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this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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How much empty housing do you think exists in canada’s largest cities?
Over 2,100 properties were self reported as being vacant in Toronto. No doubt in my mind many people lied and the number of vacant units sits around 3,500. Which isn't a lot but would definitely help.
In a city with 1.25 million homes, why are we so focused on "taxing empty investment homes" (something that already exists) for a few thousand units instead of building new homes?
Why not both? 🙂
Yeah sure. This is more a response to the top level comment (and the general sentiment) that empty units and financialization cause the scarcity, instead of just addressing the scarcity.
There are entire floors and even entire buildings sitting vacant in Vancouver because of certain foreign "investment." They were having real estate conventions where property was being sold in a certain country sight unseen and is now just sitting there doing nothing and rotting. These "investments" were/ are merely vehicles for money laundering to get it out of a certain country. This has been basically known about for years and has been going on for years. A person making a decent wage used to be able to afford a home in Vancouver. Now, everyone is priced out of the market. The Olympics were the worst thing that probably has ever happened to Vancouver and derailed the city. Olympics were basically free advertising for foreign investment that opened the eyes of a certain country to decide to buy up anything and everything because of the lax controls in place and the politicians being cool with the grift.
Ah okay I'm asking because people seem to always point to empty homes as the problem and support that thesis with anecdotal evidence.
The reality is new vacancy taxes in Ontario and BC captured a lot of those empty homes and there's simply nowhere near the scale of empty homes to make any reasonable dent in the housing crisis, even if we converted every single one to occupied.
Quite a few
a) this is before Toronto instituted the empty homes tax - less incentive for homeowners to rent out their empty unit
b) this is before the explosion of rental price increases post-covid - even less incentive for homeowners to rent out their unit
c) measuring lights on or off a couple of times a year isn't a great proxy for assessing empty units