I’d only want this if we did election reform to any variant of ranked choice voting federally, mandated it for provincial and municipal elections as well and somehow enshrined this in the charter that no subsequent government can change this. We should also have ten year terms mandated. 4-5 years is too little for proper long term planning.
Would of course need a couple more safeguards preventing that I can’t think of, but either way, I would not want a dictatorship to take away land for itself with malice.
I’ve said this like a dozen times in the comments. A dictatorship can ALREADY take away your land if they wanted to. The Canadian government expropriates land from private citizens all the time.
And then we attract pricks into the federal government who ignore rules and they evict everyone overnight so that they can build a resort for themselves.
Look, I get the sentiment, but this sort of centralization is scary.
Then how would your proposition change anything, except that the government would have even less reason to pay private citizens after forcing them to move?
It changes the money part of the equation. You could no longer sell your land because you wouldn’t own it. The government is the beneficiary of any land value appreciation, not private investors.
I don’t think that really answers the question and feels like a nothing burger. There would be no land appreciation when it’s all owned by the government. Its value is purely perceived and never realized in such a scenario.
And to be fair, land is somewhat of an interesting case. Suppose you own a piece of land and have no debtors, but you’ve died without descendants or relatives, and certainly without a will, wouldn’t the government just take over that? In essence, the government has a holding on the land, and you’re holding an indefinite lease that can be transferred. Expropriation is simply a mechanism for the government to take back the lease, but they are still obligated to pay to owners. To the owners, it sucks, cause you might really like the piece of land, or that your livelihood depends on it. Hence the conversation should be about fair compensation or equivalent exchange, and a strong scrutiny of expropriation (provably worthy investments being done by the government).
That said, that does depend on your political beliefs on individual freedom. I believe that we should have the freedom to be where we want and do what we want, but to the extent where it doesn’t cause others pain, discomfort, or jeopardy of any sorts (physical, mental, societal where appropriate), or when there is something that would benefit us, collectively. Being asked to move, and being paid fairly to do so, is annoying and disruptive, but if all we do is reject every attempt of improving public spaces and infrastructure projects, then I think we have a more serious problem than just land ownership.
Of course, every case of expropriation should be fully scrutinized. Do these people HAVE to move? There are many ways to incorporate existing infrastructure with new ones.
I simply don’t believe or trust that governments will forever be benign, and full ownership of land by only the government is no different from the age of kings: all it takes is one bad king to ruin it all.
Even in an anarchic society, there’s still a sense of ownership of space: this is where I can be alone by myself, and that my right to privacy in my space is respected.
There is land value, it’s reflected in the amount the government charges the lessee. A property downtown is not going to have the same monthly lease value as a property in the suburbs for the same land size. This changes over time as areas become more or less desirable.
I also don’t believe that the government is perfect, but I do think they’re still better than private landlords who are showing how un-trustworthy they are as we live and breath.
As for your “anarchic society”, you’re actually not correct in this assertion. Large-scale personal ownership of land was uncommon historically, though of course it depends on where and when you look.
The roman empire had private land ownership, but only for a small people. Very few people owned their own land or home.
England was the same, a bunch of lords and dukes and shit. Lots of peasants that didn’t own even the shit from the animals.
If you look at First Nations cultures in North America pre-European contact there was no private ownership at all, it was all collective for the tribes. The Aztec empire was the same, collective ownership by groups.
Tracking the ownership of a plot of land for a lot of people requires a lot of bureaucracy and centralized systems to track it, along with citizenship rights, which simply didn’t exist in most places.
I’m not promoting private ownership of land, but I fail just fail to see how allowing a single entity to manage land would be better than a more decentralized one. Having one dickhead who owns some land trying to gouge others is bad, but we can go somewhere else. If instead, we have THE dickhead who “owns” ALL of the land trying to gouge groups of people they specifically don’t like (oh you know that those racists and neo-Nazi’s will try to get into government), then where the hell are people supposed to go?
Sure, there may be a handful of landlords who own a lot of land and it’s hard to avoid them, but that’s more telling of an oligarchic society and its problems, and not that private ownership is a problem.
Some of those examples from history weren’t great. If anything, they (aside from the tribal ownership of land) more-so exemplify things that seem to frustrate you: few people own the lands and they’ve dickheads about it, but we are left with no choice.
And just because it never happened in the past, doesn’t mean that it’s bad. Personal property isn’t private property. You can use a piece of land how you wish, but you don’t own it forever: you can use it as long as you’re still using it for your personal needs. This “you” can expand into a group, eg a family, and as long as this group still continues to use it directly, it’s “theirs”. No small private group of people can “own” a piece of land and demand those on it to pay for it.
As for saying that tracking private ownership of land is bureaucratic, that doesn’t sound too different from how it’s inherently bureaucratic that the government owns it all.
but we can go somewhere else
This is where you logic breaks down.
A) People tend to like to stay in the city they’re already in, and
B) With the current system we have right now nobody who doesn’t already have a home can afford to do that
If the government owns the land, and you vote in some fucking nazis, then the people have decided that’s what they wanted. That’s how democracy works. It’s not some sort of Utopian system of government, it’s a popularity contest.
No small private group of people can “own” a piece of land and demand those on it to pay for it.
Yes they can, that’s literally what a landlord is. If the only options are Landlord A, Landlord B, or Landlord C… you have no options.
At least with the government you can vote.
The question is more is it better or worse than what we currently have. Right now, private landlords are evicting people pretty constantly for no-fault reasons like landlord-use and “redevelopment”.
You must be in ON, cause I can assure you that in provinces where the Landlord-Tenant board actually functions, like Alberta, thats NOT happening. Its not a Canadian problem, its largely an ON and BC problem and the reason its a problem in those two provinces is because of their restrictive rent controls. They SOUND like a good idea at first but when the rubber hits the road, you cant tell a landlord they can only raise the rent by 2% when inflation has been rising by 4% to 8% and expect them not to use any means possible to raise the rent. Maintenance goes up, supplies go up, appliances go up, trades go up, taxes go up, insurance goes up, but the landlord can only absorb so much and then something’s gotta give and 2% doesnt cut it.
Here in Alberta we can raise the rent by any reasonable amount we like and it works. Rents go up in times of shortage but they also go down when there is an oversupply. So in the last year, the rents in Calgary have DROPPED by 9% because there have been a lot of new rentals come on the market. It works. Rent controls do not.
Rent controls don’t work, I agree. As do most economists.
The rents in Calgary haven’t dropped because of new rental supply though, you have that idea wrong, the rents have dropped because the economy is down. Rents are down in Vancouver too by almost 7%. The supply has barely changed in either location.
Everyone keeps talking about supply solving the issue, but the market keeps actually changing because of demand, it’s impossible to build enough supply fast enough to impact the markets significantly, only by changing the demand can you have a significant impact.
Which is where the government owning the property comes in, the demand for housing isn’t actually coming from people needing places to live. It’s from investors who are buying up properties because they know that people HAVE to live somewhere. If the government owned the land, that speculation goes away almost entirely because it’s no longer profitable. The land values all drop off a cliff, and housing becomes affordable again.
If there’s one thing we don’t lack in Canada, it’s space. The problem is the allocation of it, when Bob and Jane own 3/4 of an acre downtown, and live in their 5 bedroom place by themselves now that the kids all left. That’s the problem. Fuck them, force them to either pay to have that privledge or give up the property so it can be redeveloped to fit 8 families. If they want 3/4 of an acre they can live outside the city.
Nope. Its not the economy. Its supply. There are charts that track available units for each type (apartment, main floor, basement suite, whole house, etc) on the landlord menu of Rentfaster.com. I can look at almost every category and see that the supply is up from what it was a year ago.
eg. Last year on Sept 1 there were **1066 **two bedroom apartments available
This year on Sept 1 there were **1468 **two bed room apartments available
Therefore, average rent for those apartments last year was 2335. This year its **2251 **and dropping. Currently the average has now dropped to **2137 **as of last week. Thats down 8.4%
The rental market is pretty simple. When there’s more supply prices drop. When there’s more demand, prices go up.
You clearly don’t understand how demand works. If demand drops, it looks like there’s more supply.
If you look at the change in population (it increased) and total units in the province(it increased, but not as much) total units per capita has gone down (a decrease in supply)
No those supply numbers are hard numbers. There were 402 MORE two bedroom apartments this year than last year, a 38% increase over last year. Calgary’s population has gone up but only about 5%.
Thats an EXCESS SUPPLY of apartments because the number keeps rising. If people were snapping them up as fast as they were coming available that number would be steady or dropping and rents would be rising. They’re NOT rising because there is excess supply and renters can shop around and negotiate on rent prices. which is why rents are 8 to 10% LESS than last year at this time even though there were still 100,000 people moving to Calgary.
Many out of province investors have flooded into Calgary in the last couple of years, which means many more rentals on the market as they snap up any housing they can find and turn them into rentals.
So your last statement is incorrect. Population has increased but rental supply has increased even more than the demand.
I have been a landlord in Calgary for over 40 years now and we’ve been through several excess demand and excess supply cycles because of our variable economy. We are obviously in an excess supply cycle.
Do you not understand percentages? Do you think there are only 1400 total two bedroom apartments in Calgary? The percentage change in available listings for sale does not in any way show you how many new units were created. Those are just how many people are currently trying to sell and don’t reflect net construction at all.
Calgary grew it’s population by 100,179 people in 2024 but it’s total housing completions were only 21,084 total units. Given that the average housing unit doesn’t even come close to having 5 people in it (the average is usually somewhere in the high 2s) that means the total supply per capita went down.
Eeeh… I dunno. I kind of disagree with that one. I think it’s important to allow people to own their own piece of land. Otherwise everyone can risk being evicted from their home by the government and I don’t like that idea.
Limiting how much land people can own though… Like how many residential properties. That I could go for.
If I buy a book, it’s mine to do what I want with, for as long as I want.
If I buy real estate, the government still gets to say what I do on/with it, and can take it away if they decide they really want it, or if I stop paying them property taxes. That doesn’t sound like ownership; it sounds like a rental agreement.
Its true. Ultimately all land in Canada is ultimately owned by the Crown and can be expropriated at the gov’s desire and no citizen can stop it, no matter what. We do have good laws around being fairly compensated, but you still lose your home, no matter how much you’ve invested in it or how many generations your family has lived on it. My brother in law just lost his because of a new highway coming right through his house. Yes, he got paid out, but its really hard to see 20 years of hard work and a house you built taken away for a road.
Of course there should be guidelines. You shouldn’t be able to use your property as a dumping ground for waste for example. And the taxes pay for the infrastructure that allows you to reach your land, to link it to the water network, to collect waste, etc.
“everyone can risk being evicted from their home by the government”
A) The government already has a tool to do that, in Canada it’s called “expropriation” and they happen fairly regularly.
B) That’s actually a feature of this system. People buying up land and never leaving is actually one of the major problems with our current real estate prices. In areas of high demand, if the government just terminated leases and then forced those properties to be developed we wouldn’t have the pricing issues we have now. Does this hurt people? yes, but also not nearly as much. Given that property would be much more affordable under such a scheme moving elsewhere wouldn’t be nearly as difficult.
I understand your point. But I’m worried about government abusing this.
Yeah you can be expropriated, but usually you either get a fair compensation or have legal tools to defend yourself to a certain extent no?
I think my problem is that I have a certain fear of not being able to own my own piece of land because it’s the most essential things to own. It’s your own little part of the world where you are in control.
The First Nations never had our concept of owning land. The land owns us. So we should respect it - or it will all end up looking like a strip mine eventually.
Will it? I’d say the land I own looks a lot more cared for than the thousands of acres of Crown land that’s right up against my yard. My land gets tended to regularly, the trees and grass are cared for, the weeds are taken out and the deer and bears still get to walk across it and the birds and squirrels still live in the trees. No strip mines in sight.
It’s not essential at all, plenty of people never own property in their life. Especially these days with condos, the concept of owning the land is rather irrelevant since you don’t really own a specific part of it, just an interest in a shared property that you have very little individual say over.
You WANT your own little piece of land, and that’s fair enough, but currently our system of ownership is causing problems for a lot of other people who want a place to live too but just happen to have been born too late to afford it reasonably.
100% agree. Private, inheritable land ownership in the context of a population that doesn’t all enter the game at the same time with the same resources available to them is inherently unjustifiable.
WHERE in life is anyone promised ‘the same resources’? My dad was a poor farmer. My friend’s dad was a multi millionaire owner of a thriving business. No one gets the same start. But you start with what you’ve got and work to improve your life if you want.
Uh, nowhere? That’s why private, inheritable land ownership is unjustifiable. There is no way to make such a system fair when tomorrow you will have a child who is born who will be orphaned and another who will be the beneficiary of land inheritance, neither child being responsible for the conditions they were born into. Yet both are expected to compete for the same resources. We can do much better.
I dont understand why having two different life circumstances make land ownership “unjustifiable”? That doesnt correlate. Life doesnt give us equality. Some will be richer, some poorer but why does that mean a citizen shouldn’t own land?
What’s not to understand? Please, justify to me why an orphan and the child of a billionaire who will receive a land inheritance being made to compete for resources is the best system that we shouldn’t try to get away from? As for what life “gives” us, who cares? We aren’t bound by that, else we should throw away all our tools and return to monkey. We have brains and we can design better, fairer systems than, “Well that’s just the way it is.”
We have a mixed market economy with strong socialist safety net in Canada and it IS the best system because other systems have failed miserably. If you work hard in Canada, you CAN make a lot of money. But even if you are born an orphan in a poor family you won’t die of hunger, because we do take care of the poorest. I worked with street kids in a major Canadian city and NONE of them were completely destitute. They didn’t always have stable housing (often because of their own choices) but they had shelter and they had enough to eat and clothes to wear and a surprising number of them had enough for cell phones and cigarettes despite not having jobs. You cant say that about countries that dont have safety nets.
Plus, a lot of property taxes and other local/regional usage income can be rolled up into the lease payments. What matters is how those leases are calculated, such that small/cheap properties for the working poor lease for almost nothing, but a McMansion (or actual mansion) would lease for a massive amount.
In my opinion, almost ALL taxes should be rolled into this, including most income taxes. Remove all the income tax brackets below 2x the median income, and roll that amount into these lease costs. Working families should essentially get net 0, and people who own a McMansion and are retired just pay more for the privilege or sell it and downsize like they should.
Conditionally agree, except for the immediate effect of income taxes themselves: they are deducted straight from payroll, every time payroll happens, so they are taken on a much more frequent basis and before the paycheque is ever received by the worker.
This means that the worker does not need to allocate anything out of their paycheque towards those taxes because in most cases those taxes have already been fully paid. This dramatically lowers the cognitive load for the worker, who already has significant cognitive loads by virtue of their socioeconomic status.
So there is a downside to that method that I would seek to eliminate or dramatically smooth over so that the working class don’t have yet another brick to trip over in their lives.
This could be ameliorated by having “payroll” (and if need be, even time cards themselves) run through a CRA server that does all calculations and demands a certain amount of money from the employer such that wage theft (aside from tips and a few other things) is almost completely eliminated.
Any employer wanting to dispute when an employee clocked in needs to provide evidence that the employee lied about when they walked in. Government-provided time clocks could then accept standard-issue ID as evidence that the employee clocked in, as any normal person wouldn’t want to just give away their ID, and the employee could track everything through the CRA’s website. Even employee scheduling could be run through this, allowing the CRA to ding employers seeking to game the system for financial gain.
There are many options possible, we just need to engineer the entire system to benefit the working class and (rightly!) treat the employers as the adversarial and untrustworthy belligerents that they are. We could even engineer an entire “worker resources” division which protects the worker against employer depredations, instead of protecting the company at the expense of the worker.
It really isn’t more cognitive load, your payroll taxes go down, but your mortgage/rent goes up. For a lot of working class people, it would actually work out in their favour and they’d end up seeing more net money in their account.
People still think we can build our way into affordable homes, which is impossible. Alternatives like this would actually deliver affordable housing, but you’re right that a lot of people would be unhappy about it.
I beg to differ. In Alberta, three years ago I bought a home for 65,000. Two months ago I bought another one for 60,000. The second one needs some love but it’s livable. I’m currently building a small alleyway home by combining two used buildings and the final cost will be under 30,000.
It IS possible - with some sweat equity - but not in Toronto or Vancouver, thats for sure.
So you buying places where nobody wants to live and doing all the construction yourself is somehow proof that it’s possible to build affordable housing for everyone?
Nobody wants to live in Alberta? Did we mention that Alberta has the HIGHEST interprovincial migration of any province in Canada? We’re building as fast as we can cause there are so many people moving here.
And yes, all the skills Ive learned over the years are now on youtube and can be learned by anyone. My first house gained about 25% in value because I painted it, cleaned up the yard, and built a tiny 4 x 8 front porch and then waited a couple of years to sell it. Not rocket science, just takes some work.
Calgary and Edmonton are the two main centers but not everyone wants to pay the price for living in a big city. There are lots of jobs in smaller centers.
But here’s the thing. You can move to Calgary but you’re going to need to buy a house for at least 600,000. OR you can move to a smaller center and get a house for one tenth of that price.
Now look at the difference in mortgage payments at 5.25%. The Calgary house is going to be 3400. The small town mortgage is going to be $340.
Which means in the small town, you can buy a house paying your mortgage working a minimum wage job and still have money to spare, but in Calgary you better be making over 100k if you hope to qualify for that 600k house.
Sometimes small town living just makes far more financial sense. Especially when youre in driving distance to a bigger city.
I just looked for property in Alberta under 100k, and could only find a handful of places under 100k that were not inside mobile home parks (where you don’t own the land) most of them are court ordered sales and are also mobile homes(on private lots) that essentially need to be replaced entirely.
The only reasonable one I found in the entire province which wasn’t in terrible shape, had it’s own land, and was drivable to what I consider a city was in Elnora, which is about an hour outside red deer. Unfortunately it’s unlikely you could get even a minimum wage job there, because the population is only 288 people and they have only 18 total businesses in the town, and that includes some public places like the post office and library.
The thing to remember about this though, is that it can’t support a larger population choosing this option. A few people could move there, but the moment you get more than a few moving in the prices go way up since there isn’t just a million houses sitting empty in these small towns. There’s maybe hundreds, total in the province.
listen i get yall think your very smart and if you really are that’s great, but you have to swallow the pill and realize there are people who don’t concern themselves with technicalities of every day life or their country. To them, when they buy land, they think they now own it, and not the country. Positioning this as “The government owns the land and rents the houses” will make people spin their heads 5 times over and go “what the fuck no way are we allowing that, that sounds like socialism/commie”
Its all fine and dandy discussions happen on here or reddit about what the government should do or this law or that, but the vast majority of Canadians just don’t have the time or interest to look into things like the average user on here does. Why do you think populist leaders do so well in elections, like doug ford? he talks in plain common words and points, no complicated language that people go “oh this ““nerd”” is talking again”.
I mean, the easy way around this is just to jack up property taxes so high that there’s no real difference between you owning it and you renting it from the government.
I’m going to give a bit of an odd one here.
Nobody in Canada should own land other than the federal government.
All land used by everyone should be leased from them.
This includes everything from the property with your home on it, to uranium mine, to national parks. Everything.
I’d only want this if we did election reform to any variant of ranked choice voting federally, mandated it for provincial and municipal elections as well and somehow enshrined this in the charter that no subsequent government can change this. We should also have ten year terms mandated. 4-5 years is too little for proper long term planning.
Would of course need a couple more safeguards preventing that I can’t think of, but either way, I would not want a dictatorship to take away land for itself with malice.
I’ve said this like a dozen times in the comments. A dictatorship can ALREADY take away your land if they wanted to. The Canadian government expropriates land from private citizens all the time.
And then we attract pricks into the federal government who ignore rules and they evict everyone overnight so that they can build a resort for themselves.
Look, I get the sentiment, but this sort of centralization is scary.
I mean… they can already evict people from land they privately own. It’s called “expropriation” and it happens fairly regularly in Canada.
Not sure why this would change anything related to that.
Then how would your proposition change anything, except that the government would have even less reason to pay private citizens after forcing them to move?
It changes the money part of the equation. You could no longer sell your land because you wouldn’t own it. The government is the beneficiary of any land value appreciation, not private investors.
I don’t think that really answers the question and feels like a nothing burger. There would be no land appreciation when it’s all owned by the government. Its value is purely perceived and never realized in such a scenario.
And to be fair, land is somewhat of an interesting case. Suppose you own a piece of land and have no debtors, but you’ve died without descendants or relatives, and certainly without a will, wouldn’t the government just take over that? In essence, the government has a holding on the land, and you’re holding an indefinite lease that can be transferred. Expropriation is simply a mechanism for the government to take back the lease, but they are still obligated to pay to owners. To the owners, it sucks, cause you might really like the piece of land, or that your livelihood depends on it. Hence the conversation should be about fair compensation or equivalent exchange, and a strong scrutiny of expropriation (provably worthy investments being done by the government).
That said, that does depend on your political beliefs on individual freedom. I believe that we should have the freedom to be where we want and do what we want, but to the extent where it doesn’t cause others pain, discomfort, or jeopardy of any sorts (physical, mental, societal where appropriate), or when there is something that would benefit us, collectively. Being asked to move, and being paid fairly to do so, is annoying and disruptive, but if all we do is reject every attempt of improving public spaces and infrastructure projects, then I think we have a more serious problem than just land ownership.
Of course, every case of expropriation should be fully scrutinized. Do these people HAVE to move? There are many ways to incorporate existing infrastructure with new ones.
I simply don’t believe or trust that governments will forever be benign, and full ownership of land by only the government is no different from the age of kings: all it takes is one bad king to ruin it all.
Even in an anarchic society, there’s still a sense of ownership of space: this is where I can be alone by myself, and that my right to privacy in my space is respected.
There is land value, it’s reflected in the amount the government charges the lessee. A property downtown is not going to have the same monthly lease value as a property in the suburbs for the same land size. This changes over time as areas become more or less desirable.
I also don’t believe that the government is perfect, but I do think they’re still better than private landlords who are showing how un-trustworthy they are as we live and breath.
As for your “anarchic society”, you’re actually not correct in this assertion. Large-scale personal ownership of land was uncommon historically, though of course it depends on where and when you look.
The roman empire had private land ownership, but only for a small people. Very few people owned their own land or home.
England was the same, a bunch of lords and dukes and shit. Lots of peasants that didn’t own even the shit from the animals.
If you look at First Nations cultures in North America pre-European contact there was no private ownership at all, it was all collective for the tribes. The Aztec empire was the same, collective ownership by groups.
Tracking the ownership of a plot of land for a lot of people requires a lot of bureaucracy and centralized systems to track it, along with citizenship rights, which simply didn’t exist in most places.
I’m not promoting private ownership of land, but I fail just fail to see how allowing a single entity to manage land would be better than a more decentralized one. Having one dickhead who owns some land trying to gouge others is bad, but we can go somewhere else. If instead, we have THE dickhead who “owns” ALL of the land trying to gouge groups of people they specifically don’t like (oh you know that those racists and neo-Nazi’s will try to get into government), then where the hell are people supposed to go?
Sure, there may be a handful of landlords who own a lot of land and it’s hard to avoid them, but that’s more telling of an oligarchic society and its problems, and not that private ownership is a problem.
Some of those examples from history weren’t great. If anything, they (aside from the tribal ownership of land) more-so exemplify things that seem to frustrate you: few people own the lands and they’ve dickheads about it, but we are left with no choice.
And just because it never happened in the past, doesn’t mean that it’s bad. Personal property isn’t private property. You can use a piece of land how you wish, but you don’t own it forever: you can use it as long as you’re still using it for your personal needs. This “you” can expand into a group, eg a family, and as long as this group still continues to use it directly, it’s “theirs”. No small private group of people can “own” a piece of land and demand those on it to pay for it.
As for saying that tracking private ownership of land is bureaucratic, that doesn’t sound too different from how it’s inherently bureaucratic that the government owns it all.
A) People tend to like to stay in the city they’re already in, and B) With the current system we have right now nobody who doesn’t already have a home can afford to do that
If the government owns the land, and you vote in some fucking nazis, then the people have decided that’s what they wanted. That’s how democracy works. It’s not some sort of Utopian system of government, it’s a popularity contest.
Yes they can, that’s literally what a landlord is. If the only options are Landlord A, Landlord B, or Landlord C… you have no options. At least with the government you can vote.
Yah, that couldn’t get abused.
Everything can get abused.
The question is more is it better or worse than what we currently have. Right now, private landlords are evicting people pretty constantly for no-fault reasons like landlord-use and “redevelopment”.
You must be in ON, cause I can assure you that in provinces where the Landlord-Tenant board actually functions, like Alberta, thats NOT happening. Its not a Canadian problem, its largely an ON and BC problem and the reason its a problem in those two provinces is because of their restrictive rent controls. They SOUND like a good idea at first but when the rubber hits the road, you cant tell a landlord they can only raise the rent by 2% when inflation has been rising by 4% to 8% and expect them not to use any means possible to raise the rent. Maintenance goes up, supplies go up, appliances go up, trades go up, taxes go up, insurance goes up, but the landlord can only absorb so much and then something’s gotta give and 2% doesnt cut it.
Here in Alberta we can raise the rent by any reasonable amount we like and it works. Rents go up in times of shortage but they also go down when there is an oversupply. So in the last year, the rents in Calgary have DROPPED by 9% because there have been a lot of new rentals come on the market. It works. Rent controls do not.
BC.
Rent controls don’t work, I agree. As do most economists.
The rents in Calgary haven’t dropped because of new rental supply though, you have that idea wrong, the rents have dropped because the economy is down. Rents are down in Vancouver too by almost 7%. The supply has barely changed in either location.
Everyone keeps talking about supply solving the issue, but the market keeps actually changing because of demand, it’s impossible to build enough supply fast enough to impact the markets significantly, only by changing the demand can you have a significant impact.
Which is where the government owning the property comes in, the demand for housing isn’t actually coming from people needing places to live. It’s from investors who are buying up properties because they know that people HAVE to live somewhere. If the government owned the land, that speculation goes away almost entirely because it’s no longer profitable. The land values all drop off a cliff, and housing becomes affordable again.
If there’s one thing we don’t lack in Canada, it’s space. The problem is the allocation of it, when Bob and Jane own 3/4 of an acre downtown, and live in their 5 bedroom place by themselves now that the kids all left. That’s the problem. Fuck them, force them to either pay to have that privledge or give up the property so it can be redeveloped to fit 8 families. If they want 3/4 of an acre they can live outside the city.
Nope. Its not the economy. Its supply. There are charts that track available units for each type (apartment, main floor, basement suite, whole house, etc) on the landlord menu of Rentfaster.com. I can look at almost every category and see that the supply is up from what it was a year ago.
eg. Last year on Sept 1 there were **1066 **two bedroom apartments available This year on Sept 1 there were **1468 **two bed room apartments available
Therefore, average rent for those apartments last year was 2335. This year its **2251 **and dropping. Currently the average has now dropped to **2137 **as of last week. Thats down 8.4%
The rental market is pretty simple. When there’s more supply prices drop. When there’s more demand, prices go up.
You clearly don’t understand how demand works. If demand drops, it looks like there’s more supply.
If you look at the change in population (it increased) and total units in the province(it increased, but not as much) total units per capita has gone down (a decrease in supply)
No those supply numbers are hard numbers. There were 402 MORE two bedroom apartments this year than last year, a 38% increase over last year. Calgary’s population has gone up but only about 5%.
Thats an EXCESS SUPPLY of apartments because the number keeps rising. If people were snapping them up as fast as they were coming available that number would be steady or dropping and rents would be rising. They’re NOT rising because there is excess supply and renters can shop around and negotiate on rent prices. which is why rents are 8 to 10% LESS than last year at this time even though there were still 100,000 people moving to Calgary.
Many out of province investors have flooded into Calgary in the last couple of years, which means many more rentals on the market as they snap up any housing they can find and turn them into rentals.
So your last statement is incorrect. Population has increased but rental supply has increased even more than the demand.
I have been a landlord in Calgary for over 40 years now and we’ve been through several excess demand and excess supply cycles because of our variable economy. We are obviously in an excess supply cycle.
Do you not understand percentages? Do you think there are only 1400 total two bedroom apartments in Calgary? The percentage change in available listings for sale does not in any way show you how many new units were created. Those are just how many people are currently trying to sell and don’t reflect net construction at all.
Calgary grew it’s population by 100,179 people in 2024 but it’s total housing completions were only 21,084 total units. Given that the average housing unit doesn’t even come close to having 5 people in it (the average is usually somewhere in the high 2s) that means the total supply per capita went down.
Those stats are from the city itself: https://www.calgary.ca/content/dam/www/cfod/finance/documents/corporate-economics/housing-review/Housing-Review-Q4-2024.pdf
I really don’t know how you’ve managed to get so far in life given how bad you are at understanding math. I suspect you’re just lying to be honest.
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Eeeh… I dunno. I kind of disagree with that one. I think it’s important to allow people to own their own piece of land. Otherwise everyone can risk being evicted from their home by the government and I don’t like that idea.
Limiting how much land people can own though… Like how many residential properties. That I could go for.
Land ownership is already a fiction in Canada.
If I buy a book, it’s mine to do what I want with, for as long as I want.
If I buy real estate, the government still gets to say what I do on/with it, and can take it away if they decide they really want it, or if I stop paying them property taxes. That doesn’t sound like ownership; it sounds like a rental agreement.
Its true. Ultimately all land in Canada is ultimately owned by the Crown and can be expropriated at the gov’s desire and no citizen can stop it, no matter what. We do have good laws around being fairly compensated, but you still lose your home, no matter how much you’ve invested in it or how many generations your family has lived on it. My brother in law just lost his because of a new highway coming right through his house. Yes, he got paid out, but its really hard to see 20 years of hard work and a house you built taken away for a road.
Of course there should be guidelines. You shouldn’t be able to use your property as a dumping ground for waste for example. And the taxes pay for the infrastructure that allows you to reach your land, to link it to the water network, to collect waste, etc.
“everyone can risk being evicted from their home by the government”
A) The government already has a tool to do that, in Canada it’s called “expropriation” and they happen fairly regularly.
B) That’s actually a feature of this system. People buying up land and never leaving is actually one of the major problems with our current real estate prices. In areas of high demand, if the government just terminated leases and then forced those properties to be developed we wouldn’t have the pricing issues we have now. Does this hurt people? yes, but also not nearly as much. Given that property would be much more affordable under such a scheme moving elsewhere wouldn’t be nearly as difficult.
I understand your point. But I’m worried about government abusing this.
Yeah you can be expropriated, but usually you either get a fair compensation or have legal tools to defend yourself to a certain extent no?
I think my problem is that I have a certain fear of not being able to own my own piece of land because it’s the most essential things to own. It’s your own little part of the world where you are in control.
The First Nations never had our concept of owning land. The land owns us. So we should respect it - or it will all end up looking like a strip mine eventually.
Will it? I’d say the land I own looks a lot more cared for than the thousands of acres of Crown land that’s right up against my yard. My land gets tended to regularly, the trees and grass are cared for, the weeds are taken out and the deer and bears still get to walk across it and the birds and squirrels still live in the trees. No strip mines in sight.
Good for you. The problem is that not all landowners have the same commitment.
I can’t argue with you there.
I often think about what life here would be like if there never had been any colonization. I wonder what society here would be like.
It’s not essential at all, plenty of people never own property in their life. Especially these days with condos, the concept of owning the land is rather irrelevant since you don’t really own a specific part of it, just an interest in a shared property that you have very little individual say over.
You WANT your own little piece of land, and that’s fair enough, but currently our system of ownership is causing problems for a lot of other people who want a place to live too but just happen to have been born too late to afford it reasonably.
100% agree. Private, inheritable land ownership in the context of a population that doesn’t all enter the game at the same time with the same resources available to them is inherently unjustifiable.
WHERE in life is anyone promised ‘the same resources’? My dad was a poor farmer. My friend’s dad was a multi millionaire owner of a thriving business. No one gets the same start. But you start with what you’ve got and work to improve your life if you want.
Uh, nowhere? That’s why private, inheritable land ownership is unjustifiable. There is no way to make such a system fair when tomorrow you will have a child who is born who will be orphaned and another who will be the beneficiary of land inheritance, neither child being responsible for the conditions they were born into. Yet both are expected to compete for the same resources. We can do much better.
I dont understand why having two different life circumstances make land ownership “unjustifiable”? That doesnt correlate. Life doesnt give us equality. Some will be richer, some poorer but why does that mean a citizen shouldn’t own land?
What’s not to understand? Please, justify to me why an orphan and the child of a billionaire who will receive a land inheritance being made to compete for resources is the best system that we shouldn’t try to get away from? As for what life “gives” us, who cares? We aren’t bound by that, else we should throw away all our tools and return to monkey. We have brains and we can design better, fairer systems than, “Well that’s just the way it is.”
We have a mixed market economy with strong socialist safety net in Canada and it IS the best system because other systems have failed miserably. If you work hard in Canada, you CAN make a lot of money. But even if you are born an orphan in a poor family you won’t die of hunger, because we do take care of the poorest. I worked with street kids in a major Canadian city and NONE of them were completely destitute. They didn’t always have stable housing (often because of their own choices) but they had shelter and they had enough to eat and clothes to wear and a surprising number of them had enough for cell phones and cigarettes despite not having jobs. You cant say that about countries that dont have safety nets.
https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/reports-publications/health-promotion-chronic-disease-prevention-canada-research-policy-practice/vol-44-no-11-12-2024/distribution-hunger-canadian-youth.html
But they didn’t literally die from it so we’re in the best system. Please.
Wealth inequality is at the highest level it’s ever been in Canada. Our system is currently failing.
Compared to what? Things are better for the poor in China? Venezuela? The US? What are you comparing to?
Plus, a lot of property taxes and other local/regional usage income can be rolled up into the lease payments. What matters is how those leases are calculated, such that small/cheap properties for the working poor lease for almost nothing, but a McMansion (or actual mansion) would lease for a massive amount.
In my opinion, almost ALL taxes should be rolled into this, including most income taxes. Remove all the income tax brackets below 2x the median income, and roll that amount into these lease costs. Working families should essentially get net 0, and people who own a McMansion and are retired just pay more for the privilege or sell it and downsize like they should.
Conditionally agree, except for the immediate effect of income taxes themselves: they are deducted straight from payroll, every time payroll happens, so they are taken on a much more frequent basis and before the paycheque is ever received by the worker.
This means that the worker does not need to allocate anything out of their paycheque towards those taxes because in most cases those taxes have already been fully paid. This dramatically lowers the cognitive load for the worker, who already has significant cognitive loads by virtue of their socioeconomic status.
So there is a downside to that method that I would seek to eliminate or dramatically smooth over so that the working class don’t have yet another brick to trip over in their lives.
This could be ameliorated by having “payroll” (and if need be, even time cards themselves) run through a CRA server that does all calculations and demands a certain amount of money from the employer such that wage theft (aside from tips and a few other things) is almost completely eliminated.
Any employer wanting to dispute when an employee clocked in needs to provide evidence that the employee lied about when they walked in. Government-provided time clocks could then accept standard-issue ID as evidence that the employee clocked in, as any normal person wouldn’t want to just give away their ID, and the employee could track everything through the CRA’s website. Even employee scheduling could be run through this, allowing the CRA to ding employers seeking to game the system for financial gain.
There are many options possible, we just need to engineer the entire system to benefit the working class and (rightly!) treat the employers as the adversarial and untrustworthy belligerents that they are. We could even engineer an entire “worker resources” division which protects the worker against employer depredations, instead of protecting the company at the expense of the worker.
It really isn’t more cognitive load, your payroll taxes go down, but your mortgage/rent goes up. For a lot of working class people, it would actually work out in their favour and they’d end up seeing more net money in their account.
YES YES YES. Use LVT to replace one of the awful taxes Canadians gripe about (maybe GST, maybe income tax?)
100% replace income taxes.
lol people would go wild if that was even muttered on the news
I agree, but it needs to still be talked about.
People still think we can build our way into affordable homes, which is impossible. Alternatives like this would actually deliver affordable housing, but you’re right that a lot of people would be unhappy about it.
“which is impossible”
I beg to differ. In Alberta, three years ago I bought a home for 65,000. Two months ago I bought another one for 60,000. The second one needs some love but it’s livable. I’m currently building a small alleyway home by combining two used buildings and the final cost will be under 30,000.
It IS possible - with some sweat equity - but not in Toronto or Vancouver, thats for sure.
So you buying places where nobody wants to live and doing all the construction yourself is somehow proof that it’s possible to build affordable housing for everyone?
Give your head a shake.
Nobody wants to live in Alberta? Did we mention that Alberta has the HIGHEST interprovincial migration of any province in Canada? We’re building as fast as we can cause there are so many people moving here.
And yes, all the skills Ive learned over the years are now on youtube and can be learned by anyone. My first house gained about 25% in value because I painted it, cleaned up the yard, and built a tiny 4 x 8 front porch and then waited a couple of years to sell it. Not rocket science, just takes some work.
You sure as shit didn’t buy a property for $60k in Calgary or Edmonton, which is where most of the jobs are, and where people want to live.
And, on top of that, housing prices are STILL rising in those two cities compared to last year.
I will say it again, we CANNOT build ourselves out of the housing issue we’re in right now. It simply isn’t possible.
Calgary and Edmonton are the two main centers but not everyone wants to pay the price for living in a big city. There are lots of jobs in smaller centers.
But here’s the thing. You can move to Calgary but you’re going to need to buy a house for at least 600,000. OR you can move to a smaller center and get a house for one tenth of that price.
Now look at the difference in mortgage payments at 5.25%. The Calgary house is going to be 3400. The small town mortgage is going to be $340.
Which means in the small town, you can buy a house paying your mortgage working a minimum wage job and still have money to spare, but in Calgary you better be making over 100k if you hope to qualify for that 600k house.
Sometimes small town living just makes far more financial sense. Especially when youre in driving distance to a bigger city.
I just looked for property in Alberta under 100k, and could only find a handful of places under 100k that were not inside mobile home parks (where you don’t own the land) most of them are court ordered sales and are also mobile homes(on private lots) that essentially need to be replaced entirely.
The only reasonable one I found in the entire province which wasn’t in terrible shape, had it’s own land, and was drivable to what I consider a city was in Elnora, which is about an hour outside red deer. Unfortunately it’s unlikely you could get even a minimum wage job there, because the population is only 288 people and they have only 18 total businesses in the town, and that includes some public places like the post office and library.
The thing to remember about this though, is that it can’t support a larger population choosing this option. A few people could move there, but the moment you get more than a few moving in the prices go way up since there isn’t just a million houses sitting empty in these small towns. There’s maybe hundreds, total in the province.
no, this would not pass, a small minority might be ok with, but the vast majority of millennials and gen Z/Alpha would shoot this down
Why? Most of those groups don’t even own property, and many aren’t ever likely to be able to afford it.
There’s some pretty pissed off young people out there.
government taking control of land where you live = communism to the general public.
That’s an education problem. The government already controls the land.
listen i get yall think your very smart and if you really are that’s great, but you have to swallow the pill and realize there are people who don’t concern themselves with technicalities of every day life or their country. To them, when they buy land, they think they now own it, and not the country. Positioning this as “The government owns the land and rents the houses” will make people spin their heads 5 times over and go “what the fuck no way are we allowing that, that sounds like socialism/commie”
Its all fine and dandy discussions happen on here or reddit about what the government should do or this law or that, but the vast majority of Canadians just don’t have the time or interest to look into things like the average user on here does. Why do you think populist leaders do so well in elections, like doug ford? he talks in plain common words and points, no complicated language that people go “oh this ““nerd”” is talking again”.
I mean, the easy way around this is just to jack up property taxes so high that there’s no real difference between you owning it and you renting it from the government.