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​Canada likely sitting on the largest housing bubble of all time: Strategist - BNN Bloomberg

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  • When I read stuff like this I often wonder why nothing is mentioned about Canada's lax laws on foreign ownership of multiple properties and failure to verify the legality of these owners' funds.

    Because that's what started this shit show in the 90's and nothing has been fixed.

    • There are foreign-ownership and vacant unit laws in all affected places in Canada AFAIK. They're basically self-reporting driven but they exist. The BC ones came first. They put a small dent in housing prices and then prices continued their upward march, and they did nothing at all for rent because the color of your landlord doesn't really change much.

      Any solution that doesn't involve constructing abundant housing is at best rearranging the deck chairs of the Titanic and at worst scapegoating.

      • Basically anything short of we’re going to expropriate land and build massive amounts of rgi’s and cooperatives will fix it on the supply side of the equation.

        We need to tackle the problem at the source and that’s housing being used as an investment vehicle by wealthy people and corporations as a means of wealth extraction from the working class. It’s completely choking the economy.

        • The problem is, for a neoliberal government, wealth extraction is the point. They'll look at the system and see it working as intended.

          On the flip side, massive build-outs of affordable housing is all downside: it doesn't make rich people the maximum amount of money, it requires wealth distribution downwards and there's little to no incentive to get private sector participation.

          I don't think people realize how much government has changed since ~1979 and ~1995, or how we have had two to three whole generations of politicians and civil servants who have gone their whole careers believing that government shovelling money at the private sector is the only way to do things.

          Here's a little thought experiment:

          • name me one institution implemented entirely with public funds since 1995. You can even go as far back as 1980, if you want. I'm an Ontarian, so something like GO Transit, the AGO, TVO, the Ontario Science Centre, Ontario Place, etc. The number is probably around zero.
          • Now, list all the entities sold off since then. The list is long, and contains some things you probably didn't realize, like Potash Corp, Air Canada, CN, Petro Canada and more. Think about how much money we'd have, how many services we'd still have, how much we'd be able to do about, eg, climate change if we had even a few of these.

          It's a real gut-punch to realize we sold our future to billionaries for pennies on the dollar, and now those same billionaires are squeezing us for more.

    • Look at our suburbs. They are immense. Immensely wasting the land for car parking and large road. We fucked up pretty 50years ago and now these are the consequences. Why the fuck do we need a parking lot for each building ? Before saying the investors are evil and all that shit, look how wasteful we are building our communities. The investors only got in the market because of the way we built our neighborhood. We wasted land, we made the house supply low and we got investors trying to make money with it. Preventing investors from buying houses is probably a good idea but is only a band aid that won't last.

      Stop wasting the land and this crisis is over.

106 comments