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Canada likely sitting on the largest housing bubble of all time: Strategist - BNN Bloomberg
(www.bnnbloomberg.ca)
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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:
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.