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.
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.
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.
I believe the phenomenon of people buying houses "as an investment" is relatively new. People historically bought houses as places to live and have stability. They also happened to be a good investments but that wasn't their purpose. The change in primacy of purpose is pretty much a direct result of neoliberalization, which has been underway for decades since the post-WW2 era, but became much more normalized in the 70s/80s.
What I mean to say is that it's a current cultural trend, but hardly a law of the housing market. More problematically, if we make policy based on the assumption that people view houses as investments, it serves to reify that, rather than combat it.
I'd also be shocked if the market prices were primarily driven by your cited 65%. It's been a long time since our markets and policy-making machines have been primarily driven by the majority of the population. We are a democracy composed of powerful, minority (not speaking about racial groups but class groups) interests. Anyone blaming the 65% for our woes isn't paying enough attention to the absurd weight and influence exterted by only a handful of people and institutions.
I am someone with a life-long attachment to the island, and who is surrounded by homeowners both on and off of Cortes. They have seen their home prices go up by absurd percentages in the last 5 years, they all recognize it isn't right, they would not begrudge a market correction. Most people in my experience want everyone to live well and no one well-adjusted takes the "I got mine" attitude when it comes to housing. Meaning, a 20% drop in prices wouldn't cause them to lose their shit. Heck, they may even welcome it if it meant a thriving community. Money stuck in inflated property prices can't be invested in community, after all.
The problem isn’t that we don’t know what the problem is, when it started, or what caused it, the problem is that too many voters are invested in it to want to change it.
Hence why I don’t believe it will be changed until the problem gets worse (less owners means less people voting to keep these policies)
It really doesn’t matter if corps are exploiting or causing the increases, because the voters are driving the boat on the policies that keep pumping the market up.
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.
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.
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.
So I’m understanding you correctly then. Let’s do nothing and hope things get better on their own.
Thankfully, we don’t need to agree on this, but personally, I prefer taking active steps to resolving our problems instead of just sitting back and watching them get worse.
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.
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