i think that there should be a law passed that says that you're not allowed to rent a property that you own less than 80% of, unless it's a new development. this would prevent people from buying second properties by getting second mortgages on the houses they own, then using the income to pay their banks. it doesn't make sense for middle or upper class people to expect low income renters to pay their mortgages, but that is what is driving up the rents - people just buy houses at whatever the costs, then pass it on to renters, without spending the time doing the math, or really caring.
the result is that the person working at the tim hortons ends up paying off the government worker's overpriced mortgage, which that government worker couldn't otherwise afford, and just in order to have shelter. that's not logical and that's not fair. that shouldn't be allowed. the system should be telling the middle class workers to pay their own fucking mortgages, and helping the wage slaves escape from the tyranny of serfdom. there should be far greater protections in place to stop the middle class from exploiting low income workers and students.
the purpose of housing is not to generate income. housing is not an investment. i'm not even arguing against capitalism, which is supposed to be critical of idle rentiers. deregulation has led us back into feudalism, and put us on the road to serfdom.
it would also help if they just cut interest rates, but that's going to take a while to go through.
i went through some volatility, but then i got lucky. i got into a program that's going to subsidize my rent. i could technically afford over $1500/month for rent at this point, but am currently paying $1000 and don't want to move again.
not everybody is going to navigate the system or get into this program. there's currently a problem with people buying properties as investments instead of as places to live that needs to be addressed by the federal government.
it's one thing to rent an old house you're not using because you inherited it or moved somewhere else, or your situation changed, or whatever else. but explicitly buying old properties in urban cores at high interest rates to immediately rent them at high prices to poor people is not good for society and is driving up rents and should be banned by requiring a certain level of ownership before you're allowed to rent. this will ensure that the property owners are getting more of the rent and the banks are getting less, so that property owners are not dumping the cost of their over-priced mortgages that they cannot afford onto the working class, which can afford it even less. that will open up more affordable properties for people with lower incomes to buy, instead of be forced to rent.
something else that is driving up rents is the recent near ubiquity of property management companies, which are introducing an unnecessary bourgeois layer that needs to get paid. there are very few rental units, at least around here, that are just run by somebody renting their basement, anymore. everything is run by a management company, with some absent owner behind it that just gets a cut, and which is increasingly hiding ownership concentration. what we see are these dozen or so management companies; what we don't see is that they're managing portfolios of dozens or hundreds of properties, all owned by the same person. the state needs to step in and break up these hidden ownership conglomerates by passing rules on how many single-family houses one entity can own, and how far they can live from the properties they own.
the city and the province can only do so much. it's the feds that need to step in and start breaking up concentrations of ownership, but they have broadcast that they are more interested in maintaining high property values.