this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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The government needs to step in and turn the CMHC into what it originally did: creating massive supply of cheap viable housing.
I don’t think the evidence is supporting a pure free market on rentals is working. Markets need to serve a human need, and in this case they’re failing.
Subsidies provide zero incentive, they just transfer public funds to REITs and investors.
I would be in favour of adding steep taxes and fixing the amount profit delivered to investors through REITs, which would cap investor demand for them and favour a long tail of owners.
Then they can give credits/exemptions for large buildings and new builds. And maybe introduce a home buyers plan where older buildings that REITs want out of can be purchased by the tenants with the government contributing a direct loan for the upfront costs, and having an accountant in the mix to ensure proper Strata funding after.
I don’t know, it just feels like we haven’t tried much of anything here.
You're absolutely correct in that. We've mostly just allowed for monopolies and oligopolies to take over industries in a way that only supports their bottom line.
This is one place where I think the free market could have worked, given enough time and sufficient enforcement to prevent this sort of conflict of interest, but the time for that was a decade or two ago. Now we need strong interventions by multiple levels of government to fix this problem.
Housing can't really be a free market for a number of reasons: captive market; regional market restrictions; and high barrier to entry, to name a few.