Canada

It's both really, but investment firms are certainly a bigger, growing, threat

Can we just IPO humanity already? I want to buy puts.

Capitalism is literally moving us back into feudalism. Everything is for sale. Even democracy, it seems. Perhaps fascism would be more profitable? Market is bullish on fascism!

It always rubbed me the wrong way when the previous housing minister made a point of saying we needed to protect the Mom and Pop investors. Like - no, we absolutely should not.

I absolutely agree. I'll repeat a comment I made separately.

I’ll repost a comment I made before again here:

If you have half the population each have 1 investment property. You must have the other half renters. You literally want to create two classes. Those with investment properties and those with no property. One class above another. You’re just using billionaires as a shield. You want to put yourself in a class above other people.

We should all work so that each person has one home.

And the “I don’t want to work until I die” should be covered by social insurance/social security instead of making someone else a renter.

context: https://lemmy.ca/comment/4927203

There's a lot of people saying it's the corporations fault which isn't exactly untrue and they do have significant sway politically with lobbying.

But it's the people who keep bringing back politicians that clearly don't want to lower housing prices because a segment of a population is to heavily invested into it. If anything the current tax system clearly incentivize people to invest into housing, imagine if we treated water like housing and people would buy up then vote for anyone that'll make the prices go up.

are you suggesting that the roughly 1.4 million landlords in Canada (source) are all effectively colluding?

I don't know about Canada, but in the U.S., yes, that's happening

AirBnB's a significant part of the issue. Short term rentals don't provide a place for people to actually live, while often providing a higher return over the short term than a long term rental unit.

Real estate speculators, too, add extra pressure to the housing market. Speculators often don't rent the property out at all, and attempt to treat housing as a raw commodity, buying up homes and just waiting for real estate prices to increase as the bubble continues to grow.

There may be real housing constraints in the country, but they're severely exacerbated by the view of housing as capital, rather than as homes.

When investors buy properties and set higher rent prices, non-investor landlords raise their rent prices to whatever the artificially-inflated market rate is for the area. Not all 1.4 million landlords have to be actively working on fucking the populace, but they all end up participating in it because no one is going to charge lower rent out of the goodness of their heart.

Nobody is homeless waiting for a home to be built they can purchase. There isn't a physical housing shortage.

Theres no one single issue, but all of the above happening at once AND a population boom at the same time to top it off. We need an all-of-the-above approach to fix it too. Remove zoning restrictions, make lending for multiplexes easier, build public housing as fast and as much as possible, and found new towns... to name a few.

Having enough supply isn't as profitable

It's both.

If you just look at supply and demand graphs.

Where S is supply, D is demand, N is number of people, I is number of investors, and P is price you'd have:

1. S[=N+0]=D[=N+0], P-
2. S[=N+0]<D[=N+I], P▲
3. S[<N+0]<D[=N+0], P▲
4. S[<N+0]<D[=N+I], P▲
5. S[>N+0]>D[=N+0], P▼
6. S[<N+I]<D[=N+I], P▲
7. S[>N+0]>D[=N+0], P▼
8. S[>N+I]>D[=N+I], P▼

The problem really is twofold: yes, it is supply, but there's also an extreme amount of reticence to do anything about both supply and speculation.

This is largely because the profits of the current system accrue to people who bear experience none of the pain of it (which is also why healthcare is broken, and why transit is broken, and why nothing gets done about climate change). Taxes are kept low, assets keep going up and it takes very little effort to stay rich. And money talks.

"Building like mad" isn't going to happen because "building just enough to stop people from rioting" is more profitable. No builder is going to build public housing when they can make more on McMansions and condos, and no homeowner or speculator wants to see policies that would increase their tax burden or decrease the value of their asset.

Building like mad would help, but you'd achieve similar effects by smacking down the investment side of the problem, without requiring the government to, eg, directly buy equipment, supplies and employ tradespeople to build homes, which they'd have to do as bribing developers to do it doesn't seem to work. Plus, if you tax speculation hard, maybe you can use that tax revenue to build?

The real, core issue, though, is housing in Canada at the moment is the perfect neoliberal failure, and our policymakers are so wedded to neoliberal orthodoxy that the solution (massive, direct public investment) isn't just heretical, it's inconcievable. Most of our MPs/MPPs/MLAs and civil servants don't even remember a pre-Reagan/Thatcher era of massive public investment. They don't seem to understand it's even an option.