BlameThePeacock @ BlameThePeacock @lemmy.ca

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2 yr. ago

The trick to make this work is to tax the land value, rather than the property as a whole.

Rural area, land not worth a lot, fairly low tax. My rural property that I live in is about 20% land value, and 80% house value. Downtown core, land worth a lot, but then it gets divided by all the apartments in that building bringing it to a very low number. So you have a 40 million dollar plot of land, but there's 100 condos on it, which makes the land value about the same as above in terms of a percentage vs building value.

It's underutilized land that gets absolutely slammed. That empty nest couple who kept the 5 bedroom family home that's now inside the city boundaries and refuse to sell to let it be developed into condos. The 2-3 floor condo that was built 60 years ago right downtown, but really needs to be 10-15 floors at this point. Or the 1 story business in the core, sitting on a primary bus route or next to a bus exchange, that needs to be a condo building with commercial space on the bottom.

and yet if you go look at the charts for say Vancouver and Toronto over the same period of time you can clearly see there's little to no effect from BC's policy changes.

And it's still a couple million dollars to buy a detached home in Vancouver, and the cheapest 2 bedroom condo is a half million (and it's literally on East Hastings) with most normal 2 bedrooms being listed at $600-700k

These policies haven't made anything affordable, and they aren't going to make things affordable.

Or it just happened to coincide with a massive jump in interest rates which also affected prices elsewhere that didn't implement these policies.

I agree with you on the second part, but even allowing a single home still keeps housing as an investment/profit generator.

You have to actually do something to force every owner to lose(or at least never make) money. Hence my original suggestion to heavily tax homes and return that to citizens equally.

There are stabilizing benefits in some cases. Traditions can be valuable, even just for show.

It really wouldn't.

A) It prevents renting at all except for basement suites. So no more rental buildings, which make up the majority of rentals available. Renting is an important housing option, as not everyone wants to own, nor should they have to. Move to a city to go to university, and you have to buy a house just to live in for 2-4 years before you have to sell it to move elsewhere for a job? Have a job that requires you go somewhere else for a few months while you

<build a bridge>

<implement a new computer system>

<train some people>

B) If you do the math and even take out dedicated rental buildings, there really aren't that many homes that are owned as a second place. It's about 15% of the total market, and a large chunk of that are cottages and lake houses away from the cities where people actually want to live.

The big place/small place issue is actually more of a problem than the the double ownership you're talking about. There are more total bedrooms in Canada than there are people, and once you account for couples usually sharing a bedroom, there's actually a ton of extra bedrooms across the country. The problem is that they're not distributed properly across the population, 4+ bedroom family homes that were bought to raise children are being kept for decades by empty-nest couples who don't want to downsize.

And it should be obvious that despite new regulations being put in for Foreign buyers, Vacant units, and Airbnb, the prices haven't dropped to even pre-pandemic levels, let alone any useful amount, and they're expected to keep climbing this year.

These are all small red herrings that are easy PR wins for the government, but don't actually do anything useful to the prices.

I would say it's just someone who is bad at making posters. AI stuff doesn't tend to look like that.

I didn't vote liberal.

I voted NDP, but even they didn't have a plan to actually drop housing prices.

This is a red herring.

I ran the calculations a while back, that may free up 2-4% of all housing, that is not enough to fix the problem of expensive housing. That's only 1-2 years of new building stock.

It won't hurt to do it, but it's simply not the main reason real estate is expensive.

There are studies on that, but they're not super relevant because the appropriate amount of space is determined by how many people want to live somewhere, not based on the specific size.

People are willing to live in smaller places the closer they are to amenities. It's a gradient, not a single value even for each location.

I'll repeat again, I don't need a fucking tax cut. I need the price of housing to start going down.

Increase taxes on property significantly, and use 100% of that money to give everyone a basic income.

This incentivizes both people and developers to be efficient with their housing choices. Using too much housing for the area you live in? You pay extra to help out everyone. Using the right amount? No harm to you. Using less than the average? Here's a payout, thank you.

Prices overall will drop, because it's no longer profitable to simply own a home due to the taxes, and especially not if there's no people in it because the taxes won't be offset by the basic income.

This concept is simply false.

If my house price fell by 50%, I would owe more on my mortgage than the house is worth.

This would affect me negatively in multiple ways, not the least of which may mean me losing my home as the bank would not want to renew my mortgage.

I agree that housing prices need to fall, and actually by more than 50% but it needs to happen over time or it will literally crash the entire economy.

Even something as simple as suggesting "Hey, these figures are made in Vietnam instead of China, so they're lower cost right now" is political. It is, as you said unavoidable.

Other people had already responded with answers that fit the specific question prior to me responding. I was just adding an additional possibility to consider.

The problem is that they're actively impacting your ability to participate in many hobbies, or eating up funds on necessities that force you to forgo other things entirely. It's not that we're just repeating "tariffs bad" when talking about them, it's that they're actually factoring into decisions being made in order to live our life.

You're saying that people who are old can't learn or be taught how to use a modern communications tool. Who's really being ageist here?

My 70 year old father can handle most things on his cellphone with just a few minutes of someone walking him through it.

Also, as of 2023, only 10% of the world population is over 65, so between the fact that there aren't actually that many old people and some of them definitely CAN operate modern technology, it's a good solution for most situations.

The statistical chance of that being the case is very low, but in that case sure go find a way to call their landline.

For everyone else, they should try a modern communications tool.

Those are often right.

People frequently aren't asking the right questions because they are thinking inside a box that doesn't need to exist.

Sometimes there are legitimate reasons why these options don't work, but most of the time they are the superior choice.

Sure, but that's just a dumb way to do it when even in third world countries everyone is rocking at least a basic smartphone.