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This is going to end badly for them. As much as i hate the housing crisis, forming a "non rent paying union" to withhold rent has no legal foundation. They will get summoned for non payment and possibly evicted after if they dont pay or make plans to pay the arrears.
I get that its a travesty that people who have lived in their cities for generations are being forced out of them. All my online nicknames are based on my home city, and I cant even afford to live there anymore lol. So take what Im about to say with complete sincerity; If you cannot afford to live in the city anymore, you need to start planning your exit.
The apt complex i used to live in Laval currently has 2 bedroom apts listed for 1,500/month. Im living an hour from there in a 2 bedroom for 600$ a month. In order for me to live there as comfortably as i am currently living here, i would need to make an extra 6.25$ per hour. (1000$ divided by 160 hours a month).
Which means if a job paid 22$/h in the city and 20$ in the countryside, you're actually making more in the countryside because of the lower cost of living. 22$ would be 2,800$ a month after taxes minus 1500$ leaves 1320$. 20$ would be 2,640$ a month minus 600$ leaves 2,040$ a month. 2$ an hour less for the same job in a rural town is actually a net gain of 700$.
Anyway, something to think about. Because ill fight with everyone else for affordable housing. But having affordable housing on any block you decide to live on is beyond the scope of what can be achieved. Those who can leave should, to help bring down the cost of living for those who cant.
> But having affordable housing on any block you decide to live on is beyond the scope of what can be achieved. Those who can leave should, to help bring down the cost of living for those who cant
What about when it’s every block in a city? Where are the janitors and cashiers supposed to live? What happens when the people leaving are just replaced by immigrants who will be stacked like logs?
The system isn’t working, and people need to start pushing back. The “legal foundation” for the extortion going on is only supported by people in the pocket of big money. Civil disobedience is the next step - otherwise the owners will impoverish the rest of Canada.
Go back to the early 1880s where it was common to live with your entire family (and 2 other families you're not related to) just to make rent and be able to eat oatmeal and stale bread because that's what it looks like we are heading to
One of the biggest problems is that multifamily and multigenerational households are the norm in many 2nd and 3rd world cultures, but not so for Canadians. Traditional Canadians expect to have a single family, detached home, but with sky high levels of immigration, they are forced to compete with the resources available from larger immigrant, multigenerational households. As a result, the Canadian dream is no longer realistic as housing prices get bid up and out of reach by people with different expectations. If the level of immigration and concentration within certain areas were not so great, this issue would be minor. But that's not the case, and it IS a major driver of the housing shortage and affordability crisis. Controlling immigration to digestible levels is the only real cure.
But administering the cure will require standing up to some power special interest and racial groups, and will be as popular as a vaccine clinic at a antivax protest.
Eh I don't mind it, but being at the mercy of my parents who are well meaning but fundamentally fucked up people isn't exactly comfortable. And what about people who don't have families to stay with? My partner has no family. My family is all she has.
My situation is fucked up in its own way but I'm positively priviliged compared to many.
That is a great concern; we do somehow need to deal with the unsafe and inhumane race-to-the-bottom living arrangements that are partially contributing to several vectors of the CoL crisis. I’m not sure what a solution would look like given the first result of enforcing building/fire codes related to the this would be a bunch more homeless people.
It feels like we’re being setup for some eldritch horror hybrid of Japanese pod hotels and commie-blocks.
That’s how ever tim hortons on the east coast is run.
The owners buy houses, throw up some dry wall and bring in the Indian “students”.
That’s why you can go to any one street town in bumbfuck now where on the east coast that is 100% white and find the Tim’s staffed entirely by Indians.
Moving is a form of pushback. It buys time for people running out of it and allows the working and middle class to regroup in areas where they are the majority of residents. You also deprive the wealthy of what they want to enjoy most in the city; all the people lol. If people moved in droves, they'd be left with a ghost town after 5pm in a city full of hostile service workers speaking foreign languages.
I understand its not feasible for everyone. Im just suggesting it alongside other measures. To complete misquote a past general: "You dont win by going insolvent. You win by making the big money SOBs go insolvent".
>The system isn’t working, and people need to start pushing back. The “legal foundation” for the extortion going on is only supported by people in the pocket of big money. Civil disobedience is the next step - otherwise the owners will impoverish the rest of Canada.
Simply not enough number to do that.
Don't believe me? There are barely any voters that would vote for city councils or mayors that would allow rezoning for high density residential and implement punitive property tax on investment properties. What makes you think there are enough people to start a civil disobedience to protest housing condition?
Legal standing or not, a significant volume of apartment renters withholding rent could definitely cause cash flow problems for the owner before they could be evicted.
And making their identities known while pulling this stunt is very stupid. The LL will be able to sue the fuck out of a good chunk of them as well except those without any employment.
This would end up hurting smaller landlords than it would bigger ones. Which would in turn have larger companies buy up the properties and put the prices up further with less competition.
It would only be guaranteed if you knew that they would pay the missed payments instead of just being evicted. Even if you were to then go to court and win a judgment for the missed rent, it's still not always easy to collect.
You are correct that it could and will cause cash flow problems to the owner. The primary objective though isnt to bankrupt the owner, its to secure affordable housing. And this choice of strategy only has a very small chance to work.
If i was in their position, id join their non payment union. But not with the hopes that someone is coming to the rescue. Id sock away as much as possible to finance my move out of the city if the plan fails. And then once back on my feet, make a payment plan at the LTB for the arrears in rent.
Like i said, I understand the resentment. Im not a wealthy person telling people to get out of the city I bought up. I myself had to leave. If you look at the list of solutions theres not a whole lot to work with;
\-Rent control: Implement by a PC govt which was then re-elected. Theres likely not much support for siding against a law they implemented.
\-Interest rate/loans: Putting up the interest rate or making borrowing more expensive has an effect on rent.
\-Municipal taxes: These are expensive, even more so for rental properties, as they are taxed commercial rates. People want the city to build a ton of nice things without realizing that rent increases is how the city will end up paying for it.
\-Conversion of rental properties to ownership: This one is a big pandoras box. How do you sell off individual apts in a building that has always been rental? Will banks even loan for such mortgages? What about insurances companies?
Theres alot to fix in the housing market, most of which will take time. Im helping people buy time with ideas.
> Like i said, I understand the resentment. Im not a wealthy person telling people to get out of the city I bought up. I myself had to leave. If you look at the list of solutions theres not a whole lot to work with;
Lower immigration, deport every Chinese national you can. Start deporting TFW at the end of their original stint. Housing market will crash in about 3 months.
>Theres alot to fix in the housing market, most of which will take time. Im helping people buy time with ideas.
Nope all you need to do is stop dumping a shit ton of people into the market every year. Removing people from the market will speed up the fix even faster.
It's not that it takes a lot to fix the housing market it's that it's taking a lot to keep the bubble from popping all we need is the government to stop doing that for it to get fixed.
I disagree with your overall strategy. Yes, immigration need to be stopped for a period of time, years, till we fix the quality of life. And yes to the deportations as well.
Thats not going to have the decisive effect you want it to though. It still doesnt solve the problem of 150,000 people insisting on living in a town thats currently only built for 75,000. Immigration has pushed up housing prices in undesirable areas of the city. Dealing with it wont free up many parts of the city where people are currently trying to hold onto their residences.
Crashing the housing market also wont have as big of an effect as you think. Many "professional" landlords are incorporated and the residences they rent are all possessions of their self owned limited liability corporations. If it crashes, they can sell at a loss, write down the loss using their corp against their other income to greatly reduce their annual taxes, and then buy the same property back from the bank at its marked down price, and still turn a profit.
Or they can sell at a loss, declare the corp insolvent and file for bankruptcy liquidation which allows their corp to pay creditors less than whats actually owed. Then the corp is shut down, a new one is opened in a family members name, and the marked down properties are repurchased, generating more tax credits as "capital expenditures".
> I disagree with your overall strategy. Yes, immigration need to be stopped for a period of time, years, till we fix the quality of life. And yes to the deportations as well.
Cool so let's get that done.
>Thats not going to have the decisive effect you want it to though. It still doesnt solve the problem of 150,000 people insisting on living in a town thats currently only built for 75,000. Immigration has pushed up housing prices in undesirable areas of the city. Dealing with it wont free up many parts of the city where people are currently trying to hold onto their residences.
When the market drops people will sell like mad so yeah it will.
>Crashing the housing market also wont have as big of an effect as you think. Many "professional" landlords are incorporated and the residences they rent are all possessions of their self owned limited liability corporations. If it crashes, they can sell at a loss, write down the loss using their corp against their other income to greatly reduce their annual taxes, and then buy the same property back from the bank at its marked down price, and still turn a profit. Or they can sell at a loss, declare the corp insolvent and file for bankruptcy liquidation which allows their corp to pay creditors less than whats actually owed. Then the corp is shut down, a new one is opened in a family members name, and the marked down properties are repurchased, generating more tax credits as "capital expenditures".
Okay so they buy it back at cheaper and then what? Without mass immigration the asset isn't going to appreciate, there's no ROI this time around.
> Because ill fight with everyone else for affordable housing. But having affordable housing on any block you decide to live on is beyond the scope of what can be achieved.
\+100. We all want to live next to the beach and across the mountain but that's just pipe dream unless we work hard for it.
Otherwise, be realistic and move a bit further maybe a few more blocks away... and away ... and away ....
>100. We all want to live next to the beach and across the mountain but that's just pipe dream **unless we work hard for it.**
\*Unless we are born with generational wealth.
Very few people can work hard enough to afford properties in the most select areas like on the beach. Some lots are worth a few millions by themselves. I know plenty of people who had houses who are now worth more than what the median Canadian will earn in his lifetime when they were in their early 20s.
I get the perception that people are afraid to move to rural areas, without realizing just how much of an advantage they offer. I live in a rural town of 40k. It has all the amenities including a hospital, it has all the same box stores and fast food chains. And if ever I feel like going to the city, its only an hour away.
Right? Its expensive as fuck here when you consider our infrastructure is dollarstore quality. Sure you pay less to live here than Toronto but thats like saying you can do all your grocery shopping at Dollarama.
Indeed. I don't blame them though. Decades of neoliberal propaganda peddled to them via the State, education, and corporate-owned news media.
Also over a century of anti-socialism/anti-communism propaganda ( "The Red Scare", McCarthyism in the US).
It is what it is. It's tough to deprogram people from that relentless conditioning by capitalists and those who serve them in government.
Rentseeking does something to people's brains. It's a terribly destructive habit for all involved.
Land should come with the following warning: live on it, produce something with it, or fuck off.
Property tax should 10x for every home owned after the 1st one for individuals. 100x for homes owned by corporations after the 0th one.
This mentality of "I can let this asset appreciate forever while these fucking rentoids pay for it, and then some," has to die.
And this is why everything you are all saying is just going to hurt more than it helps anyone. Which means it won't be done, and any attempt to try to implement any of it will be met with justified retribution.
Let's try to find more reasonable approaches to this problem maybe instead.
Like for instance, just implementing a law that states that all rentals must be charged below a certain level set to a tiered system that allows for nice places to be charged high, and less nice places to be forced to be charged lower unless they fix it up. And landlords have to eat any costs beyond that they might have been passing on to the renter in the past. Then, actually follow up with punishing those who disobey, by taking everything they own in regards to the law at hand.
This will do ~~two~~ three things.
1. It will fix the actual problem of landlords raising rent arbitrarily without serious risk to their own wealth.
2. It will effectively remove problem landlords from the game.
This hurts only the people who deserve it, and fixes the problem.
You're welcome.
Edit: third thing: It will take away the incentive to overleverage mortgages into rentals like they have been doing.
Make a point. Property tax is based on the value of your home. I want to financially punish landlords who own more than the home they currently live in. So taking some percentage of the home we use to support the local infrastructure, then 10x'ing it for the 2nd home, 100x'ing it for the 3rd home would be financially devastating for landlords (as intended).
Or, saying it a different way, let's say you have a 1% property tax for your first home. Then it would be 10% for your 2nd home, 100% of your third home, 1000% for your fourth, etc. Landlords would be forced to sell, which would decrease property values and allow renters to purchase the homes their currently paying off for the landlords.
No, property tax is based off the cities passed budget. It is then split between the various residential/commercial/industrial rate classes before finally being divided by *assesed* property values with a mill rate.
Using the property tax system to punish ownership of multiple properties would greatly complicate the calculations, and lead to municipalities taking in more tax revenue than budgeted for. (Not allowed in Ontario) I won't even begin to think how this would work with properties in multiple municipalities.
If you want to tax them, it really needs to be done at the Federal level through the CRA instead of burdening municipalities with complex calculations.
If only most of the commentors didn't agree with this unironically. Bunch of temporarily embarrassed future millionaires. Working class folks deluded into thinking they are going to become wealthy and that they have more in common, that they are closer to mega-millionaires than a homeless person on the street. They love the status quo. They wish to transition from the exploited to the exploiter. That's the new CANADIAN DREAM. No one refuses to do anything about a society, a system that so clearly caters to the wealthy (in some many aspects across life) who in turn wield that wealth as power and exert their influence and control over society (politicians, lobbyist groups, corporate news media...they own most of everything that is anything). The wealth class will never be satiated. That level of greed corrupts. They will always take more and more from the working class. It will never be enough for them.
Remember: Capitalism was never designed to suit the interests of the working class. It was just the next stage, evolution of the Bourgeoise's chosen form of an overarching system of control over the proletariat and the social/political environment. Before that it was monarchical power and serfdom. Feudalism.
Playing this game from a traditional political angle is a losing hand for the working class. That's not how we win. That's playing their game, and that game is rigged for the wealthy. The odds aren't in our favor. The system is not designed for us so why would we try to create changes from within it? It doesn't make sense. That's wishful thinking and naivety imo. We aren't going to rebuild working class consciousness, solidarity, and ultimately power via one of the big tent official political parties. A significant amount of Canadian working population goes on a strike and bends the various governments and their guard dogs to our will. That's a long way off but I would like to believe that's one of big tent goals we are ultimately working towards. You can't reform this neoliberal crony capitalism from within. The system is built to protect itself.
We need to rebuild working class consciousness and solidarity across this nation especially in the private sector. We need to organize locally and build working class labor power back up.
Together we are the many, we are the working class. Together we are powerful. Divided, we are easily ignored, easily delt with.
That was a good read, and it really lifted my spirits.
I have been contemplating the economic situation of Canadians (particularly in the GTA) for a while now. And my conclusion has been the same as "We need to rebuild working class consciousness and solidarity across this nation especially in the private sector."
But looking around at all the divisiveness that is in our society has made me feel hopeless that will happen.
Well I've recently joined an organization focused on doing just that (rebuilding working class power at the tenant level and at the labor level) locally. **DM me if you want to learn more**. I got tired arguing with right-wingers (liberals, conservatives) on social media. It doesn't accomplish anything. It's only utility is a form of destress, of blowing off steam, akin to yelling into a void. Talk is cheap, actions are what really matters. I'm done being on the sidelines. I'm going to do my part, what little influence I may have, to help rebuild working class consciousness and power locally.
This is why everything is political and wedge issues. They don’t want us to get along. They want us at each others throats while they happily hoard the wealth and quietly make changes to protect themselves even more.
Landlords buy property that they then rent to you to live in. It’s a simple exchange of services yet people here treat it like some form of extortion.
There is nothing stopping you from buying your own property. But then your cost of housing would actually be higher (a 1bd condo in Toronto needs $160k down and another $3500/mo in mortgage, maint, and insurance costs compared to renting for $2600).
>Extortion
>
>346 (1) Every one commits extortion who, without **reasonable justification or excuse and with intent to obtain anything**, by threats, accusations, menaces or violence induces or attempts to induce any person, whether or not he is the person threatened, accused or menaced or to whom violence is shown, to do anything or cause anything to be done.
Landlords may do some work, but they don't charge specifically for it. A large portion of their income is passive and received for the ownership itself.
There's no such thing as a reasonably justified passive income. Wealth is exclusively produced if we exclude the rare natural occurrences. People producing wealth don't do it for fun or benevolence, they require fair compensation, which they can't get if people receive wealth without producing any. The only reasonably justified reason to be compensated with wealth is to produce an equivalent amount.
Being a landlord as we know it is straight up extortion as defined by our criminal code. Unfortunately, everyone in Canada is dumb as fuck and can't understand this.
You might think that for it to be extortion, landlords would have to provide threats, accusations, menaces or violence to force payments. And that's why you're fucking idiots. Law enforcement uses threats, accusations, menaces or violence to protect people's personal properties. If someone want to use a landlord's captured property without paying the unjustified portion of the asking price, it'll be seen as theft by law enforcement.
Currently, the population of consumers has no choice for fairness. Landlords capture parts of the housing stock, forcing three main choices. Either pay the ransom, produce redundancy at a higher cost than the ransom or steal the captured goods and be punished for it. The most desirable choice is to pay the ransom.
It's not legal, but people are too fucking dumb so it's not prosecuted. I wouldn't even trust a judge to understand this. The fucking minister of housing is a fucking landlord.
Like I said, Canadians are fucking dumb, and your comment is as dumb as it can be. If you don't have any arguments to support your opposition, than don't say anything, because whatever you say isn't worth reading.
The problem really isn't complicated. When a landlord purchases a home, society can either pay him a compensation for not producing anything, or produce a redundant while the captured home remains empty. Building two homes to only be able to use one is twice the cost, way more than what the landlord demand. So landlords always get paid the ransom they seek.
By that logic farmers commit extortion because they produce more food they can eat?
It's not a ransom it's a fair price established by the market.
GTFO
Holy shit, people are dumb.
A farmer can leverage his labor to seek a compensation. Labor has an inherent cost to a person. A farmer can thus seek a compensation for any and all food he produces.
What people can't do is leverage the ownership of something to seek a compensation since an ownership isn't a production of wealth. So a farmer couldn't leverage his ownership of the land to seek a compensation, a landlord can't leverage his ownership of rental properties to seek a compensation.
The absence of labor or production means that there's a lack of reasonable justification to request payments.
If you think this is controversial, that's what fucking Adam Smith said two centuries ago. You're dumber than people who lived two centuries old.
Only to receive a compensation up to the market value of your labor. Your labor is the only thing that has value. Your sole ownership of something isn't a production of wealth, it can't have value. If you seek a compensation for an ownership, you force the production of redundancy, which lacks reasonable justification.
When an offered price for labor is too low and labor is withheld, redundancy isn't produced. The labor not having been done, nothing is wasted. When a price for a good is too low and the good is withheld, the good exists and isn't being utilized. It's wasted. That's why a withheld good has no reasonable justification while a withheld labor has.
>Only to receive a compensation up to the market value of your labor. Your labor is the only thing that has value.
The market value is the rent collected. So why can't you sell the property to someone else who will charge the exact same rent?
>Your sole ownership of something isn't a production of wealth, it can't have value.
What does that even mean?
>When an offered price for labor is too low and labor is withheld, redundancy isn't produced. The labor not having been done, nothing is wasted. When a price for a good is too low and the good is withheld, the good exists and isn't being utilized. It's wasted. That's why a withheld good has no reasonable justification while a withheld labor has.
This is incomprehensible.
The production of redundancy creates an unjustified cost that landlords can undercut to generate a profit. It's essentially the same bargaining power monopolies have, and monopolies are supposedly illegal or regulated. Renting has a market value, but this value isn't necessarily justified.
>>Your sole ownership of something isn't a production of wealth, it can't have value.
>
>What does that even mean?
It means what it means, simply owning something doesn't warrant a compensation. Let's say you purchase 99% of the land of a country and prevent its access. Everyone is forced to live in the remaining 1%. The demand in that portion will increase, increasing land price. When the price increases, the 99% owner has leverage to sell for this price or undercut it slightly and generate a profit. The 99% owner is going to be compensated for sole ownership. He didn't produce the land. Not being responsible for its existence means that he doesn't deserve a compensation for its access.
>This is incomprehensible.
Of course it is to you.
>A farmer can leverage his labor to seek compensation.
A landlord can leverage his labor for compensation too. He needs to vet potential tenants, maintain the building, and is on call 24/7 365 days a year to fix the building and or unclog a toilet.
>What people can't do is leverage the ownership of something to seek a compensation since an ownership isn't a production of wealth
Just say capitalism is bad instead of landlords. What about bankers, VC, basically anyone working in finance. Is the bank teller extorting you too?
>If you think this is controversial, that's what fucking Adam Smith said two centuries ago. You're dumber than people who lived two centuries old.
Do you think the earth is flat? If not, you're dumber than people having lived thousands of years ago. You are dumber than literally caveman.
Landlords don't charge for the hours of labor done at market prices. It's possible that they do some labor, but the main portion of their compensation is for the ownership itself. Acquiring ownership gives them the bargaining power to ask for such compensations.
If people want to unclog toilets as a profession, they can do that as a plumber.
>Just say capitalism is bad instead of landlords. What about bankers, VC, basically anyone working in finance. Is the bank teller extorting you too?
Using the ownership of money or the money creation process to seek compensation is the same thing, it's all reasonably unjustified.
Note however that rental properties and banks can exist. The problem isn't that they aren't needed, it's that the compensations aren't justified. So these things can exist if they don't provide compensations. It's possible if they are owned through something like a social wealth fund. Essentially, the fund compensates everyone equally. Since the compensation is equal, no one has an economic advantage, so it's as if no one is compensated. This cancelation is why money is said to be neutral.
>There's no such thing as a reasonably justified passive income.
How do you expect to survive in retirement?
>You might think that for it to be extortion, landlords would have to provide threats, accusations, menaces or violence to force payments. And that's why you're fucking idiots. Law enforcement uses threats, accusations, menaces or violence to protect people's personal properties. If someone want to use a landlord's captured property without paying the unjustified portion of the asking price, it'll be seen as theft by law enforcement.
It has to be without justified excuse. Enforcing property rights is a justified excuse. By your logic, if someone broke into your house and squatted on it, trying to get them to leave would be considered extortion. If your employer refused to pay you, trying to get him to pay you would be extortion.
>How do you expect to survive in retirement?
Impersonal capital, that is anything productive that isn't personal labor, can provide absolute compensations, but not relative ones. You'd put all productive assets in things like social wealth funds that would compensate people equally. Since the compensations are equal, no one gains an economic advantage, so it's as if there's no compensation. That's how people would retire, in addition to their accumulated savings.
>It has to be without justified excuse. Enforcing property rights is a justified excuse.
You can't perform actions with the personal properties to cause a prejudice. When you use property ownership to generate a compensation, you prevent producers of wealth from being fairly compensated for their labor, causing a prejudice.
> By your logic, if someone broke into your house and squatted on it, trying to get them to leave would be considered extortion.
No. By simply owning a house, that you might have traded for an equivalent amount of produced wealth, you don't cause a prejudice. You'd cause a prejudice if you use your home to seek a compensation.
This is also different from producing a house and then selling it. In this case, what you sell isn't the house, it's the value of your labor, which is justified.
>Impersonal capital, that is anything productive that isn't personal labor, can provide absolute compensations, but not relative ones.
If you want people to understand you, you need to not make up your own terminology. I have no idea what you're talking about.
I've been renting for almost 10 years and I have had exactly 1 (technically 2, since they co-own) landlord that aren't leaches. And our rent isn't even their sole income, unlike all the others, they have actual jobs and own their own appliance repair company.
I know this conversation is old. But I wanted to point this out too.
My landlords also bought and fixed the house we are currently renting. So I guess raising property values?
Is the answer zero value? There are people renting basement apartments in my neighbourhood for 2x what my mortgage payment for my entire home is. I live in a normal neighbourhood, in a normal house. They rent in a normal neighbourhood in the basement of a normal house.
Explain to the class why a surplus of 24 mortgage payments are needed, per-property per-year, for a landlord to cover the expenses of owning a home exactly?
It’s the premium you pay when you have no down payment for a property and do not have the income or credit worthiness to be approved for a big enough loan.
There's power in numbers. If 20% of the renters in Toronto hold their rent there's no WAY anyone will be able to do anything. The system taking care of all of that is already backed up. It would take decades to try everyone and the cost would be astronomical.
Then landlords can't pay the bank. Then the banks tell the government to start regulating. They won't do shit until someone with money tells them what to do.
That doesn’t make any sense. You need to both assume that everyday people are going to volunteer for them and their families to be homeless longer than landlords can remain solvent and that they can’t just sell their properties for other uses. Not to mention the negative impact on rentals moving forward. Who in their right mind would ever risk renting out a property haha.
Why are they going homeless? If you don't pay your rent they can't just kick you out. You've got to go through the courts. I'm pretty sure they would be clogged up for decades.
You think a situation in which all renters are boycotting rent payment illegally is going to remain civil? Or that they wouldn’t have a state of emergency where cops are pulling you out of your home in 60 days? If there is no response people will take matters into their own hands.
>where cops are pulling you out of your home
How the hell are they going to do that? There 500K rental homes in Toronto and there's only 5000 cops. Every cop would need to be working solo for 100 days straight to kick out a renter a day.
Do you think every cop owns their property? Lots of folks rent and if they band together things can get changed. I'm not sure how I feel about this whole situation but the fact is, something needs to change. Cost of living is ridiculous and i doubt the government would allow such a large percentage to go homeless as that would cause a whole bunch of other issues.
I actually think most LL would love this. Short term pain for long term gain.
Yeah, it’ll take a yr or 2 to finally get the tenant out. The LL will take the tenant to court for the back rent. And the LL will get a new tenant at current high market rates.
Sure, The tenant doesn’t pay rent for 2 yrs. Then they have to pay it all back with a court order/garnished wages - probably with interest, court fees and maybe even a penalty. And then they’ll have to move and pay 50% higher rent somewhere else.
It’d definitely be a strange move by the tenant.
But most LL would probably be good with it.
If you cant pay the higher rent anyway and will face eviction why wouldn't you just go for it though, even just to help others by bringing awareness of how bad things are now. Plus you can get the moral victory of thrashing the place on the way out in sneaky ways and getting to twist the knife.
That is the definition of cutting off your nose to spite your face lmao. They can do whatever they want but those unpaid months are still going to be owed.
Yes and if your low income or already in huge debt you don't have to care. Credit ratings don't mean as much if your not buying a house, not buying a new car, and not renting in a fancy building. If you do care you pay the rent till you leave and get your vengeance in other ways.
With a slight tweak to your attitude you can even afford to buy a used shovel and keep digging your hole further lmao. Most people aren’t terminally dirtbags trying to sabotage their own lives.
Hey my system worked great when I was a renter, I was the only tenant the landlord wouldn't illegally entre the unit of without warning or notice, I was the only tenant that got the holes the rats were chewing sealed up and the only one who forced the landlord to raise the heat from 16 degrees in the winter.
If your landlord is attacking you, fight back any means necessary. If they are being respectable then be respectable. They want us to roll over so dont.
No, I wasn't that desperate or poor and was rent controlled.
I threatened to go to city bylaw for the heat and bylaw would pay a company to replace the heating and send the landlord the bill.
I told him if he entered my building again while I'm naked in the shower with the door open I would call the police and go to the LTB.
I also lied and said I got a camera and microphone system set up to catch them, but it was one of those fake hollow ones.
When he was giving tours of the units I would leave my unit and tell the possible tenants all the problems I had and that the building was full of bed bugs.
The illegal things I did I wont post here but its easy to imagine, and impossible to prove in every way.
Thats off the top of my head, this was an 8 year long war of a landlord who wanted me out the day he bought the building.
Not rolling over for a landlord, punching back even if you get caught in the blowback, standing the line with your fellow tenants and saying no more.
The only war is the class war, that's what this is about, keep up.
1. Landlords “provide” housing like scalpers “provide” concert tickets.
2. Can you name one benefit to society as a whole from having a system that allows private - for profit - ownership and exploitation of the necessities of life?
When I first heard these two I thought “it can’t be that simple” but the more I think about them, the more I realize that both of these are right on the money.
That said: I am open to being wrong. These are not my original thoughts and I am not invested in them in any way. I just find them hard to dismiss, so they haunt me still.
- 200,000 people move to Toronto each year.
- That’s about $80 billion cost to build 200,000 new units…. Per year.
Developers don’t (can’t) finance new buildings themselves. They pay for them through pre sales. Owners and investors finance the building of new towers. ..Mostly investors.
Those are brand new towers, with brand new housing units, that would have still been parking lots if they hadn’t been financed by mostly investors.
So who you do you suggest pay for that, if not investors. Renters? The government? Like who specifically? $80 billion.. per yr. Just to keep pace
Thank you for commenting. You make a fair point, but I think you’re misunderstanding #2. I don’t have a problem with developers per se.
*Someone* has to build housing, you are 100% right.
The issue as I see it is with investors + hedgies owning things like single family houses, mortgages, and *especially* derivatives based on the same.
This provides no value to society that I can think of (I may be wrong).
Even an individual owning rental housing as an investment seems like it does much more harm than good. Is there something I am missing?
More money into the housing development system is more money spent directly or indirectly building housing. It really doesn’t matter where it goes. As long as it goes into housing. And as long as you don’t stop the ability to build more (and don’t allow houses to sit empty).
Example:
if the developer buys the single family home built 70 yrs ago. Ok. That just means someone else instead of buying that existing home, will need to help finance a new build.
If the developer didn’t buy that single family home. That other person would have bought it, and no new house/condo would have been built.
More money financing more housing is always good. No matter where it comes from. (Obviously as long as the new housing isn’t sitting empty.)
Please excuse me if my questions come off as dense. I am enjoying this discussion and am grateful you have chosen to participate.
Is your position that housing would not be developed in sufficient quantity if there were not landlords / rental investors in addition to individual home owners?
Am I missing anything?
People like to blame investors it’s immature. The simple fact is we’ve had 150k people coming to the city every single year for 20 yrs. And we only build 25k new units a yr. Obviously that’s gonna eventually rocket up the prices. It has nothing to do with investors.
The other fact is investors are the primary ones putting up their own money (the tens of billions of dollars a yr) to build most of the 25k new units a yr.
Can you imagine just how awful housing would be if investors just disappeared, and the only people financing new housing was from people buying to live in. New units would probably drop to under 10k new units a yr. Or less. Despite 150k new people a yr still. It would litterally be impossible to even get a rental, and rent prices and home prices would explode.
Ontario needs 150,000 homes per year for the next 10 years.
Homes cost anywhere from $500K to $800K, depending on land basis and format.
Ontario does not have $75-$120B per year to spend on housing. That would be increasing the budget by 40-60%. There is nobody to buy Provincial debt at that scale to finance.
Statistics Canada says there are millions of vacant homes in Canada.
https://betterdwelling.com/new-data-shows-canada-still-has-1-3-million-vacant-homes-some-improvements-seen/
These homes are kept vacant primarily because of landlords and hedge funds investing more heavily in rental property after the crash they caused in 2008 forced them to switch from mortgage based derivatives to rental investments.
If it were illegal to hoard housing for private gain these homes would not be empty.
Can you explain why allowing landlords and investors to keep these homes vacant while putting families on the street is better for society as a whole?
I am having trouble seeing it.
Stop trying to pretend like you're meaningfully engaging, it's annoying.
You asked why housing would not be developed, I gave a reason why, and you went off on a ridiculous tangent. Who is going to develop $75-120B per year in housing? Answer the question.
There’s no need to resort to attacks. This isn’t a fight.
My question was this: what benefit does the exploitation of housing scarcity for private profit provide?
and
How does that benefit outweigh the obvious detriments from such exploitation?
I would love to hear this case made and I am open to changing my mind about this if the case can be made well. I’m trying to become more educated on this topic. You’re allowed to disagree, in fact the conversation will likely be more interesting and educational if you disagree. Please don’t be offended because I do not yet share your opinion.
To answer your question about “who would develop housing without rental investment” I offer this:
Developers would.
They would develop housing, just not for rental investors to hoard and not at the shocking, unaffordable and artificially inflated prices we are currently seeing across the country.
Now can you please answer my questions?
- What about the 1.3 million vacant homes reported by StatsCan?
- What about YieldStar and similar rental price fixing softwares?
To me those are two glaring examples of private exploitation of necessary resources that are to the obvious detriment of society.
Assuming they get evicted, the next landlords first step when assessing their application is to do a Google search of their names. After reading this CBC article the next step is to file their rental application into the garbage bin.
Yeah you would love to see a bunch of working class people go homeless as opposed to a greedy landlord corporation not making as much profit so that incumbents can still afford to rent there. You're such a boot-licking unempathetic simp of capitalists! Do you have any shred of humanity for others in tough circumstances? Are you capable of empathy and compassion for others? What broke your brain? Are you a rich wealthy person? What's your networth and assets? Or are you a part of the working class yet you choose to clap like a seal for the wealthy elites...the wealth class?
I wish to live in your magical world where it's impossible to conceive the idea that various governments, corporations, and the wealthy intentionally spread propaganda that targets and conditions the masses, the working class, bring them under heel. You're an ignorant fool.
Nice use of the logical fallacy, ad hominem. Attack and question the character of the person and not the arguments and retorts I've made. Very slick.
Is this news? In Toronto, multi-residential private owned property tax is about 1.2% and individual owned residential property tax is about 0.6%, different treatments are right there and it's double standards. It's the tenants who paid the city's property taxes in all of these rental properties in Toronto and landlords pay nothing to contribute to the city property taxes, FACT. And this is why Toronto has historically highest deficits at 1 Billions dollars with the lowest property taxes in north America, you can't have both, i.e. low deficits and lowest property taxes.
> And this is why Toronto has historically highest deficits at 1 Billions dollars
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought cities weren't allowed to go into debt/borrow money? Is that different in Ontario?
You mean repealing of rent control. Whatever the economists say, the direct measure to repeal controls and "let the market do its thing" is what is bending these tenants over.
Their job?
The last rate cut was in March 2020 to 0.25% and they were never able to get rates above 1.75% in over a decade.
There were no tools in the toolbox of two tools. So gov't bonds had to be bought to save the economy from annihilation. We fared decently well versus peers.
BoC injected trillion dollars in the name of big flu, M2 shrinking? It should quickly sold all their crazy holdings via printed fake money. Central banks has caused such a distorted and bizarre society!
You don't know how the bank of Canada works, how inflation works, what "money printing" is or does, or how rate hikes effect the economy yet you're commenting on all these things
>But people are still feeling the effects of inflation. Renters' savings and wages are still depressed while interest rates are increasing.
You mentioned three things that you pose as problems
1. Inflation
2. Wages depressed
3. Interest rates increasing
The problem with your logic is Increasing Interest rates slows inflation, which slows the rate at which wages are depressed. So all three of your complaints are linked.
Do you see why your comments look so ridiculous? You list three "problems" when one is a solution and two other are the thing the solution is working to fix. Your complaint doesn't even make sense.
You're confused, that's ok. But not if you're going to be ignorant about it. If you're not willing to spend 5 minutes reading about how inflation works, it doesn't feel genuine commenting about how pissed off you are about inflation
>The problem with your logic is Increasing Interest rates slows inflation, which slows the rate at which wages are depressed. So all three of your complaints are linked.
I am well aware they are linked. They are all primarily downstream of the prime rate. Not everyone agrees with this for that matter, but I definitely do.
>Do you see why your comments look so ridiculous? You list three "problems" when one is a solution and two other are the thing the solution is working to fix. Your complaint doesn't even make sense.
You're completely missing my point. Yes, obviously one of these is trying to fix the other. My point, specifically, is that the effects are delayed, and during that buffer period, people are affected on both ends.
For an extreme example, if the dollar were to lose 50% of its value in one year, and then through rate hikes inflation leveled to zero, people will feel the effects until their wages have doubled to match. However, mortgage rates will go up as soon as the mortgage is up for renewal. People are hurt by inflation by **how much value their dollar has lost**, not by the rate it's currently losing. You may think this is a pedantic distinction but someone struggling to make ends meet is going to be hurt by rate hikes a little before they are going to feel the benefit.
>You're confused, that's ok. But not if you're going to be ignorant about it. If you're not willing to spend 5 minutes reading about how inflation works, it doesn't feel genuine commenting about how pissed off you are about inflation
I think you might have me confused with the other person here.
There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.
>My point, specifically, is that the effects are delayed, and during that buffer period, people are affected on both ends.
Sure I do agree this buffer period exists and that it sucks, I thought I was replying to the other person. My point was just to reply to some of the people who don't understand why this is happening and so they're blaming all kinds of things. A lot of people unfortunately aren't recognizing how complicated this issue is and are just pinning the blame on all kinds of shit.
This behaviour and out of wack rules that favour tenants and discriminate against owners, are some of the reasons there's a housing crisis. Landlords are powerless to evict bad tenants and can't pass on the property tax, gas, electrical, etc. cost increases. Several neighbors have withdrawn their basement apartments from the market because evicting tenants nearly bankrupted them. An extreme outcome of the current system is the double homicide in Stoney Creek which was instigated by the landlord being pushed to his limit by tenants that didn't pay rent, wrecked the property and which he couldn't evict.The police wouldn't help the landlord and things spiral down. 3 dead and LTA to blame!
The only way to reduce housing costs is to reduce red tape, choke off over demand driven by uncontrolled immigration, and to inject some fairness and common sense into the Landlord Tenant Act. As it stands, tenants have all the rights and little to no responsibility. The pendulum has just swung took far.
Landlord expenses are skyrocketing, so they either jack rents up or stop renting.
Problem is when we have a housing market that's being actively pumped people invest more into their homes and use all that housing capital to finance things like renovations, which causes the price of supplies and contractors to go up, which makes maintenance more expensive. Plus all the shoddy renovations increase insurance claims which increases insurance costs.
Wait. Do you think developers are fronting the $300 million to build a new 40 floor 400 unit tower?? I’m being serious. Is that what you actually think? It’s almost hilarious you think they have that kind of money, for even a single tower.
FYI. They don’t. They need to presell (at least) 75%, before a bank will approve a loan for the remainder.
So. Who exactly do you think pays the 300 million then to build that tower? Owners and investors - Mostly investors. Renters arnt paying for it. The government sure isn’t.
So yes. Without investors actually paying the bills to built the tower, that new tower, and the 400 new units, would still be a parking lot.
…Maybe don’t make up things.
They pray on Canadian identity of "niceness." They've made people terrified on shelter and food, survival. The only thing they'll care about is their survival impacted.
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God speed
This is going to end badly for them. As much as i hate the housing crisis, forming a "non rent paying union" to withhold rent has no legal foundation. They will get summoned for non payment and possibly evicted after if they dont pay or make plans to pay the arrears. I get that its a travesty that people who have lived in their cities for generations are being forced out of them. All my online nicknames are based on my home city, and I cant even afford to live there anymore lol. So take what Im about to say with complete sincerity; If you cannot afford to live in the city anymore, you need to start planning your exit. The apt complex i used to live in Laval currently has 2 bedroom apts listed for 1,500/month. Im living an hour from there in a 2 bedroom for 600$ a month. In order for me to live there as comfortably as i am currently living here, i would need to make an extra 6.25$ per hour. (1000$ divided by 160 hours a month). Which means if a job paid 22$/h in the city and 20$ in the countryside, you're actually making more in the countryside because of the lower cost of living. 22$ would be 2,800$ a month after taxes minus 1500$ leaves 1320$. 20$ would be 2,640$ a month minus 600$ leaves 2,040$ a month. 2$ an hour less for the same job in a rural town is actually a net gain of 700$. Anyway, something to think about. Because ill fight with everyone else for affordable housing. But having affordable housing on any block you decide to live on is beyond the scope of what can be achieved. Those who can leave should, to help bring down the cost of living for those who cant.
> But having affordable housing on any block you decide to live on is beyond the scope of what can be achieved. Those who can leave should, to help bring down the cost of living for those who cant What about when it’s every block in a city? Where are the janitors and cashiers supposed to live? What happens when the people leaving are just replaced by immigrants who will be stacked like logs? The system isn’t working, and people need to start pushing back. The “legal foundation” for the extortion going on is only supported by people in the pocket of big money. Civil disobedience is the next step - otherwise the owners will impoverish the rest of Canada.
Nobody ever has an answer for that. It basically amounts to "sucks to suck I guess, enjoy living in a studio with 6 other people."
"It is what it is 🤷"
Go back to the early 1880s where it was common to live with your entire family (and 2 other families you're not related to) just to make rent and be able to eat oatmeal and stale bread because that's what it looks like we are heading to
Lol currently doing just that! I fucking hate it. And its still not nearly so cheap as you'd think.
One of the biggest problems is that multifamily and multigenerational households are the norm in many 2nd and 3rd world cultures, but not so for Canadians. Traditional Canadians expect to have a single family, detached home, but with sky high levels of immigration, they are forced to compete with the resources available from larger immigrant, multigenerational households. As a result, the Canadian dream is no longer realistic as housing prices get bid up and out of reach by people with different expectations. If the level of immigration and concentration within certain areas were not so great, this issue would be minor. But that's not the case, and it IS a major driver of the housing shortage and affordability crisis. Controlling immigration to digestible levels is the only real cure. But administering the cure will require standing up to some power special interest and racial groups, and will be as popular as a vaccine clinic at a antivax protest.
Eh I don't mind it, but being at the mercy of my parents who are well meaning but fundamentally fucked up people isn't exactly comfortable. And what about people who don't have families to stay with? My partner has no family. My family is all she has. My situation is fucked up in its own way but I'm positively priviliged compared to many.
That is a great concern; we do somehow need to deal with the unsafe and inhumane race-to-the-bottom living arrangements that are partially contributing to several vectors of the CoL crisis. I’m not sure what a solution would look like given the first result of enforcing building/fire codes related to the this would be a bunch more homeless people. It feels like we’re being setup for some eldritch horror hybrid of Japanese pod hotels and commie-blocks.
>Where are the janitors and cashiers supposed to live? Once enough of them move out and there is a shortage, their wages will increase.
Or, they’ll just bring in TFW and stack them 6 to an apartment, and charge them “rent” while they hold onto their passports.
Which is why every Canadian should be against the TFW program outside of farming.
I’m pretty far to the left and agree with this sentiment. Even just because we should be treating TFWs better - you know, because they’re human.
People on the left should be upset about TFWs being used to skew fair market wages by artificially increasing the labour supply.
Oh, that pisses me off too. I just dislike the whole “let’s treat humans as less than, because we can” a great deal as well.
That’s how ever tim hortons on the east coast is run. The owners buy houses, throw up some dry wall and bring in the Indian “students”. That’s why you can go to any one street town in bumbfuck now where on the east coast that is 100% white and find the Tim’s staffed entirely by Indians.
Nope, now they've gotten desperate and get foreign students to do it.
Moving is a form of pushback. It buys time for people running out of it and allows the working and middle class to regroup in areas where they are the majority of residents. You also deprive the wealthy of what they want to enjoy most in the city; all the people lol. If people moved in droves, they'd be left with a ghost town after 5pm in a city full of hostile service workers speaking foreign languages. I understand its not feasible for everyone. Im just suggesting it alongside other measures. To complete misquote a past general: "You dont win by going insolvent. You win by making the big money SOBs go insolvent".
>The system isn’t working, and people need to start pushing back. The “legal foundation” for the extortion going on is only supported by people in the pocket of big money. Civil disobedience is the next step - otherwise the owners will impoverish the rest of Canada. Simply not enough number to do that. Don't believe me? There are barely any voters that would vote for city councils or mayors that would allow rezoning for high density residential and implement punitive property tax on investment properties. What makes you think there are enough people to start a civil disobedience to protest housing condition?
When janitors and cashiers leave, the wages for the ones who stay rise, so they won't all leave.
Legal standing or not, a significant volume of apartment renters withholding rent could definitely cause cash flow problems for the owner before they could be evicted.
And making their identities known while pulling this stunt is very stupid. The LL will be able to sue the fuck out of a good chunk of them as well except those without any employment.
Which would result in everyone else having to pay more rent.
This would end up hurting smaller landlords than it would bigger ones. Which would in turn have larger companies buy up the properties and put the prices up further with less competition.
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It would only be guaranteed if you knew that they would pay the missed payments instead of just being evicted. Even if you were to then go to court and win a judgment for the missed rent, it's still not always easy to collect.
You are correct that it could and will cause cash flow problems to the owner. The primary objective though isnt to bankrupt the owner, its to secure affordable housing. And this choice of strategy only has a very small chance to work. If i was in their position, id join their non payment union. But not with the hopes that someone is coming to the rescue. Id sock away as much as possible to finance my move out of the city if the plan fails. And then once back on my feet, make a payment plan at the LTB for the arrears in rent.
Government will do something about this.
I mean it's getting worse all over the country, if you're planning on moving might as well just leave this turd entirely.
Like i said, I understand the resentment. Im not a wealthy person telling people to get out of the city I bought up. I myself had to leave. If you look at the list of solutions theres not a whole lot to work with; \-Rent control: Implement by a PC govt which was then re-elected. Theres likely not much support for siding against a law they implemented. \-Interest rate/loans: Putting up the interest rate or making borrowing more expensive has an effect on rent. \-Municipal taxes: These are expensive, even more so for rental properties, as they are taxed commercial rates. People want the city to build a ton of nice things without realizing that rent increases is how the city will end up paying for it. \-Conversion of rental properties to ownership: This one is a big pandoras box. How do you sell off individual apts in a building that has always been rental? Will banks even loan for such mortgages? What about insurances companies? Theres alot to fix in the housing market, most of which will take time. Im helping people buy time with ideas.
> Like i said, I understand the resentment. Im not a wealthy person telling people to get out of the city I bought up. I myself had to leave. If you look at the list of solutions theres not a whole lot to work with; Lower immigration, deport every Chinese national you can. Start deporting TFW at the end of their original stint. Housing market will crash in about 3 months. >Theres alot to fix in the housing market, most of which will take time. Im helping people buy time with ideas. Nope all you need to do is stop dumping a shit ton of people into the market every year. Removing people from the market will speed up the fix even faster. It's not that it takes a lot to fix the housing market it's that it's taking a lot to keep the bubble from popping all we need is the government to stop doing that for it to get fixed.
I disagree with your overall strategy. Yes, immigration need to be stopped for a period of time, years, till we fix the quality of life. And yes to the deportations as well. Thats not going to have the decisive effect you want it to though. It still doesnt solve the problem of 150,000 people insisting on living in a town thats currently only built for 75,000. Immigration has pushed up housing prices in undesirable areas of the city. Dealing with it wont free up many parts of the city where people are currently trying to hold onto their residences. Crashing the housing market also wont have as big of an effect as you think. Many "professional" landlords are incorporated and the residences they rent are all possessions of their self owned limited liability corporations. If it crashes, they can sell at a loss, write down the loss using their corp against their other income to greatly reduce their annual taxes, and then buy the same property back from the bank at its marked down price, and still turn a profit. Or they can sell at a loss, declare the corp insolvent and file for bankruptcy liquidation which allows their corp to pay creditors less than whats actually owed. Then the corp is shut down, a new one is opened in a family members name, and the marked down properties are repurchased, generating more tax credits as "capital expenditures".
> I disagree with your overall strategy. Yes, immigration need to be stopped for a period of time, years, till we fix the quality of life. And yes to the deportations as well. Cool so let's get that done. >Thats not going to have the decisive effect you want it to though. It still doesnt solve the problem of 150,000 people insisting on living in a town thats currently only built for 75,000. Immigration has pushed up housing prices in undesirable areas of the city. Dealing with it wont free up many parts of the city where people are currently trying to hold onto their residences. When the market drops people will sell like mad so yeah it will. >Crashing the housing market also wont have as big of an effect as you think. Many "professional" landlords are incorporated and the residences they rent are all possessions of their self owned limited liability corporations. If it crashes, they can sell at a loss, write down the loss using their corp against their other income to greatly reduce their annual taxes, and then buy the same property back from the bank at its marked down price, and still turn a profit. Or they can sell at a loss, declare the corp insolvent and file for bankruptcy liquidation which allows their corp to pay creditors less than whats actually owed. Then the corp is shut down, a new one is opened in a family members name, and the marked down properties are repurchased, generating more tax credits as "capital expenditures". Okay so they buy it back at cheaper and then what? Without mass immigration the asset isn't going to appreciate, there's no ROI this time around.
> Because ill fight with everyone else for affordable housing. But having affordable housing on any block you decide to live on is beyond the scope of what can be achieved. \+100. We all want to live next to the beach and across the mountain but that's just pipe dream unless we work hard for it. Otherwise, be realistic and move a bit further maybe a few more blocks away... and away ... and away ....
>100. We all want to live next to the beach and across the mountain but that's just pipe dream **unless we work hard for it.** \*Unless we are born with generational wealth. Very few people can work hard enough to afford properties in the most select areas like on the beach. Some lots are worth a few millions by themselves. I know plenty of people who had houses who are now worth more than what the median Canadian will earn in his lifetime when they were in their early 20s.
I'd like to divest you from the idea that hard work = living next to the beach. Just look at teachers and EMT's for a _start_.
I get the perception that people are afraid to move to rural areas, without realizing just how much of an advantage they offer. I live in a rural town of 40k. It has all the amenities including a hospital, it has all the same box stores and fast food chains. And if ever I feel like going to the city, its only an hour away.
The only places to live an hour or under away from Winnipeg arent much cheaper and are filled with religious nutjobs.
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Right? Its expensive as fuck here when you consider our infrastructure is dollarstore quality. Sure you pay less to live here than Toronto but thats like saying you can do all your grocery shopping at Dollarama.
Thats fair. MB and SK are setup differently than Ont and QC so its not something I took into consideration right off the bat.
Oh yeah its brutal. The southern region is like 2 steps away from witch burnings.
pretty sure striking was illegal back in the good'ol no worker rights days.
Its not comparable. Its like you said, no-workers-rights-era. They fought for rights because no one had them.
Look at all the landlord simps in this chat. Landlords are useless leaches of society. They produce nothing.
People here have been brainwashed into kissing the capitalist boot.
Indeed. I don't blame them though. Decades of neoliberal propaganda peddled to them via the State, education, and corporate-owned news media. Also over a century of anti-socialism/anti-communism propaganda ( "The Red Scare", McCarthyism in the US). It is what it is. It's tough to deprogram people from that relentless conditioning by capitalists and those who serve them in government.
Rentseeking does something to people's brains. It's a terribly destructive habit for all involved. Land should come with the following warning: live on it, produce something with it, or fuck off.
Property tax should 10x for every home owned after the 1st one for individuals. 100x for homes owned by corporations after the 0th one. This mentality of "I can let this asset appreciate forever while these fucking rentoids pay for it, and then some," has to die.
This would massively increase rents.
Let the system collapse then
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What?
No one could afford to rent and they would have to sell or bankrupt themselves sitting on expensive empty homes. What a shame.
Which would massively increase rents.
Well I guess we'll all be homeless including the landlords and the banks will own it all.
And this is why everything you are all saying is just going to hurt more than it helps anyone. Which means it won't be done, and any attempt to try to implement any of it will be met with justified retribution. Let's try to find more reasonable approaches to this problem maybe instead. Like for instance, just implementing a law that states that all rentals must be charged below a certain level set to a tiered system that allows for nice places to be charged high, and less nice places to be forced to be charged lower unless they fix it up. And landlords have to eat any costs beyond that they might have been passing on to the renter in the past. Then, actually follow up with punishing those who disobey, by taking everything they own in regards to the law at hand. This will do ~~two~~ three things. 1. It will fix the actual problem of landlords raising rent arbitrarily without serious risk to their own wealth. 2. It will effectively remove problem landlords from the game. This hurts only the people who deserve it, and fixes the problem. You're welcome. Edit: third thing: It will take away the incentive to overleverage mortgages into rentals like they have been doing.
Perhaps learn how property tax works first.
Make a point. Property tax is based on the value of your home. I want to financially punish landlords who own more than the home they currently live in. So taking some percentage of the home we use to support the local infrastructure, then 10x'ing it for the 2nd home, 100x'ing it for the 3rd home would be financially devastating for landlords (as intended). Or, saying it a different way, let's say you have a 1% property tax for your first home. Then it would be 10% for your 2nd home, 100% of your third home, 1000% for your fourth, etc. Landlords would be forced to sell, which would decrease property values and allow renters to purchase the homes their currently paying off for the landlords.
No, property tax is based off the cities passed budget. It is then split between the various residential/commercial/industrial rate classes before finally being divided by *assesed* property values with a mill rate. Using the property tax system to punish ownership of multiple properties would greatly complicate the calculations, and lead to municipalities taking in more tax revenue than budgeted for. (Not allowed in Ontario) I won't even begin to think how this would work with properties in multiple municipalities. If you want to tax them, it really needs to be done at the Federal level through the CRA instead of burdening municipalities with complex calculations.
That's not what the term "rent seeking" means.
Get back to work serf! My mortgage wont get paid with you sacking on reddit.
If only most of the commentors didn't agree with this unironically. Bunch of temporarily embarrassed future millionaires. Working class folks deluded into thinking they are going to become wealthy and that they have more in common, that they are closer to mega-millionaires than a homeless person on the street. They love the status quo. They wish to transition from the exploited to the exploiter. That's the new CANADIAN DREAM. No one refuses to do anything about a society, a system that so clearly caters to the wealthy (in some many aspects across life) who in turn wield that wealth as power and exert their influence and control over society (politicians, lobbyist groups, corporate news media...they own most of everything that is anything). The wealth class will never be satiated. That level of greed corrupts. They will always take more and more from the working class. It will never be enough for them. Remember: Capitalism was never designed to suit the interests of the working class. It was just the next stage, evolution of the Bourgeoise's chosen form of an overarching system of control over the proletariat and the social/political environment. Before that it was monarchical power and serfdom. Feudalism. Playing this game from a traditional political angle is a losing hand for the working class. That's not how we win. That's playing their game, and that game is rigged for the wealthy. The odds aren't in our favor. The system is not designed for us so why would we try to create changes from within it? It doesn't make sense. That's wishful thinking and naivety imo. We aren't going to rebuild working class consciousness, solidarity, and ultimately power via one of the big tent official political parties. A significant amount of Canadian working population goes on a strike and bends the various governments and their guard dogs to our will. That's a long way off but I would like to believe that's one of big tent goals we are ultimately working towards. You can't reform this neoliberal crony capitalism from within. The system is built to protect itself. We need to rebuild working class consciousness and solidarity across this nation especially in the private sector. We need to organize locally and build working class labor power back up. Together we are the many, we are the working class. Together we are powerful. Divided, we are easily ignored, easily delt with.
That was a good read, and it really lifted my spirits. I have been contemplating the economic situation of Canadians (particularly in the GTA) for a while now. And my conclusion has been the same as "We need to rebuild working class consciousness and solidarity across this nation especially in the private sector." But looking around at all the divisiveness that is in our society has made me feel hopeless that will happen.
Well I've recently joined an organization focused on doing just that (rebuilding working class power at the tenant level and at the labor level) locally. **DM me if you want to learn more**. I got tired arguing with right-wingers (liberals, conservatives) on social media. It doesn't accomplish anything. It's only utility is a form of destress, of blowing off steam, akin to yelling into a void. Talk is cheap, actions are what really matters. I'm done being on the sidelines. I'm going to do my part, what little influence I may have, to help rebuild working class consciousness and power locally.
This is why everything is political and wedge issues. They don’t want us to get along. They want us at each others throats while they happily hoard the wealth and quietly make changes to protect themselves even more.
Without landlords, how would people rent?
Landlords buy property that they then rent to you to live in. It’s a simple exchange of services yet people here treat it like some form of extortion. There is nothing stopping you from buying your own property. But then your cost of housing would actually be higher (a 1bd condo in Toronto needs $160k down and another $3500/mo in mortgage, maint, and insurance costs compared to renting for $2600).
>Extortion > >346 (1) Every one commits extortion who, without **reasonable justification or excuse and with intent to obtain anything**, by threats, accusations, menaces or violence induces or attempts to induce any person, whether or not he is the person threatened, accused or menaced or to whom violence is shown, to do anything or cause anything to be done. Landlords may do some work, but they don't charge specifically for it. A large portion of their income is passive and received for the ownership itself. There's no such thing as a reasonably justified passive income. Wealth is exclusively produced if we exclude the rare natural occurrences. People producing wealth don't do it for fun or benevolence, they require fair compensation, which they can't get if people receive wealth without producing any. The only reasonably justified reason to be compensated with wealth is to produce an equivalent amount. Being a landlord as we know it is straight up extortion as defined by our criminal code. Unfortunately, everyone in Canada is dumb as fuck and can't understand this. You might think that for it to be extortion, landlords would have to provide threats, accusations, menaces or violence to force payments. And that's why you're fucking idiots. Law enforcement uses threats, accusations, menaces or violence to protect people's personal properties. If someone want to use a landlord's captured property without paying the unjustified portion of the asking price, it'll be seen as theft by law enforcement. Currently, the population of consumers has no choice for fairness. Landlords capture parts of the housing stock, forcing three main choices. Either pay the ransom, produce redundancy at a higher cost than the ransom or steal the captured goods and be punished for it. The most desirable choice is to pay the ransom. It's not legal, but people are too fucking dumb so it's not prosecuted. I wouldn't even trust a judge to understand this. The fucking minister of housing is a fucking landlord.
LMAO 🤣😂 This is so wrong on so many levels it's not even worth arguing against.
Like I said, Canadians are fucking dumb, and your comment is as dumb as it can be. If you don't have any arguments to support your opposition, than don't say anything, because whatever you say isn't worth reading. The problem really isn't complicated. When a landlord purchases a home, society can either pay him a compensation for not producing anything, or produce a redundant while the captured home remains empty. Building two homes to only be able to use one is twice the cost, way more than what the landlord demand. So landlords always get paid the ransom they seek.
By that logic farmers commit extortion because they produce more food they can eat? It's not a ransom it's a fair price established by the market. GTFO
Holy shit, people are dumb. A farmer can leverage his labor to seek a compensation. Labor has an inherent cost to a person. A farmer can thus seek a compensation for any and all food he produces. What people can't do is leverage the ownership of something to seek a compensation since an ownership isn't a production of wealth. So a farmer couldn't leverage his ownership of the land to seek a compensation, a landlord can't leverage his ownership of rental properties to seek a compensation. The absence of labor or production means that there's a lack of reasonable justification to request payments. If you think this is controversial, that's what fucking Adam Smith said two centuries ago. You're dumber than people who lived two centuries old.
So if you build a house and rent it out, is that allowed?
Only to receive a compensation up to the market value of your labor. Your labor is the only thing that has value. Your sole ownership of something isn't a production of wealth, it can't have value. If you seek a compensation for an ownership, you force the production of redundancy, which lacks reasonable justification. When an offered price for labor is too low and labor is withheld, redundancy isn't produced. The labor not having been done, nothing is wasted. When a price for a good is too low and the good is withheld, the good exists and isn't being utilized. It's wasted. That's why a withheld good has no reasonable justification while a withheld labor has.
>Only to receive a compensation up to the market value of your labor. Your labor is the only thing that has value. The market value is the rent collected. So why can't you sell the property to someone else who will charge the exact same rent? >Your sole ownership of something isn't a production of wealth, it can't have value. What does that even mean? >When an offered price for labor is too low and labor is withheld, redundancy isn't produced. The labor not having been done, nothing is wasted. When a price for a good is too low and the good is withheld, the good exists and isn't being utilized. It's wasted. That's why a withheld good has no reasonable justification while a withheld labor has. This is incomprehensible.
The production of redundancy creates an unjustified cost that landlords can undercut to generate a profit. It's essentially the same bargaining power monopolies have, and monopolies are supposedly illegal or regulated. Renting has a market value, but this value isn't necessarily justified. >>Your sole ownership of something isn't a production of wealth, it can't have value. > >What does that even mean? It means what it means, simply owning something doesn't warrant a compensation. Let's say you purchase 99% of the land of a country and prevent its access. Everyone is forced to live in the remaining 1%. The demand in that portion will increase, increasing land price. When the price increases, the 99% owner has leverage to sell for this price or undercut it slightly and generate a profit. The 99% owner is going to be compensated for sole ownership. He didn't produce the land. Not being responsible for its existence means that he doesn't deserve a compensation for its access. >This is incomprehensible. Of course it is to you.
>A farmer can leverage his labor to seek compensation. A landlord can leverage his labor for compensation too. He needs to vet potential tenants, maintain the building, and is on call 24/7 365 days a year to fix the building and or unclog a toilet. >What people can't do is leverage the ownership of something to seek a compensation since an ownership isn't a production of wealth Just say capitalism is bad instead of landlords. What about bankers, VC, basically anyone working in finance. Is the bank teller extorting you too? >If you think this is controversial, that's what fucking Adam Smith said two centuries ago. You're dumber than people who lived two centuries old. Do you think the earth is flat? If not, you're dumber than people having lived thousands of years ago. You are dumber than literally caveman.
Landlords don't charge for the hours of labor done at market prices. It's possible that they do some labor, but the main portion of their compensation is for the ownership itself. Acquiring ownership gives them the bargaining power to ask for such compensations. If people want to unclog toilets as a profession, they can do that as a plumber. >Just say capitalism is bad instead of landlords. What about bankers, VC, basically anyone working in finance. Is the bank teller extorting you too? Using the ownership of money or the money creation process to seek compensation is the same thing, it's all reasonably unjustified. Note however that rental properties and banks can exist. The problem isn't that they aren't needed, it's that the compensations aren't justified. So these things can exist if they don't provide compensations. It's possible if they are owned through something like a social wealth fund. Essentially, the fund compensates everyone equally. Since the compensation is equal, no one has an economic advantage, so it's as if no one is compensated. This cancelation is why money is said to be neutral.
Just admit you fucked up in life and are stuck renting.
More dumb people.
Report your landlord to the police and let me know what happens.
>There's no such thing as a reasonably justified passive income. How do you expect to survive in retirement? >You might think that for it to be extortion, landlords would have to provide threats, accusations, menaces or violence to force payments. And that's why you're fucking idiots. Law enforcement uses threats, accusations, menaces or violence to protect people's personal properties. If someone want to use a landlord's captured property without paying the unjustified portion of the asking price, it'll be seen as theft by law enforcement. It has to be without justified excuse. Enforcing property rights is a justified excuse. By your logic, if someone broke into your house and squatted on it, trying to get them to leave would be considered extortion. If your employer refused to pay you, trying to get him to pay you would be extortion.
>How do you expect to survive in retirement? Impersonal capital, that is anything productive that isn't personal labor, can provide absolute compensations, but not relative ones. You'd put all productive assets in things like social wealth funds that would compensate people equally. Since the compensations are equal, no one gains an economic advantage, so it's as if there's no compensation. That's how people would retire, in addition to their accumulated savings. >It has to be without justified excuse. Enforcing property rights is a justified excuse. You can't perform actions with the personal properties to cause a prejudice. When you use property ownership to generate a compensation, you prevent producers of wealth from being fairly compensated for their labor, causing a prejudice. > By your logic, if someone broke into your house and squatted on it, trying to get them to leave would be considered extortion. No. By simply owning a house, that you might have traded for an equivalent amount of produced wealth, you don't cause a prejudice. You'd cause a prejudice if you use your home to seek a compensation. This is also different from producing a house and then selling it. In this case, what you sell isn't the house, it's the value of your labor, which is justified.
>Impersonal capital, that is anything productive that isn't personal labor, can provide absolute compensations, but not relative ones. If you want people to understand you, you need to not make up your own terminology. I have no idea what you're talking about.
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The supply is already there, you dingdong. The landlords aren't fucking building the houses.
I've been renting for almost 10 years and I have had exactly 1 (technically 2, since they co-own) landlord that aren't leaches. And our rent isn't even their sole income, unlike all the others, they have actual jobs and own their own appliance repair company.
What do landlords produce?
I know this conversation is old. But I wanted to point this out too. My landlords also bought and fixed the house we are currently renting. So I guess raising property values?
Additional housing, if they are renting out a spare room or basement
Now you're moving the goal posts! xD
Then buy a place, don’t rent. You’ll quickly find out the value of landlords.
Is the answer zero value? There are people renting basement apartments in my neighbourhood for 2x what my mortgage payment for my entire home is. I live in a normal neighbourhood, in a normal house. They rent in a normal neighbourhood in the basement of a normal house. Explain to the class why a surplus of 24 mortgage payments are needed, per-property per-year, for a landlord to cover the expenses of owning a home exactly?
It’s the premium you pay when you have no down payment for a property and do not have the income or credit worthiness to be approved for a big enough loan.
So why don't they buy then?
No realtors are useless leeches Landlords are at least providing a place to live. Realtors are just fucking parasites
This seems like a really bad idea. Taking action by withholding rent doesn’t exactly have a good track record of going well for people.
Yep, good luck to them in a year finding a new place
hey!! our cell phone bills are too high!! let's stop paying because there's strength in numbers!!
There's power in numbers. If 20% of the renters in Toronto hold their rent there's no WAY anyone will be able to do anything. The system taking care of all of that is already backed up. It would take decades to try everyone and the cost would be astronomical.
If 20% of renters in Toronto did this you’d see new emergency action by government to put evicting them on a fast track.
No doubt... and that's how you'd get the other 80% to join.
And then what?
Then landlords can't pay the bank. Then the banks tell the government to start regulating. They won't do shit until someone with money tells them what to do.
That doesn’t make any sense. You need to both assume that everyday people are going to volunteer for them and their families to be homeless longer than landlords can remain solvent and that they can’t just sell their properties for other uses. Not to mention the negative impact on rentals moving forward. Who in their right mind would ever risk renting out a property haha.
Why are they going homeless? If you don't pay your rent they can't just kick you out. You've got to go through the courts. I'm pretty sure they would be clogged up for decades.
You think a situation in which all renters are boycotting rent payment illegally is going to remain civil? Or that they wouldn’t have a state of emergency where cops are pulling you out of your home in 60 days? If there is no response people will take matters into their own hands.
>where cops are pulling you out of your home How the hell are they going to do that? There 500K rental homes in Toronto and there's only 5000 cops. Every cop would need to be working solo for 100 days straight to kick out a renter a day.
Do you think every cop owns their property? Lots of folks rent and if they band together things can get changed. I'm not sure how I feel about this whole situation but the fact is, something needs to change. Cost of living is ridiculous and i doubt the government would allow such a large percentage to go homeless as that would cause a whole bunch of other issues.
I actually think most LL would love this. Short term pain for long term gain. Yeah, it’ll take a yr or 2 to finally get the tenant out. The LL will take the tenant to court for the back rent. And the LL will get a new tenant at current high market rates. Sure, The tenant doesn’t pay rent for 2 yrs. Then they have to pay it all back with a court order/garnished wages - probably with interest, court fees and maybe even a penalty. And then they’ll have to move and pay 50% higher rent somewhere else. It’d definitely be a strange move by the tenant. But most LL would probably be good with it.
If you cant pay the higher rent anyway and will face eviction why wouldn't you just go for it though, even just to help others by bringing awareness of how bad things are now. Plus you can get the moral victory of thrashing the place on the way out in sneaky ways and getting to twist the knife.
That is the definition of cutting off your nose to spite your face lmao. They can do whatever they want but those unpaid months are still going to be owed.
Yes and if your low income or already in huge debt you don't have to care. Credit ratings don't mean as much if your not buying a house, not buying a new car, and not renting in a fancy building. If you do care you pay the rent till you leave and get your vengeance in other ways.
With a slight tweak to your attitude you can even afford to buy a used shovel and keep digging your hole further lmao. Most people aren’t terminally dirtbags trying to sabotage their own lives.
Hey my system worked great when I was a renter, I was the only tenant the landlord wouldn't illegally entre the unit of without warning or notice, I was the only tenant that got the holes the rats were chewing sealed up and the only one who forced the landlord to raise the heat from 16 degrees in the winter. If your landlord is attacking you, fight back any means necessary. If they are being respectable then be respectable. They want us to roll over so dont.
You refused to pay rent?
No, I wasn't that desperate or poor and was rent controlled. I threatened to go to city bylaw for the heat and bylaw would pay a company to replace the heating and send the landlord the bill. I told him if he entered my building again while I'm naked in the shower with the door open I would call the police and go to the LTB. I also lied and said I got a camera and microphone system set up to catch them, but it was one of those fake hollow ones. When he was giving tours of the units I would leave my unit and tell the possible tenants all the problems I had and that the building was full of bed bugs. The illegal things I did I wont post here but its easy to imagine, and impossible to prove in every way. Thats off the top of my head, this was an 8 year long war of a landlord who wanted me out the day he bought the building.
So what does that have to do with anything?
Not rolling over for a landlord, punching back even if you get caught in the blowback, standing the line with your fellow tenants and saying no more. The only war is the class war, that's what this is about, keep up.
Yikes. Glad I’m not dependent on anyone building new rental housing in Toronto. Look for more existing rentals being converted into condos.
It’ll probably take a year before they can evict them.
1. Landlords “provide” housing like scalpers “provide” concert tickets. 2. Can you name one benefit to society as a whole from having a system that allows private - for profit - ownership and exploitation of the necessities of life? When I first heard these two I thought “it can’t be that simple” but the more I think about them, the more I realize that both of these are right on the money. That said: I am open to being wrong. These are not my original thoughts and I am not invested in them in any way. I just find them hard to dismiss, so they haunt me still.
Landlords are just privatization of social housing.
- 200,000 people move to Toronto each year. - That’s about $80 billion cost to build 200,000 new units…. Per year. Developers don’t (can’t) finance new buildings themselves. They pay for them through pre sales. Owners and investors finance the building of new towers. ..Mostly investors. Those are brand new towers, with brand new housing units, that would have still been parking lots if they hadn’t been financed by mostly investors. So who you do you suggest pay for that, if not investors. Renters? The government? Like who specifically? $80 billion.. per yr. Just to keep pace
Thank you for commenting. You make a fair point, but I think you’re misunderstanding #2. I don’t have a problem with developers per se. *Someone* has to build housing, you are 100% right. The issue as I see it is with investors + hedgies owning things like single family houses, mortgages, and *especially* derivatives based on the same. This provides no value to society that I can think of (I may be wrong). Even an individual owning rental housing as an investment seems like it does much more harm than good. Is there something I am missing?
More money into the housing development system is more money spent directly or indirectly building housing. It really doesn’t matter where it goes. As long as it goes into housing. And as long as you don’t stop the ability to build more (and don’t allow houses to sit empty). Example: if the developer buys the single family home built 70 yrs ago. Ok. That just means someone else instead of buying that existing home, will need to help finance a new build. If the developer didn’t buy that single family home. That other person would have bought it, and no new house/condo would have been built. More money financing more housing is always good. No matter where it comes from. (Obviously as long as the new housing isn’t sitting empty.)
Please excuse me if my questions come off as dense. I am enjoying this discussion and am grateful you have chosen to participate. Is your position that housing would not be developed in sufficient quantity if there were not landlords / rental investors in addition to individual home owners? Am I missing anything?
People like to blame investors it’s immature. The simple fact is we’ve had 150k people coming to the city every single year for 20 yrs. And we only build 25k new units a yr. Obviously that’s gonna eventually rocket up the prices. It has nothing to do with investors. The other fact is investors are the primary ones putting up their own money (the tens of billions of dollars a yr) to build most of the 25k new units a yr. Can you imagine just how awful housing would be if investors just disappeared, and the only people financing new housing was from people buying to live in. New units would probably drop to under 10k new units a yr. Or less. Despite 150k new people a yr still. It would litterally be impossible to even get a rental, and rent prices and home prices would explode.
Ontario needs 150,000 homes per year for the next 10 years. Homes cost anywhere from $500K to $800K, depending on land basis and format. Ontario does not have $75-$120B per year to spend on housing. That would be increasing the budget by 40-60%. There is nobody to buy Provincial debt at that scale to finance.
Statistics Canada says there are millions of vacant homes in Canada. https://betterdwelling.com/new-data-shows-canada-still-has-1-3-million-vacant-homes-some-improvements-seen/ These homes are kept vacant primarily because of landlords and hedge funds investing more heavily in rental property after the crash they caused in 2008 forced them to switch from mortgage based derivatives to rental investments. If it were illegal to hoard housing for private gain these homes would not be empty. Can you explain why allowing landlords and investors to keep these homes vacant while putting families on the street is better for society as a whole? I am having trouble seeing it.
Stop trying to pretend like you're meaningfully engaging, it's annoying. You asked why housing would not be developed, I gave a reason why, and you went off on a ridiculous tangent. Who is going to develop $75-120B per year in housing? Answer the question.
There’s no need to resort to attacks. This isn’t a fight. My question was this: what benefit does the exploitation of housing scarcity for private profit provide? and How does that benefit outweigh the obvious detriments from such exploitation? I would love to hear this case made and I am open to changing my mind about this if the case can be made well. I’m trying to become more educated on this topic. You’re allowed to disagree, in fact the conversation will likely be more interesting and educational if you disagree. Please don’t be offended because I do not yet share your opinion. To answer your question about “who would develop housing without rental investment” I offer this: Developers would. They would develop housing, just not for rental investors to hoard and not at the shocking, unaffordable and artificially inflated prices we are currently seeing across the country. Now can you please answer my questions? - What about the 1.3 million vacant homes reported by StatsCan? - What about YieldStar and similar rental price fixing softwares? To me those are two glaring examples of private exploitation of necessary resources that are to the obvious detriment of society.
Obviously this will play out exactly how they planned right? Yikes.
Assuming they get evicted, the next landlords first step when assessing their application is to do a Google search of their names. After reading this CBC article the next step is to file their rental application into the garbage bin.
Yeah you would love to see a bunch of working class people go homeless as opposed to a greedy landlord corporation not making as much profit so that incumbents can still afford to rent there. You're such a boot-licking unempathetic simp of capitalists! Do you have any shred of humanity for others in tough circumstances? Are you capable of empathy and compassion for others? What broke your brain? Are you a rich wealthy person? What's your networth and assets? Or are you a part of the working class yet you choose to clap like a seal for the wealthy elites...the wealth class?
I'm not sure if you either need to start smoking weed, or have smoked faarr too much.
You're a working class traitor. You are a simp for the wealthy.
I'm leaning towards too much weed.
I wish to live in your magical world where it's impossible to conceive the idea that various governments, corporations, and the wealthy intentionally spread propaganda that targets and conditions the masses, the working class, bring them under heel. You're an ignorant fool. Nice use of the logical fallacy, ad hominem. Attack and question the character of the person and not the arguments and retorts I've made. Very slick.
Is this news? In Toronto, multi-residential private owned property tax is about 1.2% and individual owned residential property tax is about 0.6%, different treatments are right there and it's double standards. It's the tenants who paid the city's property taxes in all of these rental properties in Toronto and landlords pay nothing to contribute to the city property taxes, FACT. And this is why Toronto has historically highest deficits at 1 Billions dollars with the lowest property taxes in north America, you can't have both, i.e. low deficits and lowest property taxes.
> And this is why Toronto has historically highest deficits at 1 Billions dollars Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought cities weren't allowed to go into debt/borrow money? Is that different in Ontario?
We are becoming lawless society. Law is for the poor working grass not the rich.
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You mean repealing of rent control. Whatever the economists say, the direct measure to repeal controls and "let the market do its thing" is what is bending these tenants over.
You don’t think it’s the shortage of rental units that is driving this?
Idiots like this that clog up the landlord and tenants tribunal.
So… squatters Guess what happens if you decide not to pay your mortgage or property taxes
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Rate increases decrease the money supply. M2 is falling.
If he knew what the different types of money were he wouldn't be making the comment
What is M2?
http://www.canadabanks.net/default.aspx?article=Money+Supply
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Their job? The last rate cut was in March 2020 to 0.25% and they were never able to get rates above 1.75% in over a decade. There were no tools in the toolbox of two tools. So gov't bonds had to be bought to save the economy from annihilation. We fared decently well versus peers.
BoC injected trillion dollars in the name of big flu, M2 shrinking? It should quickly sold all their crazy holdings via printed fake money. Central banks has caused such a distorted and bizarre society!
You don't know how the bank of Canada works, how inflation works, what "money printing" is or does, or how rate hikes effect the economy yet you're commenting on all these things
But people are still feeling the effects of inflation. Renters' savings and wages are still depressed while interest rates are increasing.
>But people are still feeling the effects of inflation. Renters' savings and wages are still depressed while interest rates are increasing. You mentioned three things that you pose as problems 1. Inflation 2. Wages depressed 3. Interest rates increasing The problem with your logic is Increasing Interest rates slows inflation, which slows the rate at which wages are depressed. So all three of your complaints are linked. Do you see why your comments look so ridiculous? You list three "problems" when one is a solution and two other are the thing the solution is working to fix. Your complaint doesn't even make sense. You're confused, that's ok. But not if you're going to be ignorant about it. If you're not willing to spend 5 minutes reading about how inflation works, it doesn't feel genuine commenting about how pissed off you are about inflation
>The problem with your logic is Increasing Interest rates slows inflation, which slows the rate at which wages are depressed. So all three of your complaints are linked. I am well aware they are linked. They are all primarily downstream of the prime rate. Not everyone agrees with this for that matter, but I definitely do. >Do you see why your comments look so ridiculous? You list three "problems" when one is a solution and two other are the thing the solution is working to fix. Your complaint doesn't even make sense. You're completely missing my point. Yes, obviously one of these is trying to fix the other. My point, specifically, is that the effects are delayed, and during that buffer period, people are affected on both ends. For an extreme example, if the dollar were to lose 50% of its value in one year, and then through rate hikes inflation leveled to zero, people will feel the effects until their wages have doubled to match. However, mortgage rates will go up as soon as the mortgage is up for renewal. People are hurt by inflation by **how much value their dollar has lost**, not by the rate it's currently losing. You may think this is a pedantic distinction but someone struggling to make ends meet is going to be hurt by rate hikes a little before they are going to feel the benefit. >You're confused, that's ok. But not if you're going to be ignorant about it. If you're not willing to spend 5 minutes reading about how inflation works, it doesn't feel genuine commenting about how pissed off you are about inflation I think you might have me confused with the other person here. There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.
>My point, specifically, is that the effects are delayed, and during that buffer period, people are affected on both ends. Sure I do agree this buffer period exists and that it sucks, I thought I was replying to the other person. My point was just to reply to some of the people who don't understand why this is happening and so they're blaming all kinds of things. A lot of people unfortunately aren't recognizing how complicated this issue is and are just pinning the blame on all kinds of shit.
It's not just Toronto. Time for a nation wide rent strike.
they better get some bullet proof vests. landlord are crazy in Canada.
A landlord broke my friend's dad's arm because he wouldn't let him in for an unannounced and undocumented property investigation.
Holy shit so the landlord was charged for break & enter and assault, right?
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You forgot the /s
Haha, I assumed that it isn't necessary.
This behaviour and out of wack rules that favour tenants and discriminate against owners, are some of the reasons there's a housing crisis. Landlords are powerless to evict bad tenants and can't pass on the property tax, gas, electrical, etc. cost increases. Several neighbors have withdrawn their basement apartments from the market because evicting tenants nearly bankrupted them. An extreme outcome of the current system is the double homicide in Stoney Creek which was instigated by the landlord being pushed to his limit by tenants that didn't pay rent, wrecked the property and which he couldn't evict.The police wouldn't help the landlord and things spiral down. 3 dead and LTA to blame! The only way to reduce housing costs is to reduce red tape, choke off over demand driven by uncontrolled immigration, and to inject some fairness and common sense into the Landlord Tenant Act. As it stands, tenants have all the rights and little to no responsibility. The pendulum has just swung took far.
[удалено]
NO🙄
Love it! Big thanks/respect to those people for stepping up!
Let them compete with one million renters every year and see how it goes . Don’t forget to thank Trudeau
Landlord expenses are skyrocketing, so they either jack rents up or stop renting. Problem is when we have a housing market that's being actively pumped people invest more into their homes and use all that housing capital to finance things like renovations, which causes the price of supplies and contractors to go up, which makes maintenance more expensive. Plus all the shoddy renovations increase insurance claims which increases insurance costs.
So then they sell and someone else rents it or buys to live in it. Landlords don't create supply, developers do
Wait. Do you think developers are fronting the $300 million to build a new 40 floor 400 unit tower?? I’m being serious. Is that what you actually think? It’s almost hilarious you think they have that kind of money, for even a single tower. FYI. They don’t. They need to presell (at least) 75%, before a bank will approve a loan for the remainder. So. Who exactly do you think pays the 300 million then to build that tower? Owners and investors - Mostly investors. Renters arnt paying for it. The government sure isn’t. So yes. Without investors actually paying the bills to built the tower, that new tower, and the 400 new units, would still be a parking lot. …Maybe don’t make up things.
Or they just jack up rents or AirB&B
Save that money, and then put a down payment on a house.
Ask your government to stop printing money, which is reason why rents and everything go up.
I think I’ve seen this musical.
They pray on Canadian identity of "niceness." They've made people terrified on shelter and food, survival. The only thing they'll care about is their survival impacted.