B.C.’s Cortes Island is making housing history as the first community in the province to tax short-term holiday rentals and have the funds directed to affordable housing projects, said Mark Vonesch, the area’s Strathcona Regional District director.
B.C.’s Cortes Island is making housing history as the first community in the province to tax short-term holiday rentals and have the funds directed to affordable housing projects, said Mark Vonesch, the area’s Strathcona Regional District director.
I’m copying from my other reply:
The logic here is that the primary owner of houses in Canada is individual families, 65% of residential properties in this country are lived in by the owners. Go ask a home owner if they’d be willing to vote for a party that will intentionally drop the value of their house by 50%. We actually need closer to 70-80% reduction in some places to reach “affordable.”
How would homeowners react to even a 20% drop in prices? Poorly. Therefore the policies currently being proposed won’t even do that much.
Homeowners bought houses as an investment. They expect a return. New buyers expect a return too despite high prices, which is the primary driver of current prices.
I believe the phenomenon of people buying houses “as an investment” is relatively new. People historically bought houses as places to live and have stability. They also happened to be a good investments but that wasn’t their purpose. The change in primacy of purpose is pretty much a direct result of neoliberalization, which has been underway for decades since the post-WW2 era, but became much more normalized in the 70s/80s.
What I mean to say is that it’s a current cultural trend, but hardly a law of the housing market. More problematically, if we make policy based on the assumption that people view houses as investments, it serves to reify that, rather than combat it.
I’d also be shocked if the market prices were primarily driven by your cited 65%. It’s been a long time since our markets and policy-making machines have been primarily driven by the majority of the population. We are a democracy composed of powerful, minority (not speaking about racial groups but class groups) interests. Anyone blaming the 65% for our woes isn’t paying enough attention to the absurd weight and influence exterted by only a handful of people and institutions.
I am someone with a life-long attachment to the island, and who is surrounded by homeowners both on and off of Cortes. They have seen their home prices go up by absurd percentages in the last 5 years, they all recognize it isn’t right, they would not begrudge a market correction. Most people in my experience want everyone to live well and no one well-adjusted takes the “I got mine” attitude when it comes to housing. Meaning, a 20% drop in prices wouldn’t cause them to lose their shit. Heck, they may even welcome it if it meant a thriving community. Money stuck in inflated property prices can’t be invested in community, after all.
The problem isn’t that we don’t know what the problem is, when it started, or what caused it, the problem is that too many voters are invested in it to want to change it.
Hence why I don’t believe it will be changed until the problem gets worse (less owners means less people voting to keep these policies)
It really doesn’t matter if corps are exploiting or causing the increases, because the voters are driving the boat on the policies that keep pumping the market up.
I wish I had your sunny optimism about voters driving the boat.