A remote Canadian island makes history in fight for affordable housing
A remote Canadian island makes history in fight for affordable housing
B.C.’s Cortes Island is making housing history as the first community in the province to tax short-term holiday rentals and have the funds directed to affordable housing projects, said Mark Vonesch, the area’s Strathcona Regional District director.
B.C.’s Cortes Island is making housing history as the first community in the province to tax short-term holiday rentals and have the funds directed to affordable housing projects, said Mark Vonesch, the area’s Strathcona Regional District director.
The median cost of a house on Cortes was $800,000 in 2022. Yet households with a median income would only be able to afford a home worth $207,000, a housing needs report last year showed.
Housing is unnecessarily expensive, regardless of efforts to create affordable ones.
Now if only those taxes ACTUALLY GO to affordable housing projects. Accountability in this area is simply abysmal.
Maybe once this fails people will start to realize that it's not short-term rentals driving the majority of the problem.
It's a great boogeyman/scapegoat because it is a little bit of the problem, while being a small enough group of people that they can be setup as bad ones without much repercussion. Unfortunately, It's not a significant portion of the actual problem. The actual problem is the majority of basic home owners, which if we were to actually deal with would vote the government out to save their own investments.
Explain. I've heard short term owners being the problem, and uber rich investment owners being the problem. Explain how long-term home owners who live in their houses year round are the problem.
I'm copying from my other reply:
The logic here is that the primary owner of houses in Canada is individual families, 65% of residential properties in this country are lived in by the owners. Go ask a home owner if they’d be willing to vote for a party that will intentionally drop the value of their house by 50%. We actually need closer to 70-80% reduction in some places to reach “affordable.”
How would homeowners react to even a 20% drop in prices? Poorly. Therefore the policies currently being proposed won't even do that much.
Homeowners bought houses as an investment. They expect a return. New buyers expect a return too despite high prices, which is the primary driver of current prices.
What do you propose we do then, especially as a first step measure? Right now it seems like you're arguing that doing nothing would be better. If we don't try any new measures, the problem won't just go away.
Build 3.5 million new housing units by 2030.
There's no politically acceptable option right now. We need the system to fail before enough voters will be willing to pass laws to benefit the majority.
Any steps we take in the meantime just extend the time to reach a viable solution. The viable solution is to remove any ability for property owners to profit off land value appreciation. They should only be able to profit off added value improvements (building, renovations, etc.)
Tyranny of the majority is a known problem with democracy. This is a perfect example of it in action.
Not being argumentative, what's the logic here?
The logic here is that the primary owner of houses in Canada is individual families, 65% of residential properties in this country are lived in by the owners. Go ask a home owner if they'd be willing to vote for a party that will intentionally drop the value of their house by 50%. We actually need closer to 70-80% reduction in some places to reach "affordable."
Any potential policy that reduces home prices enough to help will simply not be palatable to most of these voters, and given that this 65% is often older and more likely to vote it means that the majority of voters do not want actual policies to reduce housing prices.
Targeting Airbnb ignores the fact that Airbnb makes up a tiny percentage over the overall market, and thus doesn't have as significant effect as people believe.