How Canada’s media manufactures sympathy for the landlord class
How Canada’s media manufactures sympathy for the landlord class
‘Sob stories’ about landlords in the media disguise the exploitation of the housing market—and undermine the fight for tenants’ rights
I've said it before, I'll say it again.
The biggest problem isn't landlords, it's normal land owners.
Around 65% of residential properties in Canada are owned by the people who live in them.
These people expect government policy to allow their property value to increase, and would vote out a government that tanks their home value.
So that's what governments deliver, and prices keep going up.
Yeah, housing can't be an investment AND affordable. Investments have to grow faster than inflation. Affordable things can't do that.
That being said it's hard to blame "homeowners" because the goal is to make more people into homeowners, it's kind of backwards to antagonize the goal itself.
Certainly though the current perception needs to change, you don't buy a house as an investment, you buy it so that you get to keep your "rent" as equity, and you get to lock down your "rent" over 25+ years so that it effectively gets cheaper in relation to your income.
You blame the homeowners not for owning, but for supporting policies that maintain their investment.
Even the rent as equity shouldn't be significant, the actual house depreciates over time and requires repairs to keep it's value. The most important change needed is to make it so that owners NEVER benefit from the value of the land increasing. This can be done in a number of ways, from regular property taxes to applying capital gains to property value.
Agreed. Nimbys do so much damage.
Respectfully, fuck you. Should I rent instead of owning so the ratio of landlords to homeowners goes up? The fact that only 65% of residential properties are owned by the occupant that is already alarming and shows that NON occupants are using houses as investments.
If the "value" of my townhouse goes up then great, if the cost of housing stays exactly the same for the next 10 years but the cost of living drops to match wages I would be thrilled.
Respectfully, fuck you. You're desperately under-educated on this topic. 65% is near a record high ownership percentage, and if you count people instead of properties the number is even higher (owners have higher average family size)
The vast majority of the remaining 35% is made up of dedicated rental apartments, which of course are owned by investors, any rental by definition has to be an investment.
The thing is that people don't even really want the ownership rate to be higher than that. There are a thousand and one reasons why someone would want to rent instead of own, from being a student, to living in a care home, to even freeing yourself up to be able to move for your career or romantic life. Renting is usually a lot easier than owning. Even when homes were dirt cheap, ownership never went to 80% or anything.
The current problem isn't the percentage, it's the cost.
What we really need to do is control land values, they can't continue going up if we want affordable housing. We have to implement policies that drop land values, primarily by taxing land use. It's the only possible route to affordable housing.
Canada's media is doing a shitty job.
Everyone is out here defending landlords saying things like "there are good and bad landlords AND tenants". Just the fact that 99.4% of rent is collected ON TIME shows the problem isn't tenants. If 99.4% of landlords were "good landlords" we could have a "both sides suffer" argument but we're at least 50% away from that.
The problem are not landlord... At least, not traditional one. It's because we treat a basic need as an investment. A home should not be an investment. It should be something like a car, it should depreciate with time.
Another thing is NIMBY. Preventing new construction project to protect your investment is another cause of this shitshow.
Another thing is urbanism rule. Homeowner should be allowed to build something on their land instead of playing the lawn competition every year.
Solve these and the landlord thing is gone. The landlord outrage is a distraction from the real plague. It's just a symptom. Of course a landlord will raise the price if it can, that's how a market works. Landlord can raise the price because we don't construct enough. That is the real outrage and that's what we should focus on. Not this shitty ragebait dividing piece of false problem.
Renting is useful for so many reason. Not everyone wants to take care of a house or can afford one.
Theres more vacent homes then there are homeless. Theres plenty of houses, too many are owned by big corpo mfers that airbnb and only rent. Idc if my neighbor also owns 2 other houses he rents out, there should be a small limit like only own 3 houses though. The main issue is i dont think commercial entities should be able to own residential homes at all. The rich should not be able to monopolize and hoard life necessities.
Why would anyone choose to rent provided an option to own and sufficient funds? Who owns new construction? If landlords, why not manufacture scarcity to drive up prices?
If you only work at a temporary place for example. You don't want to bother caring for a house. You want to be able to move whenever you like. You can't afford a loan or you can't get one. You cannot guaranty that you will work in the near future.
A mortgage is something that will lock you down to a place. Buying a plac is also something that lock you down. You wanna move to another town for a new job ? Sell the house, buy a new one. That sucks. It's faster to just rent for a while then maybe buy something after.
At the very start of the COVID fueled housing crisis I remember the former housing minister going on about needing to protect "Mom and Pop" landlords. It drove me insane and him being removed made me smile for days.
Many replies in this thread saying that landlords aren't the problem: If you own more than one property with the purpose of renting or flipping you are part of the problem. Why the need to sugarcoat this? You shouldn't be paying anyone's morgage with your rent, this is ridiculous.
This article is bullshit. There have always been good landlords and bad landlords, good tenants and bad tenants. Renting is supposed to be mutually beneficial and it usually is, but sometimes it isn't and that's why we have laws and a tribunal: to protect both parties to the rental agreement.
Recent media stories about landlords and tenants are driven by two things: a MASSIVELY UNREASONABLE housing shortage and a MASSIVELY UNREASONABLE backlog at the landlord-tenant board. The housing shortage certainly favors the landlord, and the backlog at the LTB favors the tenant.
If the LTB is there to arbitrate all kinds of disputes in a fair manner, why does the backlog at the LTB favour the tenant? Well, the nuclear option for landlords is eviction, which they cannot do without the LTB. Whereas the nuclear option for tenants is not paying the rent, which is grounds for an eviction the landlord cannot obtain. That means the tenant can live rent-free for one to two years, if they do not mind being evicted in the end. And if the tenant is poor, it hardly matters that the LTB eventually orders the tenant to pay back-rent they do not have.
So, why have some recent stories been about the tenants-from-hell? Because it is the flip side of the large number of other stories about house prices and rents becoming unreasonable. There are news stories everyday about high house prices, high rents, low rental availability, increasing population, and the collective burden all of this places on younger generations. There are thousands of articles about this, and the media needs grist for the mill, so naturally they want to cover a different angle. Nobody cares about faceless corporate landlords, so they run stories about landlords or tenants with a human face. We, the public, lap up these human interest stories because we are programmed by evolution to find human drama at the individual amd small group level engaging. Thus, ragebait draws clicks.
And that is ehat this article is as well. It does nothing but push an oppressor-oppressed narrative to make people mad. It's ragebait masquerading as media analysis. The fact is that renting is as old as civilization itself and will always be with us. It is necessary because many people cannot or do not want to own a home. In a balanced market with a reasonable arbitration mechanism, the interests of landlords and tenants are also approximately balanced. But right now we have neither a balanced market nor a reasonable arbitration mechanism. In this context, stories about rapacious landlords and scumbag tenants are just stories about the range of human nature when the rules of fair conduct are not enforced. We can't change human nature, but we can shape the market and the dispute resolution mechanism.
A quick look of CBCs archive for 'tenant' shows at least 4 tenant positive stories in the last month. This article sounds like nonsense.