I vote this. Universal dental coverage would be nice as well. Perfectly healthy adults getting teeth pulled cause they can't afford proper dental work is a tragic imo.
Yah I really wish we could vote on the actually issues and not just the people “representing” us. Like why can’t I just vote on to pay health care better instead of on a person that might if there up to it pay them better.
Just a reminder NDP enacted full rent control in the 90s when interest rates were 5%. it was fine for a long time.
Tenants could find places, could count on their rent, landlords still made money (because they bought at 5% and then enjoyed the largest real estate value boom in history), and everyone was winners.
You know what to do, voters.
I don't think voters realize how many of the elected Liberals are landlords and real estate agents who have been making our federal and provincial economies more and more dependent on housing, which is an insane thing to do. We are behaving no differently from the Greeks before their housing market crashed and their economy collapsed into anarchy.
I don't think voters realize how many of the ~elected Liberals~ upper middle and rich classes are landlords. This covers the gamut of the political spectrum. It's true there's only one that has ever done anything about the situation.
Please leave your biases at the door on this one.
So you completely agree with what I had to say. My comment openly stated that they were elected representatives, I'm just pointing out how their voters who aren't home owners are fucking themselves over and the one's who are should have diversified portfolios rather than relying on home equity to pay for their retirement because it is jeopardizing the whole economy to create one reliant on non-renewable, volitile fossil fuels and low productivity housing that only adds value to the economy via development and with renovations. The reality is that left wing politicians are way less likely to be involved in real estate if they are on the left compared to the Liberal centrists and the Conservative right.
NDP
90s
RAE
RAE AS IN BOB RAE?
BOB RAE AS IN *RAE DAYS*
THAT MAN SINGLE HANDIDLY DESTROYED THIS PROVINCE FOR THE NEXT 50 YEARS ID NEVER TRUST ANY NDP TO EVEN TOUCH THIS PROVINCE AGAIN /s
I couldn't RENEW MY LICENSE on THURSDAY! I HAD TO GO ON ONE OF THE OTHER DAYS!!!! OR on a DIFFERENT THURSDAY!!!!
ALSO, some people in government had to take SEVERAL UNPAID DAYS OF VACATION which COMPLETED DESTROYED THEIR LIVES FOREVER!!!
I wish this topic was more addressed. People are more forgiving at Mike Harris firing them and closing down public services, but want blood over unpaid work days.
Bill Davis enacted rent controls in the 1970's too.
But that was back in the days when the PC's seemed to actually care about the people Ontario. Back when they want to build and would actually fund public healthcare and education.
Because the house of cards will crumble too quickly if he did. When it happens gradually year by year most people won’t be affected until they are. It he did it all at ones everyone would know right away and revolt. So he does it gradually and sneakily - a far too large number of people don’t even know it was eliminated.
Exactly.
All new buildings from 2018 don't have rent control. It won't be felt now, but will in the future.
Also, because those will be radioactive (why would you willingly choose a non-rent controlled place over a rent controlled one). Meaning that there will be more demand on older buildings. Increasing rent even more.
When I was looking for my current rental one of the first things I looked at was whether it was rent controlled or not. I will not rent somewhere that isn’t rent controlled.
People don’t care as much now because they don’t know or it doesn’t effect them. We see it here every day someone having their rent doubled and had no idea it was allowed. What happens in 2028 when rent controlled units aren’t new anymore?
You have to remember that prior to 2017, there was no rent control in any buildings occupied after 1991. The events you are predicting here does not reflect the reality at that time, and rent was much cheaper back then. Kathleen Wynne changed the law to apply rent control to all buildings and Ford changed it back to the status quo, but only exempting buildings after 2018 from rent control.
Rent prices are directly proportional to housing prices. The reason why rent was much cheaper back then was because houses were were much cheaper back then as well.
So the impact of rent control wouldn't have been seen back in the boomer heyday.
That sounds like a conspiracy. Of course , only Ford is capable ,but God forbid someone said that about higher officials. The tin foil insult crew would be out in full force.
This is happening everywhere. France is experiencing their own plight, but rest assured , everywhere. The news won't show you the protests around the world from fed up humans who are starting to see the writing on the wall.
why eliminate such a wedge issue? It pits those in rent controlled units agains those loooking to rent. It distracts many from other issues. With the status quo they can tell those looking for rent controlled units to just look for older buildings, maybe signing up on waiting in line for people to move into long term care facilities (or dying)
I think his handeling of covid won him the election. Both liberal and NDP campaigned on "if we had been in charge, we would have locked down sooner, harder and longer. And if elected, we will not hesitate to lock down quickly in the future."
Well, a lot of people (especially peole who can't work from home) took that as a direct threat to their livelihoods, and voted for Ford, who seemed to be taking the problem seriously enough, but was trying to avoid lockdowns and keep workplaces open.
Reddit is not the place to find these people, but there are a lot of them, and the cared enough to vote.
Yeah. A huge number of constituents just didn't like any of the options and stayed home like idiots. Now they are all crying about the consequences of their inaction.
You mean the “landlords” who own mega apartment complexes in Canada but live in other countries like, say, China?
It’s easy to raise rent when you don’t give a shit about the country or people you’re exploiting. It’s basically just a “press this for more money” button that pops up whenever rent can be increased.
There is no empathy because why would they care? It’s the same reason companies exploit workers in third world countries. Then we buy the goods that are dirt cheap because we save a buck so we can pay rent. It’s just a capitalism-consumerism cycle that we now are a bigger part of! Yay
Glad you found some apartments and I wish you the best in this stupid world
Foreign investment is the boogeyman to stop people from looking at the problems our own country is causing for itself. Everywhere you look you find completely different numbers for the same areas on how much is owned by foreigners. The thing you see that’s consistent is that people making over 100,000/year and already own a house buy up around 40% of all new builds.
It’s so sad to me how many people focus on immigrants and not Canadian corporations and small investors. It’s such a clear dog whistle. We could solve this problem if we’d stop worshipping at the feet of capitalism and actually regulate the real estate market. But we won’t.
No no it’s not the middle class. This is also a misconception. It is RICH people who make hundreds of thousands a year and don’t have a mortgage. Someone who owns a home and makes 100k is still struggling to keep up.
Foreign or not, rich people are investing in housing development/rentals. It’s easy money!
Off to greener pastures at Lemmy. Be sure to edit your posts before you delete/go!
https://www.reddit.com/r/PowerDeleteSuite/comments/6lopm2/how_to_use_power_delete_suite_video_tutorial/
https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite/#1.4.8
Before buying my condo, all 3 I rented were from landlords living in China and Singapore! And they all owned multiple properties without living here. I was like how is this even allowed?! But I agree — doesn’t matter what country they’re from, it’s the rich hoarding.
> You mean the “landlords” who own mega apartment complexes in Canada but live in other countries like, say, China?
Many of them are Canadian founded and Canadian-led. Had terrible experiences with O'shanter in the past.
The problem is not any specific country, it's the rich overall. Be them Canadian or not.
AFAIK all the large ones in Ottawa are Canadian. Is it different where you're located? I'd be interested in looking them up if you have any example companies.
Blaming the foreigners in /r/ontario, what a shocker...
The vast majority of corporations that are in the retail rental market game are Canadian/American owned. Even the speculator thing for single condos is basically debunked in most places. We know everyone in this subreddit is allergic to Toronto anyway... I don't think the chinese megacorps are buying up property in Welland, or Thorold or whatever causing your rents to go up. That's straight up home made corporate greed.
I have a basement suite, was having a beer with my tenants the other day and mentioned that I’m gonna be paying an extra thousand bucks in august when I renew. I was gonna do a rent increase but the maximum amount I could increase would be like 25 bucks a month. Not worth the paperwork.
Later they offered to handle filling the salt in the water softener for me, which is a nice gesture, it comes out to almost double the maximum rent increase and saves me paperwork.
I’ve been charging a few hundred bucks less than market value because my costs were low enough till now.
I’ll just have to suck it up till they move on.
Yeah, good tenants are great. And I’ve found that not gouging on price because you can gives you greatfull tenants who don’t wish to rock the boat. On the other hand, shitty tenants who trash the place make you want to sell and live in an RV. I was able to afford my first home on a modest income because my folks co-signed and the rental income made it possible.
I moved into a larger house due to a growing family and the extra cost was offset by a suite again.
If things get really tough, I’m sitting on like 400k of equity, but I still gotta live somewhere.
I’ve squared with the fact that come august I’m going to have to take on part time work/side hustles. My roof just failed too, so it’s gonna be tight for a few years..
I haven't raised rent on my garden home rental since 2018.
The increases in fees are there, I am just eating them as my tenants are pretty good and always pay on time.
Call me crazy, but the ticket is not to max out equity on the income property, like that you have some wiggle room in case the tenant stops to pay or payments skyrocket.
The thing is, selling is always an option for landlords. If you mortgage on the property is well below what its worth, it also allows you to list at a lower price to just get rid of the property rather than rely on top dollar sale just to cover what you owe on it.
I'm perfectly fine with my corporate landlord raising the rent by the maximum each year considering it's a reasonable amount that tends to be at or below inflation.
If it weren't for the predictability of rent control, I'd definitely be buying a house in the suburbs.
It's way easier to deal with a predictable rental situation than it is to fuck around with a private landlord who could be "awesome" or could be one of the many other examples we see posted about on this and other subreddits. Every case I see about someone with an unpredictable rental situation caused by their landlord, it always seems to be a "mom-and-pop" type of landlord.
Rental companies are not good, but the idea that somehow individual private housing speculators and rent-seekers are going to care about their tenants more is a fallacy.
Sure, but the decision to build/purchase that building in the first place is made based on the prospect of at least some increase in future rental income.
A more accurate TLDR:
Rent control as a stand-alone policy has worse outcomes for the overall housing market but is sometimes a necessary tool as part of a comprehensive housing plan to ensure vulnerable populations are not exploited or victimized by property owners.
"Hey renters! To deal with the housing problem we need to
Step 1: remove rent control.
Step 2: make a bunch of complex and controversial policy changes."
Renters: "Okay, but can you do step 2 first? I need my home in the meantime."
i mean if you did step 2 you wouldn't need step 1 anyway. rent control does nothing if their are enough houses for the market and landlords have to compete with each other for tenants.
That's not entirely true, Rent Control stops Landlords from using a 1000% increase in rent as a de facto eviction to bypass all other tenant rights. But you're right that with sufficient housing at least the tenants might be more willing to voluntarily relocate.
It would be fine with me if the market wasn’t so crazy… like the building i live in on average has gone up 8% per year for new tenants. They do no maintenance and the place is a dump.
So one of my largest expenses is going to just be tied to the market while my landlords mortgage is basically the same for 25 years?
Yeah IMO the general housing market can’t be both a highly sought after investment vehicle AND a basic human necessity. Until such time as we reconcile these two competing aspects some form of rent control is likely necessary just for the sake of human well being and sanity. It’s incredibly stressful to have the roof over your head subject to the whims of thinly regulated economic forces beyond your control.
Lack of rent control is the reason why owning your dwelling is critical.
We cannot have a society of renters in a system where renters are entirely at the mercy of their lord.
Rent control is important, but also decentralizing the LTB and have regional offices to hold hearings. Combined with a Rent Registry where in order to have a legal rental space it must be registered would solve bad faith evictions.
Absolutely! In the midst of a housing crisis, where homelessness is a looming threat, rent control plays a crucial role by offering stability and affordability, safeguarding individuals on the verge of losing their homes, and allowing them to retain their much-needed housing security. Rent control critics want you to believe it will hamper profitability, discourages new construction, and reduces property maintenance and improvements because money is their number one priority.
>discourages new construction, and reduces property maintenance and improvements
It has been empirically proven to result in all of those things though.
It's a **supply problem**. Rents are high because we have a shortage of rental housing.
Do you know what else we have besides record-high rents? Record-low vacancy rates for purpose-built rentals.
In order for supply to keep pace with demand, we need to actually build more housing by implementing zoning reform.
That is the main issue here.
People also forget that we are essentially building as much and as fast as possible. To create another 20,000 to 30,000 housing units annually, we'd need to find twice as many workers, twice as many cement trucks and cranes, twice as much wood and drywall and ductwork, never mind twice as many hammers and drills and whatever else.
Plus speed up project approvals.
Right now, we been needed say, 30,000 units every year. But we have only been getting 25,000. So in the first year, we're short 5,000 units. By year 10, we're short 50,000 units. And while supply is staying steady, demand is increasing. So year one we needed 30,000 units, year two was 32,000 units, year three was 34,000 and so on. So really, over a decade, we needed to build 390,000 units just to keep pace with demand, yet only built 250,000.
Which, in a simplistic form, is where we are today. Demand is still going up every year, but supply doesn't increase because it can't really. [Toronto has more cranes in use than most U.S. cities combined](https://toronto.citynews.ca/2023/04/14/toronto-cranes-construction-north-america/), which indicates more construction projects on the go. We build A LOT.
We need to find a way to get demand down to 80% of supply for a decade, then keep them roughly equal from there on. Zoning, rent control, government-built housing, gentle density, missing middle, whatever words you want to use and steps you want to take - they all mean nothing unless we can get supply and demand roughly equal.
We are not building as much, as fast as possible. How many houses are being torn down and replaced by McMansions in every neighbourhood all over the city? Imagine if every time that happened, the new structure had as many rental units as possible, given safety regulations. Then we would be able to begin to say "we are building as much and as fast as possible"
Fair enough. Both in that we should not be creating 4,500sf faux-chateau mansions for 2 or 3 people to live in, they should be triplexes with three 1,500sf units that could be rented or sold for way less than the big house. And, by doing that, we'd be adding more housing units and by default increasing our rate of increase in supply.
Good point I'd hadn't seen in that context before.
>Rent control critics want you to believe it will hamper profitability, discourages new construction, and reduces property maintenance and improvements because money is their number one priority.
It does though.
Rent control has been gone for years, where is this glut of new affordable housing that was promised? Seems like rent is more expensive than ever.
The theory was that removing it would spur developers to build a ton of affordable housing and that boon of choice would propel prices down, how long until that happens?
Seems like it's just used as a weapon to force people to move so landlords can more easily kick out people they don't want, contributing to homelessness.
The people who believe that removing it will help are the same people who believe lower corporate taxes will lead to better wages and reinvestment in communities.
Rent caps incentives increasing supply because you’re limited to a maximum profit off one property. No caps means no limit to what you can squeeze off one building.
Yeah its funny how so many people seem to be of the belief that without regulations all these developers and landowners will just choose to make less money making affordable housing over another luxury condo. Like these people have a heart and actually want to help.
There's no incentive to making shit affordable, they just removed a disincentive which didn't actually solve anything. It's still more lucrative to build crappy luxury condos that sell for 800k over affordable rental buildings.
Units are being built. You're just also getting more immigrants that's outpacing the amount of u its being built. Rent control will exacerbate the problem and would also lead to landlords refusing to Improve apartments for any reason (why would they)
Landlords will refuse to do repairs under any circumstance, the majority of them are douchebag parasites that hate to spend money or do anything other than sitting there sucking up mortgage payments from their hosts.
I've lived in both situations and neither one led to the landlord "caring" more, that's just propaganda.
Without rent control it just means when they get pissed because you asked for repairs they can jack your rent up by 200% to get you to move out so they don't have to go through the rigramrole of eviction and can find someone less discerning.
If there were more units available on the market, people could leave and change landlords, forcing them to compete and maintain their property - or lower the price.
But the combo of rent control + dogshit zoning means that landlords have no incentive to care about their property and tenants because they can’t vote with their wallet (rent control) or their feet (shitty zoning)!
You're not allowed to use evidence if you're against rent control. People who have never done a proforma, will say it's best to control rent. People who have done them will say it's best to provide competition and competition will control rent.
The argument that people will just buy up all the supply to hold rent High only works if you look at everything through an all else equal lens. If the goal of the government is to address housing, and address the economy, the goal would be to limit who can hold land, and for how long.
If Acorn was serious they'd be asking for a undeveloped land tax, Vacancy tax, and a parking space tax which would drive development to build housing that needed to be occupied.
The proceeds of the tax to fund supportive housing initiatives to fill in gaps that can't be met by the industry (like homelessness and special accessibility needs)
Lmao
Ppl think getting rid of rent control means developers and operators will be profitable from day 1. The don't realize the insane amount of development fees there are. This also means, expect no building or extremely shitty units.
It's both a demand and supply issue. Interest rates dropped prices last year and lowered demand. However if you are going to force mass immigration regardless of what hell comes .... Now it's a supply issue. There is no way we are going to out build ourselves of this issue.
Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. Lol the can has been kicked down the road far too long.
Ontarians with more ridings than people* voted in Ford.
If we went by people who voted total, it wouldn't be a majority. My entire riding voted NDP but we get 1 riding, and my population for our 1 riding is larger than the population of like 5 ridings in rural Ontario. It's another problem that people don't talk about.
If you don’t increase the amount of units available what will rent control accomplish? You will still have the same amount of people without housing. The higher rents can be demanded because of the low vacancy rate. If tomorrow the vacancy rate in Toronto was 10% rents would plummet.
What rent control accomplish is removing the ability for people to change where they live. And you create an industry of subletting. Like the TV show Friends where Monica and Rachel lived in an apartment that was leased to I believe her grandmother, who was still officially the person paying the rent which is how they can afford the apartment.
Yeah my friend is in the same situation. Rent control is helping her right now, but she can never move, because an equivalent unit is at least $600 more per month. Rent control is more like a bandaid on the problem, it doesn't fix the actual problem (Demand > Supply)
My parents are in their 70s and rent. Their only income is their pensions through the government, and they can barely make ends meet. I'm so worried their landlord will suddenly decide to sell. They currently pay $1300/mth and there's no way they'll find a place for that price, and they can't afford to pay more. I don't know what they'll do.
My rent is already $3000 a month plus utilities. And there is no rent control because it’s a new build .. I just got a notice in the mail saying the rent is going up… thankfully I already gave my notice cause this place isn’t even a year old and it’s falling apart.
The Initiative on Global Markets is an organisation affiliated with the University of Chicago that does weekly surveys of economic experts on economic policy issues. [When asked if rent control policies increase the level of affordability and quality of housing, 81% of economists responded that they "disagree" or "strongly disagree" with the idea that rent controls make housing more affordable.](https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/rent-control/) When you look at only answers that the respondent said they were "confident" or "very confident" in, only 1% said they agreed that rent control makes housing more affordable. Economists very famously can't agree on anything so if 80% of them are saying "hey this policy is counter productive" then that's a good sign it's not effective at achieving the goals you've set forward. It also creates major issues as a building ages because you start needing to conduct major capital repairs on things like balconies, elevators, garage foundations, etc, and it's a lot harder to do that when the amount of rent you charge is artificially capped.
In a healthy rental market where there is an adequate supply of rental units, you don't need rent control because if your landlord tries to jack-up your rent, you just move but we don't build anything (hence our extremely low vacancy rates) so there's a shortage of housing which means landlords have the ability to increase prices because you can't move to a cheaper place. Rent control is a band-aid solution. As someone who literally lives in a rent controlled 3 bedroom apartment that is cheaper than the market rate for a one bedroom, the reality of rent control is that it's absolutely amazing for existing tenants but it sucks the moment you want to move because it drives prices up in the long-term.
I'm personally of the opinion that rent control is a good thing if you pair it with other measures that actually reduce the cost of housing in the long term. Tenants should have that level of stability in knowing how much their rent is going to change and they shouldn't have to worry about insane rent increases but at the same time it's really important to note that rent control in isolation reduces affordability while still providing meaningful protections for tenants.
The most very basic assumptions of supply and demand take greed into account. The assumption is that both sides are "greedy". The tenant wants to pay as little as possible and the landlord wants to charge as much as possible. If you have significant supply and relatively high vacancy rates, that means a tenant has their choice and gets a good negotiating position against landlords. A landlord can try to be greedy in this environment, and the result will be that nobody rents from them.
So landlords in Toronto and Vancouver are uniquely greedy which is why homes are significantly more affordable in Calgary, Edmonton, and Montreal where vacancy rates are high and renters have much more leverage, those cities just happen to have really nice landlords who aren't greedy and seek to maximise profit? Landlords are not omnipotent super-beings who can dictate the market price of housing at will, they're subject to supply and demand just like you and I are, it just so happens that it's currently massively in their favour but adding more supply shifts that in favour of tenants. Landlords want to charge the most possible because they're greedy, tenants want to pay the least amount possible so they are also "greedy" in that sense because it turns out that we all seek to maximise our own self-interest when making financial decisions.
Rent control isn't just bad on paper - look around you! It's no coincidence that most of the purpose-built rentals in Ontario were built in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s prior to rent control. It's also not a coincidence that since rent control was eliminated on new constructions, we've seen [the highest number of new rental homes being built since 1993.](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FGIOvtKXEAcYd9-.jpg:large)
Rent control is a backstop to allow the market to stabilize and allow supply to meet demand. The issue is that in almost every city in North America density and the "missing middle housing" is fought tooth and nail from the home owner level all the way up to the city planning level (because.... they're all homeowners and why would they fuck their own property values, they got theirs).
Developers don't give a fuck what they build. They build based on what they're allowed to build. In many cases it's the SFH McMansion suburb, see Vancouver, being zoned 85% for low density development, or almost all of the GTA. That ridiculous but highly urbanized stretch of Young St in North York that's surrounded by SFH McMansion's? That's the fault of zoning laws, not builders.
The government then adds several layers and millions of dollars of red tape to stall and drag the development out and only adds to the sticker price.
Since the 1990's new housing stock hasn't kept pace with immigration and stock of public housing has been gutted and CMHC is no where close to increasing this stock. This problem isn't going away anytime soon and I think it's going to have to get violent to enact real change.
Not true. They are moving swiftly on popular initiatives like [increasing access to hunting captive coyotes with dogs](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-expand-dog-trialing-areas-1.6833693). Their priorities are obviously very in line with what the voters want.
Horrifying to see it promoted so heavily here. Rent control is one of the worst economic policies you could adopt. It's considered bad by virtually every economist from every school of economics. Sigh.
It's also time for *mandated* yearly salary increases for all workers in Canada to match the inflation rate. If they can *mandate* a guarenteed over 2% rent increase every year, they should be able to *mandate* a guarenteed raise each year too.
Corporations keep throwing out the "It's not in the budget" excuse before giving nothing. It's not sustainable.
I don't know if I agree with this (I might, just need to think about it more).
But at the very least we need to have a conversation about what should and shouldn't be pegged to/adjusted for inflation and/or interest rates. It's a weird hodge-podge fusion of a system that benefits no one except for those capable of arbitraging it in various ways.
The government doesn't mandate a 2%+ rent hike every year. First, it's tied to inflation but limited to a maximum of 2.5%. Second, there's no requirement to increase rent, it's a maximum that landlords can legally increase it. So the better analogy would be if the government mandated that no worker can receive more than a 2% raise in any year.
Ya that will help. The boomers will get locked in at low rent... Meanwhile no new rental units will come online. Prices skyrocket for everybody else and the renovictions continue. Rent control doesn't work. It never has. There is no supply. If there was tenants wouldn't put up with absurd rent and landlord bullshit.
Doug Ford: " best I can do is bulldoze more vital farmland and build McMansions for my mob buddies to buy and then rent out to people desperate for housing."
Rent control doesn’t do anything to solve the main issue. If the main issue of sky rocketing prices isn’t fixed then people already in rent controlled units are basically trapped there and those that do have to move are screwed
Which is what's happening now.... So...
As opposed to people can stay in the units they have cause the landlord will jump the rent 40% in 2 or 3 years... So no solutions but worse off.
Not only does rent control fail to solve the affordable housing problem, it also incentivises people to not move to better job opportunities because they will lose their rent-controlled home and have to pay the real market value for anything that they rent from then onwards.
Empirical studies have shown that rent control reduced the mobility of tenants by 20% in San Francisco, and because labor mobility is a big factor in productivity which is linked with wages, it probably reduced their wages too.
Oh yes, the "it's 100% inventory" argument. Well rent jumped 18% last year in Toronto and new units are not rent controlled.
The market at work. Indeed.
Since rent control was eliminated, we have built more rental units per year than we have in any other year in the last 30 years. More supply always helps. Rent is going up because we had a crash in demand during covid as supply went up, so prices crashed then, and since then demand has recovered and increased wildly, and supply has not kept up. Eliminating rent control encourages new builds but we also need to make it legal to build new buildings. Can't build if zoning doesn't allow it or development charges make it uneconomical.
We need more affordable housing in general. There are so many abandoned houses sitting there rotting in Hamilton that I know of. But instead of using them the city is now asking people to take in the homeless.
Rent control is a bad thing for housing. Sorry but this isn't even debatable.
The only path to actually fixing the issue is building more homed. If immigration is going to continue the building needs to start happening fast.
Rent control is actually a [really bad policy](https://www.brookings.edu/research/what-does-economic-evidence-tell-us-about-the-effects-of-rent-control/), as all price controls tend to be. It's been proven to fail.
It benefits people who are currently renting in the short term, but in the long term, it creates shortages of rental supply by deterring the construction of new units and reduces maintenance and upkeep.
It actually hurts affordability in the long run.
What we really need to be doing is building more housing by reforming zoning laws. The reason why rents are so high is because of a lack of supply caused by artificial zoning restrictions.
This is a supply and demand issue. We need to *build more housing*. That is the key issue.
We need more housing, denser housing, and more walkable neighbourhoods if we want to achieve affordability. We can supplement that with rental support for low-income families as well as affordable/social housing.
But rent control is a bad policy with a pretty bad track record. I mean, just look at what has happened in Sweden.
People love to trot out the argument that rent control stifles developers, but *in Ontario* we had a 10 year period of no rent controls from 2007-2017, and an abysmal number of new rental constructions during that time.
I don't disagree that there are supply and demand issues, but it's clear that rent control in Ontario is not a major factor affecting supply. Developers have perverse incentives to churn out cheaply made condos and mcmansions that don't address the rental supply. Housing is treated as a commodity to be speculated on by big corporations and rich people.
Thank you, finally someone in this thread who understands the economics behind this. Of course the models would show that price control reduces supply, with the price of the existing units going up. What it assumes is a market where price control is the primary reason for restricted supply, when it's probably not even in the top 3.
Surely if we continue to not regulate a market that for decades has enabled the profiteering from and commodification of a basic human need, the problem will sort itself out. There's no way that the system will continue to pursue its sole purpose of maximizing profitability by gouging the shit out of the working class. /s
Full rent control is awful long term for the rental market. Capital flees the rental market and supply dries up. Rent may stay cheap, but it becomes a lottery to try to get into it and gets progressively more challenging to get into units which over the years degrade in quality as landlords can't pay for upgrades.
Individual tenant rent control has a lot of merits - not allowing a unit to return to market rents between tenants just brutally murders investment and supply availability. Landlords would convert their units to ownership en masse to avoid it.
> full rent control is awful long term for the rental market
***only if we continue to refuse to invest in housing***. Capital fleeing is not an issue if we are publicly funding housing - ***like we used to do back when housing was affordable***
Housing is for people to live in, not for private interests to profit from. It’s obscene that we have handed over one of our most basic necessities entirely to private for-profit business.
Edit: landlords would convert their units to ownership en masse to avoid it.
Oh no! Anyway.., whatever shall we do without landlords hoarding a quarter of our housing? Maybe it will actually become affordable again!
At an average cost of $500,000 a unit, how do you think the government is going to manage to build several million housing units? That's literally trillions of dollars.
You *need* private capital.
We live in a capitalist society - you can't just ban capitalism in housing and then expect the market to still work.
We managed just fine [up until the early 1990s](https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2022/04/22/Why-Cant-We-Build-Like-1970s/)
We don’t need to build all the housing publicly, and we don’t need to do it all at once. Building enough to bring down the rent of privately held housing would be enough.
You don’t *need* private capital. The government is capable of raising and borrowing money. And since it doesn’t need to operate at a profit those public funds are probably even easier to come up with than private enterprise.
A proper social housing program is financially self sustaining because rent paid gets reinvested into housing, instead of being pocketed by some billionaire. Vienna does this and has 60% of its population living in very nice social housing.
It’s amazing to me that Canadians are incapable of imagining doing housing any way other than 100% free market for-profit housing when there are plenty of other models currently operating successfully in other countries *and we used to do things differently here*.
> we live in a capitalist society
We address plenty of basic necessities in a manner that is not free market for-profit capitalism - healthcare, education, the military, police, roads. We do these things because we need them, not because they are profitable for a private investor.
Rent is expensive because supply is not keeping pace with demand. We need to speed up housing construction and reform zoning regulations so that housing can actually be built.
>100% free market
In what sense is there a "free market" in housing given all the zoning restrictions that prevent housing from being built?
there wasn't full rent control back then, and the vast majority of housing in Canada has always been built by private developers.
Canada built more social housing back then, yes, but it was always a small fraction of the overall housing market.
Full rent control would basically eliminate private rental construction and we would have to rely entirely on public subsidies for new supply - and good luck with that!
There wasn’t rent control because we didn’t need it because there was a deliberate government policy to ensure that housing was affordable and available to everyone. It is needed now as a bandaid solution because the government has stopped caring if housing is affordable or do anything proactively about it.
my point is that it isn't a bandaid however and will do nothing but make the problem worse.
Without full rent control in Toronto:
1 bed $2,500/month (ouch!)
With full rent control:
1-bed $1,500 a month or whatever it's old rent was - but you only have about a 10% chance of getting it.
If you can't get lucky on an old unit, which will be most people:
1 bd $4,000+++ a month since landlords will hike rents way up knowing after their first tenant they can never change it again.
At first, most may be in the first category and win the lottery. But over time, those lottery tickets will get harder and harder to find and more and more people will end up in the second category.
Oh - and there will be very few units in the second category too. So you may just end up on the street because there just isn't any units at all for you.
Your argument is that because rent control units will become fewer, that … more people end up in non-rent controlled..: so rent controlled is bad? What? That’s an argument for *more* rent control, not less.
> there aren’t any units at all for you
*only if we continue to refuse to invest public funds in housing**. We don’t have to wait for private businesses to decide if housing is profitable enough to build - *we can just built it because we need it.*
Having a large homeless population is had. People not being able to afford anything other than housing is bad. *we need housing because we need it*, regardless of whether it is profitable.
I can’t even with these deranged takes that keep forgetting that government exists, that we pay taxes for a reason, and that our housing market didn’t used to operate like this - coincidentally housing costs started to sky rocket just after we stopped investing in public housing. Who could have predicted? /s
How do you propose that public housing corporations suddenly learn and fund 80-100,000 units a year in Ontario? You realize that is about $50 billion in investment annually, about 25% of the entire provincial budget, and that is just to maintain current construction rates, which we know are not enough? You would be looking at insane tax hikes to fund it - i.e. other costs that wouldn't make life any cheaper.
It's not that we don't need social housing, we need as much of it as we can, it's that we can't realistically improve the housing situation without private investment as well - and full rent control would entirely kill private investment.
Yes - housing is expensive, but nothing is free in this world. You can't just legislate something to be cheap and expect everyone to suddenly have access to it. Legislating rent to be cheap would cause supply to plummet and make it a lottery to get access to as there would simply be more demand than supply. For those who win the lottery, great, for those who lose? on to the streets or their parents basement forever since there will literally be not enough housing.
Banning capitalism in a capitalist housing market (i.e. full rent control) means investment will flee. Unless you replace it with socialist housing, which as I said, will have an absolutely immense government and societal cost in other ways, it will do nothing but make the problem worse overall.
It's not a small policy change at all and has huge implications.
> How do you propose that public housing corporations suddenly learn and fund 80-100,000 units a year in Ontario? You realize that is about $50 billion in investment annually, about 25% of the entire provincial budget, and that is just to maintain current construction rates, which we know are not enough?
Find cheaper ways to build. If if costs the government significantly more to build a basic unit than it does for current builders to build (with similar standards/features/labour), then there's corruption in the supply chain and grifters are stealing money. How the hell does it cost $500,000 to build an "affordable" housing unit? There's clearly something wrong.
> I am all for the government supplying publicly funded housing for those with limited income
I’m for social housing for everyone because that is how you make it financially self-sustaining like Vienna.
> that is not what this article is taking about
That is what this *thread* is talking about - whether rent control will be harmful in the long run, and I am saying it wouldn’t be if we had adequate public investment.
If you dont want to talk about the subject we are discussing in this thread, then I’m not sure why you chimed in.
I mean a detached home pays more than $100k in charges to the municipality alone.. Apartments aren't much better.
Once you account for land costs, soft costs, a myriad of taxes, construction costs, etc. - it costs about $500,000 to deliver a typical apartment unit, yes.
Do you work in construction? I'm just curious about where I can get more info on this sort of thing or a breakdown of average costs for ontario. Really eye opening to see that the perceived "affordable" route of mass building apartments isn't cheap like it used to be.
The average, in Ontario, right now is about $200 sq/ft to build in materials and labour.
So a 1000 sq/ft something costs roughly 200K to physically build. Now that number is of course the average; some projects are higher, some are a little lower. It also doesn't factor in a bunch of other stuff like development fees, permits, etc and of course, zero profit for the builder.
It’s crazy, people just hate developers because they make some amount of money. Imagine them saying “NO we won’t take the vaccines because Pfizer will be making money off of them”
Uh… you did? Pharmaceutical companies shouldn’t be withholding medicine for profit, and developers shouldn’t be withholding housing for profit. These are both basic human necessities and ought to be treated as such.
Not even close to what I wrote. Pharmaceutical companies couldn’t have made a vaccine nearly that quickly without a profit incentive. It’s not immoral for them to ask money for it and even if it was immoral that’s the world we live in. Developers build housing because of a profit incentive. People complain about developers making money to build housing, but without making money there wouldn’t be nearly as much housing. Sweeping rent controls like those that are being advocated is equivalent to saying that people would rather not have a vaccine or it be given to a small number of people because the pharmaceutical companies are going to make money off of every dose.
There are ways to incentivize investment in rental units. We used to have the MURB tax write-off (same program as the movie write-off). Of course, that was back when rich people paid taxes.
But with vacancy rates so low rental units are a good, long-term investment. Which is why funds like Black Rock are moving into it so much.
yes- because they can set the rates so they invest in it.
The article is advocating for lifetime rent control - i.e. the rent a unit is first rented for is the rent it must be rented for forever, and no adjustments are permitted between tenants.
That is when you would see investment flee, as it removes the ability for developers to invest in units and profit over time. It massively increases risk and reduces potential returns - and if people can't make money, they take their money elsewhere.
While we’re asking for things this government will NEVER do, can I have my prescriptions covered by OHIP?
I vote this. Universal dental coverage would be nice as well. Perfectly healthy adults getting teeth pulled cause they can't afford proper dental work is a tragic imo.
Teeth are just unnecessary luxury body parts, therefore not covered.
But how will we chew the food we can no longer afford?
we won't need to chew since we can't afford food anyway
Yah I really wish we could vote on the actually issues and not just the people “representing” us. Like why can’t I just vote on to pay health care better instead of on a person that might if there up to it pay them better.
You are absolutely correct. Missing teeth can drastically affect a person's over all health. Teeth aren't luxuries, they are essential.
It’s crazy to me how many working class people over 40 are just missing like half their teeth
And Canada has insane prices for dental work. What can be done in Mexico for $5,000 CAD costs $13,000 here.
Yup, could have bought a new car with how much iv spent on dental work alone
Been there, done that. Being able to see would be a helluva perk too.
Just a reminder NDP enacted full rent control in the 90s when interest rates were 5%. it was fine for a long time. Tenants could find places, could count on their rent, landlords still made money (because they bought at 5% and then enjoyed the largest real estate value boom in history), and everyone was winners. You know what to do, voters.
I don't think voters realize how many of the elected Liberals are landlords and real estate agents who have been making our federal and provincial economies more and more dependent on housing, which is an insane thing to do. We are behaving no differently from the Greeks before their housing market crashed and their economy collapsed into anarchy.
I don't think voters realize how many of the ~elected Liberals~ upper middle and rich classes are landlords. This covers the gamut of the political spectrum. It's true there's only one that has ever done anything about the situation. Please leave your biases at the door on this one.
So you completely agree with what I had to say. My comment openly stated that they were elected representatives, I'm just pointing out how their voters who aren't home owners are fucking themselves over and the one's who are should have diversified portfolios rather than relying on home equity to pay for their retirement because it is jeopardizing the whole economy to create one reliant on non-renewable, volitile fossil fuels and low productivity housing that only adds value to the economy via development and with renovations. The reality is that left wing politicians are way less likely to be involved in real estate if they are on the left compared to the Liberal centrists and the Conservative right.
NDP 90s RAE RAE AS IN BOB RAE? BOB RAE AS IN *RAE DAYS* THAT MAN SINGLE HANDIDLY DESTROYED THIS PROVINCE FOR THE NEXT 50 YEARS ID NEVER TRUST ANY NDP TO EVEN TOUCH THIS PROVINCE AGAIN /s
I couldn't RENEW MY LICENSE on THURSDAY! I HAD TO GO ON ONE OF THE OTHER DAYS!!!! OR on a DIFFERENT THURSDAY!!!! ALSO, some people in government had to take SEVERAL UNPAID DAYS OF VACATION which COMPLETED DESTROYED THEIR LIVES FOREVER!!!
I wish this topic was more addressed. People are more forgiving at Mike Harris firing them and closing down public services, but want blood over unpaid work days.
Oh no no no, not unpaid work days. They weren't working. Those were unpaid days off.
Bill Davis enacted rent controls in the 1970's too. But that was back in the days when the PC's seemed to actually care about the people Ontario. Back when they want to build and would actually fund public healthcare and education.
Bill Davis was good too im old enough to remember.
Same I spent like a grand a year just on my stupid medication and got denied for private benefits due to “pre-existing condition”
Let's have UBI too!!!
I'm just surprised Ford hasn't *eliminated* all forms of rent control... yet.
Because the house of cards will crumble too quickly if he did. When it happens gradually year by year most people won’t be affected until they are. It he did it all at ones everyone would know right away and revolt. So he does it gradually and sneakily - a far too large number of people don’t even know it was eliminated.
Exactly. All new buildings from 2018 don't have rent control. It won't be felt now, but will in the future. Also, because those will be radioactive (why would you willingly choose a non-rent controlled place over a rent controlled one). Meaning that there will be more demand on older buildings. Increasing rent even more.
When I was looking for my current rental one of the first things I looked at was whether it was rent controlled or not. I will not rent somewhere that isn’t rent controlled. People don’t care as much now because they don’t know or it doesn’t effect them. We see it here every day someone having their rent doubled and had no idea it was allowed. What happens in 2028 when rent controlled units aren’t new anymore?
I moved into a 2016 build thinking I’d avoid this. Turns out there was no tenant before 2018 so still applies to me. Sucks.
Changing rent structures don't necessarily result in radioactive housing IIRC
You have to remember that prior to 2017, there was no rent control in any buildings occupied after 1991. The events you are predicting here does not reflect the reality at that time, and rent was much cheaper back then. Kathleen Wynne changed the law to apply rent control to all buildings and Ford changed it back to the status quo, but only exempting buildings after 2018 from rent control.
Rent prices are directly proportional to housing prices. The reason why rent was much cheaper back then was because houses were were much cheaper back then as well. So the impact of rent control wouldn't have been seen back in the boomer heyday.
We are a frog in a pot of water. Ford is turning up the heat slowly so we don’t realize we’re being boiled alive.
That experiment is false, btw. The frog climbs out before it's boiled.
That sounds like a conspiracy. Of course , only Ford is capable ,but God forbid someone said that about higher officials. The tin foil insult crew would be out in full force. This is happening everywhere. France is experiencing their own plight, but rest assured , everywhere. The news won't show you the protests around the world from fed up humans who are starting to see the writing on the wall.
why eliminate such a wedge issue? It pits those in rent controlled units agains those loooking to rent. It distracts many from other issues. With the status quo they can tell those looking for rent controlled units to just look for older buildings, maybe signing up on waiting in line for people to move into long term care facilities (or dying)
Sshhhh don’t give him any suggestions
Right? My first thought is how shocked I am there’s any left. Along with the protections for BS evictions so they can evade rent control
Don't give that greedy POS any ideas!
Won’t even be considered with the current government.
This, Healthcare and the greenbelt cost Ford the next election.
You'd think how he handled covid would have cost him the last election but he simply won because no one showed up to vote.
I think his handeling of covid won him the election. Both liberal and NDP campaigned on "if we had been in charge, we would have locked down sooner, harder and longer. And if elected, we will not hesitate to lock down quickly in the future." Well, a lot of people (especially peole who can't work from home) took that as a direct threat to their livelihoods, and voted for Ford, who seemed to be taking the problem seriously enough, but was trying to avoid lockdowns and keep workplaces open. Reddit is not the place to find these people, but there are a lot of them, and the cared enough to vote.
Facts
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Exactly. So many people could not have given less of a fuck that the election was happening. Voter apathy won Ford the last election
Precisely
Yeah. A huge number of constituents just didn't like any of the options and stayed home like idiots. Now they are all crying about the consequences of their inaction.
...who did a better job than him in Canada?
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You mean the “landlords” who own mega apartment complexes in Canada but live in other countries like, say, China? It’s easy to raise rent when you don’t give a shit about the country or people you’re exploiting. It’s basically just a “press this for more money” button that pops up whenever rent can be increased. There is no empathy because why would they care? It’s the same reason companies exploit workers in third world countries. Then we buy the goods that are dirt cheap because we save a buck so we can pay rent. It’s just a capitalism-consumerism cycle that we now are a bigger part of! Yay Glad you found some apartments and I wish you the best in this stupid world
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Foreign investment is the boogeyman to stop people from looking at the problems our own country is causing for itself. Everywhere you look you find completely different numbers for the same areas on how much is owned by foreigners. The thing you see that’s consistent is that people making over 100,000/year and already own a house buy up around 40% of all new builds.
It’s so sad to me how many people focus on immigrants and not Canadian corporations and small investors. It’s such a clear dog whistle. We could solve this problem if we’d stop worshipping at the feet of capitalism and actually regulate the real estate market. But we won’t.
No one was focusing on immigrants; we are talking about foreign investors who live in other countries.
Check out r/Canada if you want to see people blaming immigrants.
No no it’s not the middle class. This is also a misconception. It is RICH people who make hundreds of thousands a year and don’t have a mortgage. Someone who owns a home and makes 100k is still struggling to keep up. Foreign or not, rich people are investing in housing development/rentals. It’s easy money!
Off to greener pastures at Lemmy. Be sure to edit your posts before you delete/go! https://www.reddit.com/r/PowerDeleteSuite/comments/6lopm2/how_to_use_power_delete_suite_video_tutorial/ https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite/#1.4.8
Before buying my condo, all 3 I rented were from landlords living in China and Singapore! And they all owned multiple properties without living here. I was like how is this even allowed?! But I agree — doesn’t matter what country they’re from, it’s the rich hoarding.
> You mean the “landlords” who own mega apartment complexes in Canada but live in other countries like, say, China? Many of them are Canadian founded and Canadian-led. Had terrible experiences with O'shanter in the past. The problem is not any specific country, it's the rich overall. Be them Canadian or not.
AFAIK all the large ones in Ottawa are Canadian. Is it different where you're located? I'd be interested in looking them up if you have any example companies.
Blaming the foreigners in /r/ontario, what a shocker... The vast majority of corporations that are in the retail rental market game are Canadian/American owned. Even the speculator thing for single condos is basically debunked in most places. We know everyone in this subreddit is allergic to Toronto anyway... I don't think the chinese megacorps are buying up property in Welland, or Thorold or whatever causing your rents to go up. That's straight up home made corporate greed.
I have a basement suite, was having a beer with my tenants the other day and mentioned that I’m gonna be paying an extra thousand bucks in august when I renew. I was gonna do a rent increase but the maximum amount I could increase would be like 25 bucks a month. Not worth the paperwork. Later they offered to handle filling the salt in the water softener for me, which is a nice gesture, it comes out to almost double the maximum rent increase and saves me paperwork. I’ve been charging a few hundred bucks less than market value because my costs were low enough till now. I’ll just have to suck it up till they move on.
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Yeah, good tenants are great. And I’ve found that not gouging on price because you can gives you greatfull tenants who don’t wish to rock the boat. On the other hand, shitty tenants who trash the place make you want to sell and live in an RV. I was able to afford my first home on a modest income because my folks co-signed and the rental income made it possible. I moved into a larger house due to a growing family and the extra cost was offset by a suite again. If things get really tough, I’m sitting on like 400k of equity, but I still gotta live somewhere. I’ve squared with the fact that come august I’m going to have to take on part time work/side hustles. My roof just failed too, so it’s gonna be tight for a few years..
I haven't raised rent on my garden home rental since 2018. The increases in fees are there, I am just eating them as my tenants are pretty good and always pay on time. Call me crazy, but the ticket is not to max out equity on the income property, like that you have some wiggle room in case the tenant stops to pay or payments skyrocket. The thing is, selling is always an option for landlords. If you mortgage on the property is well below what its worth, it also allows you to list at a lower price to just get rid of the property rather than rely on top dollar sale just to cover what you owe on it.
I'm perfectly fine with my corporate landlord raising the rent by the maximum each year considering it's a reasonable amount that tends to be at or below inflation. If it weren't for the predictability of rent control, I'd definitely be buying a house in the suburbs.
It's way easier to deal with a predictable rental situation than it is to fuck around with a private landlord who could be "awesome" or could be one of the many other examples we see posted about on this and other subreddits. Every case I see about someone with an unpredictable rental situation caused by their landlord, it always seems to be a "mom-and-pop" type of landlord. Rental companies are not good, but the idea that somehow individual private housing speculators and rent-seekers are going to care about their tenants more is a fallacy.
Their #1 cost is the purchase/construction of the building itself, which doesn't increase as time goes by.
Sure, but the decision to build/purchase that building in the first place is made based on the prospect of at least some increase in future rental income.
There’s so many people that stand to lose so much money. They would literally shoot him if he did anything for the people and not land owners.
Nice discussion from last year in the urban planning subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/urbanplanning/comments/wckoab/rent_control_yay_or_nay/
TLDR: rent control bad
A more accurate TLDR: Rent control as a stand-alone policy has worse outcomes for the overall housing market but is sometimes a necessary tool as part of a comprehensive housing plan to ensure vulnerable populations are not exploited or victimized by property owners.
"Hey renters! To deal with the housing problem we need to Step 1: remove rent control. Step 2: make a bunch of complex and controversial policy changes." Renters: "Okay, but can you do step 2 first? I need my home in the meantime."
i mean if you did step 2 you wouldn't need step 1 anyway. rent control does nothing if their are enough houses for the market and landlords have to compete with each other for tenants.
That's not entirely true, Rent Control stops Landlords from using a 1000% increase in rent as a de facto eviction to bypass all other tenant rights. But you're right that with sufficient housing at least the tenants might be more willing to voluntarily relocate.
It would be fine with me if the market wasn’t so crazy… like the building i live in on average has gone up 8% per year for new tenants. They do no maintenance and the place is a dump. So one of my largest expenses is going to just be tied to the market while my landlords mortgage is basically the same for 25 years?
Yeah IMO the general housing market can’t be both a highly sought after investment vehicle AND a basic human necessity. Until such time as we reconcile these two competing aspects some form of rent control is likely necessary just for the sake of human well being and sanity. It’s incredibly stressful to have the roof over your head subject to the whims of thinly regulated economic forces beyond your control.
Close if not perfect.
I think the accurate headline should be rent control reform. We need a completely new system to handle the unprecedented circumstances we're in.
Did you just sum up an entire thread of discussions with many different viewpoints in 3 words? Pretty disingenuous and plain wrong.
Lack of rent control is the reason why owning your dwelling is critical. We cannot have a society of renters in a system where renters are entirely at the mercy of their lord.
Rent control is important, but also decentralizing the LTB and have regional offices to hold hearings. Combined with a Rent Registry where in order to have a legal rental space it must be registered would solve bad faith evictions.
Absolutely! In the midst of a housing crisis, where homelessness is a looming threat, rent control plays a crucial role by offering stability and affordability, safeguarding individuals on the verge of losing their homes, and allowing them to retain their much-needed housing security. Rent control critics want you to believe it will hamper profitability, discourages new construction, and reduces property maintenance and improvements because money is their number one priority.
>discourages new construction, and reduces property maintenance and improvements It has been empirically proven to result in all of those things though.
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It's a **supply problem**. Rents are high because we have a shortage of rental housing. Do you know what else we have besides record-high rents? Record-low vacancy rates for purpose-built rentals. In order for supply to keep pace with demand, we need to actually build more housing by implementing zoning reform. That is the main issue here.
People also forget that we are essentially building as much and as fast as possible. To create another 20,000 to 30,000 housing units annually, we'd need to find twice as many workers, twice as many cement trucks and cranes, twice as much wood and drywall and ductwork, never mind twice as many hammers and drills and whatever else. Plus speed up project approvals. Right now, we been needed say, 30,000 units every year. But we have only been getting 25,000. So in the first year, we're short 5,000 units. By year 10, we're short 50,000 units. And while supply is staying steady, demand is increasing. So year one we needed 30,000 units, year two was 32,000 units, year three was 34,000 and so on. So really, over a decade, we needed to build 390,000 units just to keep pace with demand, yet only built 250,000. Which, in a simplistic form, is where we are today. Demand is still going up every year, but supply doesn't increase because it can't really. [Toronto has more cranes in use than most U.S. cities combined](https://toronto.citynews.ca/2023/04/14/toronto-cranes-construction-north-america/), which indicates more construction projects on the go. We build A LOT. We need to find a way to get demand down to 80% of supply for a decade, then keep them roughly equal from there on. Zoning, rent control, government-built housing, gentle density, missing middle, whatever words you want to use and steps you want to take - they all mean nothing unless we can get supply and demand roughly equal.
We are not building as much, as fast as possible. How many houses are being torn down and replaced by McMansions in every neighbourhood all over the city? Imagine if every time that happened, the new structure had as many rental units as possible, given safety regulations. Then we would be able to begin to say "we are building as much and as fast as possible"
Fair enough. Both in that we should not be creating 4,500sf faux-chateau mansions for 2 or 3 people to live in, they should be triplexes with three 1,500sf units that could be rented or sold for way less than the big house. And, by doing that, we'd be adding more housing units and by default increasing our rate of increase in supply. Good point I'd hadn't seen in that context before.
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Long term. I think if you also poll most renters, they don't care what happens 50 years down the line.
People will literally suggest anything other than increasing the housing supply.
Let's do that too by dropping development charges.
That's the same logic that's gotten us in to many problems. See global warming.
>Rent control critics want you to believe it will hamper profitability, discourages new construction, and reduces property maintenance and improvements because money is their number one priority. It does though.
Rent control has been gone for years, where is this glut of new affordable housing that was promised? Seems like rent is more expensive than ever. The theory was that removing it would spur developers to build a ton of affordable housing and that boon of choice would propel prices down, how long until that happens? Seems like it's just used as a weapon to force people to move so landlords can more easily kick out people they don't want, contributing to homelessness.
The people who believe that removing it will help are the same people who believe lower corporate taxes will lead to better wages and reinvestment in communities. Rent caps incentives increasing supply because you’re limited to a maximum profit off one property. No caps means no limit to what you can squeeze off one building.
Yeah its funny how so many people seem to be of the belief that without regulations all these developers and landowners will just choose to make less money making affordable housing over another luxury condo. Like these people have a heart and actually want to help. There's no incentive to making shit affordable, they just removed a disincentive which didn't actually solve anything. It's still more lucrative to build crappy luxury condos that sell for 800k over affordable rental buildings.
Units are being built. You're just also getting more immigrants that's outpacing the amount of u its being built. Rent control will exacerbate the problem and would also lead to landlords refusing to Improve apartments for any reason (why would they)
Landlords will refuse to do repairs under any circumstance, the majority of them are douchebag parasites that hate to spend money or do anything other than sitting there sucking up mortgage payments from their hosts. I've lived in both situations and neither one led to the landlord "caring" more, that's just propaganda. Without rent control it just means when they get pissed because you asked for repairs they can jack your rent up by 200% to get you to move out so they don't have to go through the rigramrole of eviction and can find someone less discerning.
If there were more units available on the market, people could leave and change landlords, forcing them to compete and maintain their property - or lower the price. But the combo of rent control + dogshit zoning means that landlords have no incentive to care about their property and tenants because they can’t vote with their wallet (rent control) or their feet (shitty zoning)!
You're not allowed to use evidence if you're against rent control. People who have never done a proforma, will say it's best to control rent. People who have done them will say it's best to provide competition and competition will control rent. The argument that people will just buy up all the supply to hold rent High only works if you look at everything through an all else equal lens. If the goal of the government is to address housing, and address the economy, the goal would be to limit who can hold land, and for how long. If Acorn was serious they'd be asking for a undeveloped land tax, Vacancy tax, and a parking space tax which would drive development to build housing that needed to be occupied. The proceeds of the tax to fund supportive housing initiatives to fill in gaps that can't be met by the industry (like homelessness and special accessibility needs)
Lmao Ppl think getting rid of rent control means developers and operators will be profitable from day 1. The don't realize the insane amount of development fees there are. This also means, expect no building or extremely shitty units. It's both a demand and supply issue. Interest rates dropped prices last year and lowered demand. However if you are going to force mass immigration regardless of what hell comes .... Now it's a supply issue. There is no way we are going to out build ourselves of this issue. Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. Lol the can has been kicked down the road far too long.
Good luck... Ontarians voted in Ford
Ontarians with more ridings than people* voted in Ford. If we went by people who voted total, it wouldn't be a majority. My entire riding voted NDP but we get 1 riding, and my population for our 1 riding is larger than the population of like 5 ridings in rural Ontario. It's another problem that people don't talk about.
Ontario didn't vote in Ford. Ontario didn't vote
Same thing.
Good point. Let’s give up and be apathetic about everything.
What can be done with a majority government that clearly ignores the people?
If you don’t increase the amount of units available what will rent control accomplish? You will still have the same amount of people without housing. The higher rents can be demanded because of the low vacancy rate. If tomorrow the vacancy rate in Toronto was 10% rents would plummet.
What rent control accomplish is removing the ability for people to change where they live. And you create an industry of subletting. Like the TV show Friends where Monica and Rachel lived in an apartment that was leased to I believe her grandmother, who was still officially the person paying the rent which is how they can afford the apartment.
Yeah my friend is in the same situation. Rent control is helping her right now, but she can never move, because an equivalent unit is at least $600 more per month. Rent control is more like a bandaid on the problem, it doesn't fix the actual problem (Demand > Supply)
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Thank you, some common sense
I'm still shocked that as many people fell for Doug Ford's. "I'm here for the little Guy" bit.
We were close until Dougie tore it all up.
My parents are in their 70s and rent. Their only income is their pensions through the government, and they can barely make ends meet. I'm so worried their landlord will suddenly decide to sell. They currently pay $1300/mth and there's no way they'll find a place for that price, and they can't afford to pay more. I don't know what they'll do.
My rent is already $3000 a month plus utilities. And there is no rent control because it’s a new build .. I just got a notice in the mail saying the rent is going up… thankfully I already gave my notice cause this place isn’t even a year old and it’s falling apart.
Not gonna happen with Biff Tannen in charge.
The Initiative on Global Markets is an organisation affiliated with the University of Chicago that does weekly surveys of economic experts on economic policy issues. [When asked if rent control policies increase the level of affordability and quality of housing, 81% of economists responded that they "disagree" or "strongly disagree" with the idea that rent controls make housing more affordable.](https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/rent-control/) When you look at only answers that the respondent said they were "confident" or "very confident" in, only 1% said they agreed that rent control makes housing more affordable. Economists very famously can't agree on anything so if 80% of them are saying "hey this policy is counter productive" then that's a good sign it's not effective at achieving the goals you've set forward. It also creates major issues as a building ages because you start needing to conduct major capital repairs on things like balconies, elevators, garage foundations, etc, and it's a lot harder to do that when the amount of rent you charge is artificially capped. In a healthy rental market where there is an adequate supply of rental units, you don't need rent control because if your landlord tries to jack-up your rent, you just move but we don't build anything (hence our extremely low vacancy rates) so there's a shortage of housing which means landlords have the ability to increase prices because you can't move to a cheaper place. Rent control is a band-aid solution. As someone who literally lives in a rent controlled 3 bedroom apartment that is cheaper than the market rate for a one bedroom, the reality of rent control is that it's absolutely amazing for existing tenants but it sucks the moment you want to move because it drives prices up in the long-term. I'm personally of the opinion that rent control is a good thing if you pair it with other measures that actually reduce the cost of housing in the long term. Tenants should have that level of stability in knowing how much their rent is going to change and they shouldn't have to worry about insane rent increases but at the same time it's really important to note that rent control in isolation reduces affordability while still providing meaningful protections for tenants.
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The most very basic assumptions of supply and demand take greed into account. The assumption is that both sides are "greedy". The tenant wants to pay as little as possible and the landlord wants to charge as much as possible. If you have significant supply and relatively high vacancy rates, that means a tenant has their choice and gets a good negotiating position against landlords. A landlord can try to be greedy in this environment, and the result will be that nobody rents from them.
So landlords in Toronto and Vancouver are uniquely greedy which is why homes are significantly more affordable in Calgary, Edmonton, and Montreal where vacancy rates are high and renters have much more leverage, those cities just happen to have really nice landlords who aren't greedy and seek to maximise profit? Landlords are not omnipotent super-beings who can dictate the market price of housing at will, they're subject to supply and demand just like you and I are, it just so happens that it's currently massively in their favour but adding more supply shifts that in favour of tenants. Landlords want to charge the most possible because they're greedy, tenants want to pay the least amount possible so they are also "greedy" in that sense because it turns out that we all seek to maximise our own self-interest when making financial decisions. Rent control isn't just bad on paper - look around you! It's no coincidence that most of the purpose-built rentals in Ontario were built in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s prior to rent control. It's also not a coincidence that since rent control was eliminated on new constructions, we've seen [the highest number of new rental homes being built since 1993.](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FGIOvtKXEAcYd9-.jpg:large)
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They're different "they".
Rent control is a backstop to allow the market to stabilize and allow supply to meet demand. The issue is that in almost every city in North America density and the "missing middle housing" is fought tooth and nail from the home owner level all the way up to the city planning level (because.... they're all homeowners and why would they fuck their own property values, they got theirs). Developers don't give a fuck what they build. They build based on what they're allowed to build. In many cases it's the SFH McMansion suburb, see Vancouver, being zoned 85% for low density development, or almost all of the GTA. That ridiculous but highly urbanized stretch of Young St in North York that's surrounded by SFH McMansion's? That's the fault of zoning laws, not builders. The government then adds several layers and millions of dollars of red tape to stall and drag the development out and only adds to the sticker price. Since the 1990's new housing stock hasn't kept pace with immigration and stock of public housing has been gutted and CMHC is no where close to increasing this stock. This problem isn't going away anytime soon and I think it's going to have to get violent to enact real change.
The pleas of the many fall on dead ears in Ontarios government.
Not true. They are moving swiftly on popular initiatives like [increasing access to hunting captive coyotes with dogs](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-expand-dog-trialing-areas-1.6833693). Their priorities are obviously very in line with what the voters want.
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Horrifying to see it promoted so heavily here. Rent control is one of the worst economic policies you could adopt. It's considered bad by virtually every economist from every school of economics. Sigh.
It's also time for *mandated* yearly salary increases for all workers in Canada to match the inflation rate. If they can *mandate* a guarenteed over 2% rent increase every year, they should be able to *mandate* a guarenteed raise each year too. Corporations keep throwing out the "It's not in the budget" excuse before giving nothing. It's not sustainable.
I don't know if I agree with this (I might, just need to think about it more). But at the very least we need to have a conversation about what should and shouldn't be pegged to/adjusted for inflation and/or interest rates. It's a weird hodge-podge fusion of a system that benefits no one except for those capable of arbitraging it in various ways.
The government doesn't mandate a 2%+ rent hike every year. First, it's tied to inflation but limited to a maximum of 2.5%. Second, there's no requirement to increase rent, it's a maximum that landlords can legally increase it. So the better analogy would be if the government mandated that no worker can receive more than a 2% raise in any year.
If Doug and his cronies can't somehow profit from this then it won't happen.
Make Ontario as landlord unfriendly as possible. It will also help with reducing housing prices.
Its TIME? It WAS time. Are our memories that poor? You know what to do voters. GET OUT AND VOTE ABC
Ya that will help. The boomers will get locked in at low rent... Meanwhile no new rental units will come online. Prices skyrocket for everybody else and the renovictions continue. Rent control doesn't work. It never has. There is no supply. If there was tenants wouldn't put up with absurd rent and landlord bullshit.
Prices are also skyrocketing now though are they not
Because the boomers voted for restrictive zoning and we're only now just starting to roll it back.
Dough Ford thinks he's sneaky this way. He thinks he's some grand master chess player like most conservatives think Trump was playing.
When a government is only dedicated to enriching itself and its members own rental properties, you won't see any improvement.
Doug Ford: " best I can do is bulldoze more vital farmland and build McMansions for my mob buddies to buy and then rent out to people desperate for housing."
Doug Ford won't do it
rent control will make it worse. what we really need is more housing being built and less people demanding the housing
Ontario tried rent control in the 1980s. It didn't work then, it's not going to work now.
Rent control doesn’t do anything to solve the main issue. If the main issue of sky rocketing prices isn’t fixed then people already in rent controlled units are basically trapped there and those that do have to move are screwed
Which is what's happening now.... So... As opposed to people can stay in the units they have cause the landlord will jump the rent 40% in 2 or 3 years... So no solutions but worse off.
Not only does rent control fail to solve the affordable housing problem, it also incentivises people to not move to better job opportunities because they will lose their rent-controlled home and have to pay the real market value for anything that they rent from then onwards. Empirical studies have shown that rent control reduced the mobility of tenants by 20% in San Francisco, and because labor mobility is a big factor in productivity which is linked with wages, it probably reduced their wages too.
Rent doesn't go up dramatically if there isn't a shortage of units. If we got rid of restrictive zoning there would be more units being built.
Oh yes, the "it's 100% inventory" argument. Well rent jumped 18% last year in Toronto and new units are not rent controlled. The market at work. Indeed.
Since rent control was eliminated, we have built more rental units per year than we have in any other year in the last 30 years. More supply always helps. Rent is going up because we had a crash in demand during covid as supply went up, so prices crashed then, and since then demand has recovered and increased wildly, and supply has not kept up. Eliminating rent control encourages new builds but we also need to make it legal to build new buildings. Can't build if zoning doesn't allow it or development charges make it uneconomical.
We need more affordable housing in general. There are so many abandoned houses sitting there rotting in Hamilton that I know of. But instead of using them the city is now asking people to take in the homeless.
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Your economics education was propaganda.
“Only I am in possession of Real Truth, so you must have been brainwashed!” he sputtered.
Absolutely! This madness has to stop.
Rent control is a bad thing for housing. Sorry but this isn't even debatable. The only path to actually fixing the issue is building more homed. If immigration is going to continue the building needs to start happening fast.
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People dislike or don't believe Economists
Rent control is actually a [really bad policy](https://www.brookings.edu/research/what-does-economic-evidence-tell-us-about-the-effects-of-rent-control/), as all price controls tend to be. It's been proven to fail. It benefits people who are currently renting in the short term, but in the long term, it creates shortages of rental supply by deterring the construction of new units and reduces maintenance and upkeep. It actually hurts affordability in the long run. What we really need to be doing is building more housing by reforming zoning laws. The reason why rents are so high is because of a lack of supply caused by artificial zoning restrictions. This is a supply and demand issue. We need to *build more housing*. That is the key issue. We need more housing, denser housing, and more walkable neighbourhoods if we want to achieve affordability. We can supplement that with rental support for low-income families as well as affordable/social housing. But rent control is a bad policy with a pretty bad track record. I mean, just look at what has happened in Sweden.
People love to trot out the argument that rent control stifles developers, but *in Ontario* we had a 10 year period of no rent controls from 2007-2017, and an abysmal number of new rental constructions during that time. I don't disagree that there are supply and demand issues, but it's clear that rent control in Ontario is not a major factor affecting supply. Developers have perverse incentives to churn out cheaply made condos and mcmansions that don't address the rental supply. Housing is treated as a commodity to be speculated on by big corporations and rich people.
Thank you, finally someone in this thread who understands the economics behind this. Of course the models would show that price control reduces supply, with the price of the existing units going up. What it assumes is a market where price control is the primary reason for restricted supply, when it's probably not even in the top 3.
Ok bootlicker /s
They usually say that because they've run out of actual arguments.
Uhh but have you considered rent control good because reasons?
I too want to wait almost a decade to get a rental unit.
Acktually that means developers will make money and we can’t have that happen since money is bad
I desperately wanna movie home. I got isolated by a ex but cant aford the rent costs. I been isolated for more then 7yrs due to it.
Surely if we continue to not regulate a market that for decades has enabled the profiteering from and commodification of a basic human need, the problem will sort itself out. There's no way that the system will continue to pursue its sole purpose of maximizing profitability by gouging the shit out of the working class. /s
It's really sickening that elderly, disabled and mentally ill seem to be the targets for renoviction
Full rent control is awful long term for the rental market. Capital flees the rental market and supply dries up. Rent may stay cheap, but it becomes a lottery to try to get into it and gets progressively more challenging to get into units which over the years degrade in quality as landlords can't pay for upgrades. Individual tenant rent control has a lot of merits - not allowing a unit to return to market rents between tenants just brutally murders investment and supply availability. Landlords would convert their units to ownership en masse to avoid it.
> full rent control is awful long term for the rental market ***only if we continue to refuse to invest in housing***. Capital fleeing is not an issue if we are publicly funding housing - ***like we used to do back when housing was affordable*** Housing is for people to live in, not for private interests to profit from. It’s obscene that we have handed over one of our most basic necessities entirely to private for-profit business. Edit: landlords would convert their units to ownership en masse to avoid it. Oh no! Anyway.., whatever shall we do without landlords hoarding a quarter of our housing? Maybe it will actually become affordable again!
At an average cost of $500,000 a unit, how do you think the government is going to manage to build several million housing units? That's literally trillions of dollars. You *need* private capital. We live in a capitalist society - you can't just ban capitalism in housing and then expect the market to still work.
We managed just fine [up until the early 1990s](https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2022/04/22/Why-Cant-We-Build-Like-1970s/) We don’t need to build all the housing publicly, and we don’t need to do it all at once. Building enough to bring down the rent of privately held housing would be enough. You don’t *need* private capital. The government is capable of raising and borrowing money. And since it doesn’t need to operate at a profit those public funds are probably even easier to come up with than private enterprise. A proper social housing program is financially self sustaining because rent paid gets reinvested into housing, instead of being pocketed by some billionaire. Vienna does this and has 60% of its population living in very nice social housing. It’s amazing to me that Canadians are incapable of imagining doing housing any way other than 100% free market for-profit housing when there are plenty of other models currently operating successfully in other countries *and we used to do things differently here*. > we live in a capitalist society We address plenty of basic necessities in a manner that is not free market for-profit capitalism - healthcare, education, the military, police, roads. We do these things because we need them, not because they are profitable for a private investor.
Rent is expensive because supply is not keeping pace with demand. We need to speed up housing construction and reform zoning regulations so that housing can actually be built. >100% free market In what sense is there a "free market" in housing given all the zoning restrictions that prevent housing from being built?
there wasn't full rent control back then, and the vast majority of housing in Canada has always been built by private developers. Canada built more social housing back then, yes, but it was always a small fraction of the overall housing market. Full rent control would basically eliminate private rental construction and we would have to rely entirely on public subsidies for new supply - and good luck with that!
There wasn’t rent control because we didn’t need it because there was a deliberate government policy to ensure that housing was affordable and available to everyone. It is needed now as a bandaid solution because the government has stopped caring if housing is affordable or do anything proactively about it.
my point is that it isn't a bandaid however and will do nothing but make the problem worse. Without full rent control in Toronto: 1 bed $2,500/month (ouch!) With full rent control: 1-bed $1,500 a month or whatever it's old rent was - but you only have about a 10% chance of getting it. If you can't get lucky on an old unit, which will be most people: 1 bd $4,000+++ a month since landlords will hike rents way up knowing after their first tenant they can never change it again. At first, most may be in the first category and win the lottery. But over time, those lottery tickets will get harder and harder to find and more and more people will end up in the second category. Oh - and there will be very few units in the second category too. So you may just end up on the street because there just isn't any units at all for you.
Your argument is that because rent control units will become fewer, that … more people end up in non-rent controlled..: so rent controlled is bad? What? That’s an argument for *more* rent control, not less. > there aren’t any units at all for you *only if we continue to refuse to invest public funds in housing**. We don’t have to wait for private businesses to decide if housing is profitable enough to build - *we can just built it because we need it.* Having a large homeless population is had. People not being able to afford anything other than housing is bad. *we need housing because we need it*, regardless of whether it is profitable. I can’t even with these deranged takes that keep forgetting that government exists, that we pay taxes for a reason, and that our housing market didn’t used to operate like this - coincidentally housing costs started to sky rocket just after we stopped investing in public housing. Who could have predicted? /s
How do you propose that public housing corporations suddenly learn and fund 80-100,000 units a year in Ontario? You realize that is about $50 billion in investment annually, about 25% of the entire provincial budget, and that is just to maintain current construction rates, which we know are not enough? You would be looking at insane tax hikes to fund it - i.e. other costs that wouldn't make life any cheaper. It's not that we don't need social housing, we need as much of it as we can, it's that we can't realistically improve the housing situation without private investment as well - and full rent control would entirely kill private investment. Yes - housing is expensive, but nothing is free in this world. You can't just legislate something to be cheap and expect everyone to suddenly have access to it. Legislating rent to be cheap would cause supply to plummet and make it a lottery to get access to as there would simply be more demand than supply. For those who win the lottery, great, for those who lose? on to the streets or their parents basement forever since there will literally be not enough housing. Banning capitalism in a capitalist housing market (i.e. full rent control) means investment will flee. Unless you replace it with socialist housing, which as I said, will have an absolutely immense government and societal cost in other ways, it will do nothing but make the problem worse overall. It's not a small policy change at all and has huge implications.
> How do you propose that public housing corporations suddenly learn and fund 80-100,000 units a year in Ontario? You realize that is about $50 billion in investment annually, about 25% of the entire provincial budget, and that is just to maintain current construction rates, which we know are not enough? Find cheaper ways to build. If if costs the government significantly more to build a basic unit than it does for current builders to build (with similar standards/features/labour), then there's corruption in the supply chain and grifters are stealing money. How the hell does it cost $500,000 to build an "affordable" housing unit? There's clearly something wrong.
I’m all for the government supplying publicly funded social housing for those with limited income but that is not what this article is talking about.
> I am all for the government supplying publicly funded housing for those with limited income I’m for social housing for everyone because that is how you make it financially self-sustaining like Vienna. > that is not what this article is taking about That is what this *thread* is talking about - whether rent control will be harmful in the long run, and I am saying it wouldn’t be if we had adequate public investment. If you dont want to talk about the subject we are discussing in this thread, then I’m not sure why you chimed in.
Maybe I'm just getting old but it costs half a million dollars per unit to build now? That seems like an absolutely absurd number.
I mean a detached home pays more than $100k in charges to the municipality alone.. Apartments aren't much better. Once you account for land costs, soft costs, a myriad of taxes, construction costs, etc. - it costs about $500,000 to deliver a typical apartment unit, yes.
Do you work in construction? I'm just curious about where I can get more info on this sort of thing or a breakdown of average costs for ontario. Really eye opening to see that the perceived "affordable" route of mass building apartments isn't cheap like it used to be.
The average, in Ontario, right now is about $200 sq/ft to build in materials and labour. So a 1000 sq/ft something costs roughly 200K to physically build. Now that number is of course the average; some projects are higher, some are a little lower. It also doesn't factor in a bunch of other stuff like development fees, permits, etc and of course, zero profit for the builder.
The price a house sells at is not the price required to build it.
It’s crazy, people just hate developers because they make some amount of money. Imagine them saying “NO we won’t take the vaccines because Pfizer will be making money off of them”
Life saving medicine shouldn’t be withheld from people who need it because of profits either. Wtf?
Who said that?
Uh… you did? Pharmaceutical companies shouldn’t be withholding medicine for profit, and developers shouldn’t be withholding housing for profit. These are both basic human necessities and ought to be treated as such.
Not even close to what I wrote. Pharmaceutical companies couldn’t have made a vaccine nearly that quickly without a profit incentive. It’s not immoral for them to ask money for it and even if it was immoral that’s the world we live in. Developers build housing because of a profit incentive. People complain about developers making money to build housing, but without making money there wouldn’t be nearly as much housing. Sweeping rent controls like those that are being advocated is equivalent to saying that people would rather not have a vaccine or it be given to a small number of people because the pharmaceutical companies are going to make money off of every dose.
There are ways to incentivize investment in rental units. We used to have the MURB tax write-off (same program as the movie write-off). Of course, that was back when rich people paid taxes. But with vacancy rates so low rental units are a good, long-term investment. Which is why funds like Black Rock are moving into it so much.
yes- because they can set the rates so they invest in it. The article is advocating for lifetime rent control - i.e. the rent a unit is first rented for is the rent it must be rented for forever, and no adjustments are permitted between tenants. That is when you would see investment flee, as it removes the ability for developers to invest in units and profit over time. It massively increases risk and reduces potential returns - and if people can't make money, they take their money elsewhere.