A Green and Liberal MPP have worked together to develop a plan they say could fix the Ontario housing crisis in 10 years.
Kitchener Centre MPP Aislinn Clancy and Etobicoke-Lakeshore MPP Lee Fairclough are co-sponsoring a private member’s bill that they say creates a housing-first plan. Experts CBC News spoke to say while not perfect, if passed, the bill would take important steps to really addressing the homelessness crisis being felt in municipalities across Ontario.
Bill 28, Homelessness Ends with Housing Act includes the creation of a portable housing benefit, setting up an advisory committee of people with expertise and collecting data on supportive housing to make sure the province is meeting its targets.
“Every Ontarian deserves a stable, safe, affordable place to live, and this new legislation offers a solution and a clear path rooted in evidence, compassion and a commitment to housing as a human right,” Clancy said in a news conference on Tuesday.
In the case of the housing crisis, it really isn’t.
The longer we continue this pyramid scheme of propping up house prices the more people will be hurt by it.
We need to pass government policies that crash the value of housing by 50-80% instead of continuing to pretend that we can build our way to cheaper houses after the market has shown again and again it will not do that.
I question what that policy will look like though. All house listings must be set to 20% of their 2024 assessed value or last MLS listing?
What I’m hoping to see is government creating non-market housing, but even if not, the government spurring building new affordablly built and dense standardized homes will provide enough places for homeless and struggling people to live.
It’s not just creating the market conditions and then sitting on our hands whistling, but actually acting as a housing developer that forces the rest of the market to compete that will bring prices down. Legislation won’t, it will just be a boon to the “can we find a loophole around this” business.
There are multiple ways to crash the value of housing.
One of the easiest would be a 100% capital gains tax on property values (not building value). You can no longer profit from simply holding onto land. You can develop it and earn a profit from the building work you do, but just holding it and doing nothing no longer generates any value. This profit motive is what’s pushing the investment in property that drives up prices, and removing it would crash the value of land overnight.
Or, and this is my preferred option, a monthly land value tax (again not on buildings) that is set high enough to replace all of the income taxes, then drop income taxes to 0%. This way we tax people based on how much land they use (which includes how desirable that land is just based on the assessments) not based on how much work they accomplish. People who live in smaller amounts of land (like a condo) pay less tax, and people who want giant mansions near cities can pay the rest of us a bucket load of money that the rest of us workers now save on taxes. Instead of replacing income taxes, I also wouldn’t mind seeing a similar universal basic income system.
By easy you mean of course conceptually easy. I love land value taxes conceptually but politically they will not be easy to implement. In fact none of the solutions to housing affordability will be easy to implement because homeowners don’t want the value of their property to decrease under any circumstances. That is their nest egg and they guard it with extreme jealousy.
You’re absolutely correct. People are yelling for change, but refuse to vote for that change.
And exactly how do you handle the situation where mortgages are now higher than the value of the house itself? The banks are certainly not going to let the mortgages just ‘go away’.
You handle it the same way we’re handling the crazy high rents right now, by letting some people get hurt. It’s just a matter of who.
In the current system we have, it’s the non-homeowners that are getting fucked, and recent home purchasers too, but since new non-homeowners keep joining the population (kids grow up, and immigrants) that means continual pain for more and more people in a never ending pyramid scheme of sky high prices.
If we crash the market in the way I propose, current homeowners will get absolutely fucked (including me), but going forward the prices will now be affordable and controlled for everyone. It will also make for a much healthier overall economy.
As soon as the home prices hit rock bottom, far below the supply-demand level, people will buy cheap, then raise the price way back up because there will be a bidding war and those with money will still bid the prices way up. House prices are where they should be. The market decides. Only way around this is a pure socialist country where the ‘government’ owns all the land, and rents it out on a perpetual basis to those who want it. They can never sell it, so land prices can never go stratosphere. The government is always owns it. The rent is in lieu of property taxes.
That doesn’t apply when the item has ongoing costs like a land value tax. People don’t bid up items that return a negative value. This is why cars go down in value over time.
A high enough land value tax is the same as a government rent amount, but still allows for individual ownership and the benefits thereof (like being able to make changes to the property)