Quote:
Originally Posted by Cecil Terwilliger
Building more houses is completely irrelevant if only the rich can buy them. No amount of supply will bring housing prices in line with wages. Not without collapsing the whole system. Housing needs to be made available to regular people and where the jobs are located (big cities). Wages also need to be increased.
Any approach needs to be multi pronged. Build more, remove all tax breaks for rental property owners and heavily tax anyone owning more than one property, ban foreign ownership, give tax breaks and incentives to first time buyers. Then heavily incentivize multi family developments and restrict endless urban sprawl. Our cities can’t afford that type of infrastructure. And out east they’re eating into valuable farmland. Calgary is unique that we have basically few natural barriers unlike TO, Mtl and Vancouver. But it doesn’t mean we should just build to the horizon, the infrastructure is too expensive to maintain. Not unless we double property taxes on SFHs.
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I don't disagree with a lot of what your are stating, but we do need more supply.
Also, increasing wages without increasing supply is only going to ramp up pricing. We're in a situation, where due to the shortage of available units, people are just throwing stupid amounts of money at housing, both for rental and purchase. Increasing wages is only going to further drive lower income people out and put that money into the pockets of the landlords and investors.
As for farmland, Canadians want to hold onto this dream of having farmland that's also close to major cities. That's simply not sustainable with the kind of growth we're seeing. The farmland is going to have to expand further out from the cities.
I'm a huge proponent of increased density and moving away from the model of single detached housing. However, there are so many people coming into Canada, even that won't be enough.