Housing should be a human right, but now it's not even a utility; it's a luxury good for the wealthy that even the poor must find a way to afford.

I am in a small Ontario town of 12,000 people. Covid caused many rich people from Toronto to come down here and buy up property so they could rent it. I was paying 1000$ for a 3 bedroom that was just built about 5 years ago. It was a nice place and a great price, owned by a guy my father in law works with. He never raised the rent since we moved in.

Some guy from Toronto shows up and buys the property. Instantly raises our rent to the maximum allowed limit. Then when we moved out last year, he listed the place for 2500$... Who the fuck can afford 2500$ rent in a small town that doesn't even have a fucking movie theatre.. Our biggest employers are a fucking warehouse and regional federal government office.

A reminder: rent is the purest form of supply/demand in the housing market. Nobody rents multiple units to sit on them the way people do to buy them. If prices are going up, that means vacancy is low and there just aren't enough units to rent compared to the number of people who are looking for a unit. Landlords hiking prices are hiking prices because somebody will pay that higher price.

The solution has to involve either building a crapload more units, or having less people who need housing (as always, Malthusians are invited to go first). Anybody who is proposing other approaches to this problem is either a con-man or an idiot. You cannot redistribute your way out of a shortage.

My rent renewal offer was up $400.. to $2100 a month, for a shitty apartment.. there's a hole in the bathroom door where somebody punched through it and they couldn't be bothered to fix it.

Fuck u, peasants.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Although the pace of increase has come down ever so slightly, the price of rental accommodation in Canada continues to go up, with the average new tenant now being asked to pay $2,117 a month.

The ongoing tumult in the housing market has garnered numerous headlines of late, as the Bank of Canada's campaign to tame inflation has caused mortgage rates to skyrocket.

"Despite rental apartment completions in Canada over the past 12 months reaching their highest level since the 1970s, rent growth has remained exceptionally strong," the report said.

That comes as no surprise to Torontonian Cassandra Kranjec, who earlier this year begrudgingly agreed to a 14 per cent increase in her rent on a one-bedroom, one-bathroom condo in the Liberty Village neighbourhood.

While he says Canada's impressive population growth and surge in international students may pay off down the line for the economy, in the short term at least it is exacerbating an already acute housing shortage.

"People can jump on a plane this morning and arrive [in Canada] tonight, but we can't put a house on the production line today and have it ready by tomorrow — it takes us three or four or five years to do that."

The original article contains 888 words, the summary contains 199 words. Saved 78%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

I think the answer is to just buy a mobile home with an arctic package. They finance them over 20 years. You can drive anywhere you want. If you are paying over 24k a year to rent, you will pay it off very quickly.