis, 2 things need to happen:
  government needs to invest heavily in affordable housing and public construction infrastructure.
  government needs to get the hell out of the way of the private sector that will happily profit from stopping the bleeding.

My rent renewal offer was up $400.. to $2100 a month, for a shitty apartment.. there's a hole in the bathroom door where somebody punched through it and they couldn't be bothered to fix it.

Fuck u, peasants.

I think the answer is to just buy a mobile home with an arctic package. They finance them over 20 years. You can drive anywhere you want. If you are paying over 24k a year to rent, you will pay it off very quickly.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Although the pace of increase has come down ever so slightly, the price of rental accommodation in Canada continues to go up, with the average new tenant now being asked to pay $2,117 a month.

The ongoing tumult in the housing market has garnered numerous headlines of late, as the Bank of Canada's campaign to tame inflation has caused mortgage rates to skyrocket.

"Despite rental apartment completions in Canada over the past 12 months reaching their highest level since the 1970s, rent growth has remained exceptionally strong," the report said.

That comes as no surprise to Torontonian Cassandra Kranjec, who earlier this year begrudgingly agreed to a 14 per cent increase in her rent on a one-bedroom, one-bathroom condo in the Liberty Village neighbourhood.

While he says Canada's impressive population growth and surge in international students may pay off down the line for the economy, in the short term at least it is exacerbating an already acute housing shortage.

"People can jump on a plane this morning and arrive [in Canada] tonight, but we can't put a house on the production line today and have it ready by tomorrow — it takes us three or four or five years to do that."

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