Quote:
Originally Posted by GGG
If you want to drive down housing cost you need to drive down land value. In order to drive down land value you have to tax the #### out of it, or increase density per unit of land, or make more land available.
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I am doubtful that massive taxes would honestly get you to cheaper homes. By increasing the land taxes substantially the cost of ownership will skyrocket and make the homes as unaffordable as if you left the system as it is now.
Honestly, I think you need to refine your strategy and start looking at other levers. For example:
1) Reduce the competition for buying a house by restricting who can buy
- Eliminate foreign ownership could start with eliminating people outside of Canada from owning land. However, you can go further and say that if someone doesn't live in Alberta then they cannot own a home in Alberta.
- Eliminating corporate ownership of homes (with some exceptions) would also reduce competition for home ownership
2) Limit the number of properties a person can own
- Owning a second home for a family member? That's cool.
- Owning 10 rental homes as an investment? Not so cool.
- Running a slumlord inventory of hundreds of homes? Super not cool.
3) Regulate home building so they have a cap on profits
4) Move the home building to the public sector so that profits are not a primary motivator of the industry
5) Increase land taxes on corporations that own prime real-estate, which is the same as your idea but you filter out 'people' and just tax corporate owned land at higher levels.
This should be done long before you do it to people's homes. The CP rail yard is a great example. That amount of inner city land could be tens of thousands of homes walking/biking distance to downtown.
6) Take prime land from corporations to develop density for housing people. The company will be compensated and can buy new land on the edge of the city for their warehouse or whatever.
etc.
You can start pulling different levers at different times to get the results that you want. As a populist, my decisions would focus on what is best for the people and what would impact the people the least.
Powderjunkie keeps saying the reason to be happy with blanket rezoning is because the process was inefficient... which is a poor argument. If the process was inefficient then fix the process.