The only developed country that doesn't seem to have a housing crisis right now is Japan. After their real estate market collapsed in the 90s, they instituted a number of reforms to make housing less attractive as an investment vehicle. Now housing there tends to depreciate over time, not appreciate. Consequently, it's viewed not as an investment but as a consumer product, much like buying a car, and there is competition that brings costs down.

I think this is the sensible approach we need to follow in the rest of the developed world, but I don't think it's not going to be politically feasible until a lot of homeowners feel a lot of pain and give up on the idea of housing as an investment

Housing as an investment shouldn't have ever been a fucking thing. I'd like to find some of these investors and sell them my used car the way way they try to sell a used house.

The abandonment of public housing by the federal government in the 1990s went hand-in-hand with a wider push to financialize the entire sector: rent controls were deregulated, rules were rewritten to make it easier for landlords to purchase buildings then forcibly hike rents.

Once the Liberal and Conservatives governments pushed us into this era of investor led housing development it was obvious there was going to be a growing group of people that would be very happy that general housing prices were sky rocketing. Imagine how society would have viewed any type a significant bump in housing otherwise, how would anyone view it as anything as a bad thing.

List of random thoughts for what investor led housing has brought us aside for the prices:

• Worse quality housing - They're not living in it so they don't care how poorly built or designed it is as long as it can be flipped for profit.
• Worse quality local amenities - Why invest in things like local amenities, transit and anything else when it doesn't make a difference for you
• Worse maintained strata housing - Anyone that has been on strata boards know that investors owned units don't want to maintain the building since they'll be gone by the time the shit hits the fan and be twice as expensive to fix.

The cause isn't "investors", they are a symptom, of capitalism, the actual cause.

Housing is a human right and should not be commodified, anything less than that should no longer be acceptable.

Tax the fuck out of rental income, and increase the property taxes for investor-owned or foreign-owned homes to commercial rates, then hit them again with a pre-tax that increases at a rate 2x of inflation. We'll stomp that shit out in under a decade.

Over the past several decades, Canadian housing has been transformed into a financialized wild west where the interests of the investor class are sacrosanct and social need is secondary.

Secondary? That implies it has any priority what so ever in the market. It has been shown clearly there is no consideration of the social aspect of housing as an investment. It's how much you can get for your property, that now carries no mortgage (OK, boomer), and how you can fund the lifestyle you've been practising for all these years. Remember, there are no poor people, just temporarily inconvenienced millionaires.

Greed is good. So are the well cooked rich, I've heard.

It's both, you can't fix the problem by only attacking one of the two biggest causes.

Renting a space for people to live in should be a privilege and not a right. We should have a board that limits what your rented space and its amenities can be rented for. I would even go as far as a permit and if you violate it you must sell the property within 90 days or jail time. We shouldn't fuck around with the basic human right to affordable housing.

Foreign investment got us started down this path. A ton of people moved here when UK handed HK sovereignty to China in the 90s.

Investment is probably a bigger problem now but that was established by the initial foreign investment booms.