• @otp
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    32 months ago

    If people aren’t going to lease, won’t they sell anything they’re not living in?

    They’d either rent it out, sell, or sit on an empty home.

    If they’d be content sitting on an empty home, then we just need to tax empty homes. (Which would be great for those landlords who have 20 “homes” in their townhouse for international students…)

    • @[email protected]
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      fedilink
      22 months ago

      No.

      Anyone with a spare room won’t rent. Why would a 25 year old rent out a room in a 2 bed if they thinking of starting a family or upgrading in 5 years? Why would a old couple rent out a room if they want to leave it to their children.

      Even family homes. Maybe it’s in a good area and in 5-10 years the land can be turned into more profitable high density but seeing as you can’t throw people out of they homes it will make more sense to leave it vacant or knock it down.

      It would massively reduce the supply of housing.

      Equally no one would bother building housing at all, it wouldn’t financially make sense. It’s not like they have to spend money in Toronto they would just spend it elsewhere.

      • @otp
        link
        12 months ago

        People talk about the housing crisis, not the rooming crisis. As well, aren’t shared homes under different laws already? So all of those room renting examples aren’t in the same boat as homes.

        I know that in Ontario, we count LTC beds as homes…but we can be a little bit more honest here.

        If people are buying properties to hold them vacant for 5-10 years, then we have other problems. And like I said, we could tax that vacant home. And if it’s a big enough problem, we could pull in all that tax money and use it to build more housing.

        And I know that some people buy housing to rent it out, but some people buy housing to live in. And some of those people are buying brand new houses or condos…to live in. So there’s still a market for buying new housing, and even if we can’t build it with tax dollars, there would be someone who’d be interested in building units to sell to that market, even if it’s not all investors.