40
This Airbnb alternative won’t destroy Canada’s housing market
(breachmedia.ca)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
40 points (90.0% liked)
Canada
7230 readers
641 users here now
What's going on Canada?
Communities
🍁 Meta
🗺️ Provinces / Territories
- Alberta
- British Columbia
- Manitoba
- New Brunswick
- Newfoundland and Labrador
- Northwest Territories
- Nova Scotia
- Nunavut
- Ontario
- Prince Edward Island
- Quebec
- Saskatchewan
- Yukon
🏙️ Cities / Local Communities
- Calgary (AB)
- Edmonton (AB)
- Greater Sudbury (ON)
- Halifax (NS)
- Hamilton (ON)
- Kootenays (BC)
- London (ON)
- Mississauga (ON)
- Montreal (QC)
- Nanaimo (BC)
- Oceanside (BC)
- Ottawa (ON)
- Port Alberni (BC)
- Regina (SK)
- Saskatoon (SK)
- Thunder Bay (ON)
- Toronto (ON)
- Vancouver (BC)
- Vancouver Island (BC)
- Victoria (BC)
- Waterloo (ON)
- Winnipeg (MB)
🏒 Sports
Hockey
- List of All Teams: Post on /c/hockey
- General Community: /c/Hockey
- Calgary Flames
- Edmonton Oilers
- Montréal Canadiens
- Ottawa Senators
- Toronto Maple Leafs
- Vancouver Canucks
- Winnipeg Jets
Football (NFL)
- List of All Teams:
unknown
Football (CFL)
- List of All Teams:
unknown
Baseball
- List of All Teams:
unknown - Toronto Blue Jays
Basketball
- List of All Teams:
unknown - Toronto Raptors
Soccer
- List of All Teams:
unknown - General Community: /c/CanadaSoccer
- Toronto FC
💻 Universities
💵 Finance / Shopping
- Personal Finance Canada
- BAPCSalesCanada
- Canadian Investor
- Buy Canadian
- Quebec Finance
- Churning Canada
🗣️ Politics
- Canada Politics
- General:
- By Province:
🍁 Social and Culture
Rules
Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage:
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
That's still a lot extra if you want to catch up in, say, a decade, but I digress.
I don't think this is the first time I've encountered you pushing for the most technical sense of "shortage", but I still don't get why that's the hill you want to die on. We all agree there's an issue, whatever we call it.
Explain, if you would. It sounds like you have your own idea about why housing prices are higher than we will culturally tolerate.
I'll jump in and offer my (uninformed) opinion. It seems that housing is seen as more of an investment. Developers build higher end houses rather than lower income housing because the profit margins are higher. In this context, reducing the value of housing as an investment by making it harder for owning multiple properties while making it easier for people to own one house could go a long ways to settling out the cost of housing in the mid to long term simply by changing the incentives on what to build.
Short term, just getting some housing supply out of short term rentals and absentee investors hands could put some more housing on the market now.
Is it enough? I doubt it, but we can do more than one thing.
Oh, okay, so the "empty houses in Vancouver" idea. Now, I'm also uninformed about the ins and outs of landlording, but it sounds like you make a decent amount being a slumlord with maximally many tenants, too.
I can, at least, attest that investments usually have their own economic logic, and there's no free lunch there either. If you want to make a lot of money from an investment, you either come in with a big sum of money to start with, or you need to get lottery-winner lucky. That's why I was a bit skeptical about that explanation from the start, and why the physical lack of supply explanation seems like the simplest one now.
I think the "empty houses" isn't all or nothing. A house used for an AirBNB results in empty hotel rooms, and is "less full" than a rental that is rented for the whole month. Likewise a large house, with a single occupant is less full than an apartment building on the same land with even a 50% occupancy rate. This is the whole "missing middle density" comes in.
My impression is that developers would rather buy a bunch of land, throw up some upper scale housing, sell it, and move on. You are right that building an apartment building and renting it out is also a viable investment strategy, but it just seems that there are more developers selling houses than landlords building apartment buildings. Granted landlords kind of suck to, so condo's would be better I would think, but what do I know?