Blame speculators, not foreign buyers
Re Wynne housing plan given cool reception, April 21 Kathleen Wynne, like B.C. Premier Christy Clark, continues to pussyfoot around the issue of housing affordability, while doing nothing to address the real problem. Scapegoating foreign investors is easy, because they can’t vote, but they are also not necessarily the problem.
What is the problem is real estate speculators, foreign and domestic, driving up home prices while the rest of us and our kids get stuck with the costs.
The direct way to deal with this will be a tax on speculative capital gains on real estate.
We must impose a tax on capital gains from short-term realestate flipping: 100 per cent for less than a year, 95 per cent for less than two years, and so on, until the activity stops and the economy is brought back to stability.
Clark and Wynne are so busy protecting those who profit from flipping that their supposed measures are completely ineffective. Malcolm McSporran, Vancouver I applaud the efforts of politicians from all three levels of government in trying to find ways to bring the high-flying housing market in Toronto under control.
But I believe they are missing an important component of the problem. Whenever an older bungalow comes on the market, developers jump in with wildly inflated bids meant to shut out other contenders. Then the house that otherwise would have been an ideal starter home is demolished and replaced by a new million-dollar-plus monster.
No one can fault the sellers for wanting as high a price as possible for their properties.
But maybe it’s time to limit the number of permits for new houses built by developers under these circumstances, as well as closing the loopholes that allow builders to disguise new house construction as a renovation. Raphael Vigod, Toronto Now that the inflation in Toronto housing is nearly 33 per cent, isn’t it time for a 10-per-cent property tax hike? That might make it far less necessary to squeeze the billions needed to repair community housing or even build new. Hamish Wilson, Toronto I am surprised by the lack of creativity shown by our leaders in their efforts to rationalize the housing market in the GTA, while creating more affordable housing, renting or owned.
The focus seems to be on new development as the solution to all our woes, when there’s a lot of untapped housing space within existing housing stock that could be brought online relatively quickly.
Surely there’s a way to incentivize homeowners to divide existing large dwellings into duplexes, thereby helping more families afford mortgages. We could be encouraging existing homeowners to create apartments within their homes through flexible regulations that recognize the restrictions of existing buildings rather than applying newbuilding regulations.
There are other big cities that have tackled the issue by modifying existing homes. Throughout the U.K., there are regulations for co-ownership. For progressive rental policies, consider Berlin. Carolyn Smith, Toronto