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Originally Posted by albertGQ
Maybe he and city council can help out a bit and stop gouging home owners with large property tax increases.
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Aren't our property tax rates some of the lowest in Canada?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hesla
Yeah ... Nenshi is in the wrong here and usually i find myself agreeing with him.
I took a loss on my rental condo for 3 years and now i have a very small gain based on the market value of my area. My rent in 4 years has gone up on average $50 / year.
Is this gouging ?
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I don't think he was referring to all landlords categorically.
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Ask home builders what the city's policy of increasing urban development at the expense of suburban growth has done, and they'll tell you it's created the housing crunch they predicted long ago. No matter how much the city may try to force condo living on the masses, people will want yards. Without new development farther out, this increases the cost of the houses that already exist (or moves people to outlying areas where they don't pay for Calgary city services). This further puts lower income homeowners into the condo market, which takes away from the rental market, putting people into the Drop-In Centre.
Whose fault is that? That's a planning issue.
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It's a catch 22 because if you keep growing the city outwards it becomes increasingly expensive to serve a city with government services over such a spread-out area. Condensed population centers are less expensive to serve since the people aren't spread out over such a huge area. Plus, denser population growth reduces the number of new cars on the road which makes a big difference in terms of how much money needs to get poured into building new roads and widening existing ones, etc.