For all the flack the Liberals got for this, is this a political win? $100 million in yearly payments seems pretty good

oops. I can’t seem to change it. I’ll delete/repost.

My mistake thanks for the clarification.

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I can’t understand how people look at PP

If you’re the average Canadian and your rent has doubled or tripled, groceries have jumped 50%, and your health care system is collapsing in the last 8 years since Trudeau took power isn’t desperately wanting any alternative an obvious reaction? Many districts are effectively a two party race and if your only goal is to ensure Trudeau isn’t PM, the Cons are your only options.

I’m not saying Pollievre will make any meaningful difference, but at the very least he’s been saying our housing system is broken. Trudeau’s had 8 years and things have only become much worse.

You live in hell?

Knowing justin trudeau, some stern words with no action are the best we can hope for

Just building more doesn’t help. That will cause more urban sprawl and make everyone’s commute worse.

We have so much space to build within the confines of the greenbelt with density, and it doesn’t only have to be in large cities. We could easily build millions of more homes and not only would that ease our housing prices with more supply, but it creates more livable communities. Building denser means we’d reduce traffic because communities can scale transit/walkability/active infrastructure, it’d reduce tax burdens because we service smaller areas, it’d reduce noise/air pollution/traffic injuries with fewer vehicles, all while improving economic opportunities for local businesses.

This is a proven model we’ve been using for thousands of years, and only since the rise of the automobile has this shifted in the 20th century. It’s a no-brainer we should build homes it really is that simple.

And after paying all that money you still have to live in London 😔

Genuinely baffling take, our entire system prioritizes the homeowner above all else. Policies like a GST exemption are the smallest of crumbs in a world where it’s literally illegal to build an apartment building in 80% of the land in our largest cities.

Only looking at (taxpayer-funded) subsidies alone, homeowners get FHSAs, first time buyer tax credit, home buyer’s plan, tax-free imputed rent, unlimited capital gains exemption, and a slew of other provincial grants. This is all while they build equity! What do renters get in comparison?

Ignoring these hypothetical numbers, an abundance of housing means more options for renters. In this case the developers have to compete for our rental money. This means lower rents.

Housing is financialized because it’s a scarce commodity. Removing scarcity removes financialization.

An abundance of housing improves options and lowers rents.

I have no love for the Liberals but this is indisputably good policy for incentivizing rental supply. Gotta give credit where it’s due.

That is a 100% indisputably correct assumption. Vacancy taxes worked where they’ve been implemented to incentivize the occupancy of empty homes and the overwhelming majority of homes have people living in them.

I need you in every housing thread I post here.

The point of this article is we can and should make room in Toronto. There’s plenty of space if we accommodate with a better built form that isn’t sprawling detached homes.

“let’s tear down everything here that all the existing residents chose and replace it with something else that we think is more logical”.

This feels like a dishonest interpretation that misses a lot of the nuance presented in the article.

a) this is before Toronto instituted the empty homes tax - less incentive for homeowners to rent out their empty unit

b) this is before the explosion of rental price increases post-covid - even less incentive for homeowners to rent out their unit

c) measuring lights on or off a couple of times a year isn’t a great proxy for assessing empty units

Yeah sure. This is more a response to the top level comment (and the general sentiment) that empty units and financialization cause the scarcity, instead of just addressing the scarcity.

Subsidizing homeowners with a taxpayer-funded cheque for $500 is regressive policy for a leftist party. Even if we’re means-testing it, there’s so many better ways that money could be spent.

Once again, as a renter dealing with year over year increases of hundreds of dollars per month, I get nothing.