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from the for-$10K/year-I'll-make-a-house-look-lived-in dept.
Vancouver, suffering from a near-zero supply of homes available for rent, plans to slap investors sitting on vacant properties with a new tax in an effort to make housing more accessible in Canada's most-expensive property market.
The levy, which would start in January, may be as high as 2 percent of the property's assessed value, Kathleen Llewellyn-Thomas, the city's general manager of community services, told reporters Wednesday. That would mean a minimum C$20,000 ($15,000) annual payment for the typical C$1 million-plus detached home in Vancouver based on July 2015 assessment data, the most recent available.
"Vancouver is in a rental housing crisis," said Mayor Gregor Robertson, whose announcement follows a separate measure by the province in July to impose a 15 percent tax on foreign buyers. "Dangerously low vacancy rates across the city are near zero."
Vancouver is penalizing property owners for not renting empty buildings.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Friday September 16 2016, @03:41AM
I don't know the Canadian situation, but Switzerland also has a continual shortage of rental properties in the cities. I imagine the causes are similar: Strict building regulations plus rent control.
There are real risks and costs associated with renting a property, specifically, there is a real risk that the renters will trash the place. If they do, the repair costs may be far higher than any rent you collected. If you're not in the business of running rental properties, but just have a house sitting empty for a few months, that may not be a risk you are willing to take.
Doing a bit of reading on Vancouver, this all sounds very familiar: "As housing prices spiral upward, rents are going up, pushing low-income and working people out of the city to find more affordable rents."
What, exactly, is wrong with living outside the city? We live about 40km from the nearest large, rent-controlled city. There is plenty of inexpensive rental property available, and excellent train connections. Nope, instead we hear demands for stricter rent control in the city. What about re-zoning or new construction? Oh, no, you aren't allowed to change anything either.
Cities change and develop, populations shift. You can't put a city in stasis, trying to preserve some idyllic past situation - it just doesn't work.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 3, Informative) by driven on Friday September 16 2016, @05:21AM
Good trains or not, spending over 2 hours a day commuting on a train (total) isn't my idea of fun. For some people, they're spending ~3 hours commuting (Vancouver to Mission City [translink.ca]). You trade time with your family and recreational activities for lower (but still expensive!) rent/home ownership.
(Score: 2) by Bogsnoticus on Friday September 16 2016, @07:32AM
I spend nearly 4 hours per day on trains commuting to and from work.
But i'm prepared to do that, as living on 12 acres of forested land with fresh water and fishing, wild game for meat, no police sirens every 5 minutes, no fuck-knuckles doing burnouts on the roads, and the general peace and quiet of country life means my stress levels are now near zero.
The only downside: No fibre connection, ADSL2 only.
Genius by birth. Evil by choice.
(Score: 3, Funny) by driverless on Friday September 16 2016, @10:33AM
I spend nearly 4 hours per day on trains commuting to and from work.
Luxury! I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, travel twenty-nine hours a day down to mill, and pay mill owner for permission to travel there and when we got back to our rent-controlled apartment in Downtown Eastside, our Dad would kill us and dance about on our graves singing about dangerously low vacancy rates.
(There are a lot of drugs in circulation in Downtown Eastside).
(Score: 2) by Bogsnoticus on Saturday September 17 2016, @06:36AM
Did I forget to mention that once I walk home from the station, barefoot in the snow, the missus slices me in two with a bread knife?
Genius by birth. Evil by choice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 16 2016, @02:28PM
I spend nearly 4 hours per day on trains commuting to and from work.
So aside from the weekends you really only go home to sleep and that's it as that's all you have time for after that commute. What's the damn point of having a house then if you don't have much time to enjoy it?
(Score: 2) by Bogsnoticus on Saturday September 17 2016, @06:39AM
I get 4-5 hours of R&R once I get home, providing I hid the bread knife before I left in the morning.
Not to mention Australia is still civilised enough that noone tried to mug or steal from you, at least if there are potential witnesses, that you can catch up on lost sleep during those long trips.
Genius by birth. Evil by choice.
(Score: 2) by dry on Saturday September 17 2016, @01:59AM
I live on 10 acres of forested land. Kids still come out here to do burnouts though sirens are very rare. Only have dial-up and if I had to work in Vancouver, it had better be during regular hours as the train the parent mentions makes 4 trips in during the morning and 4 trips back evenings, so 1/2 hour drive to train, worry about leaving vehicle all day and 2 hour trip to Vancouver.. Instead I work locally, 20 minute drive usually. No way could I handle the stress of a long commute.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 16 2016, @05:40AM
"next to bombing, rent control seems in many cases to be the most efficient technique so far known for destroying cities"
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Friday September 16 2016, @12:48PM
Without rent control most of the people on my block in upper middle class Brooklyn neighborhood Park Slope would not be able to afford to live here. Note, that's "upper middle class," as in, the C-level executives who are not EO's and skilled professionals, not "poor welfare deadbeats."
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 16 2016, @09:06PM
Nobody wants to invest in new housing because they rightly (happened several times in NY) fear that rent control with be applied to the new housing, despite promises otherwise. It's called "recapture".
What little does get built outside of rent control will go for a silly high price. Supply is limited, because nobody wants to invest. Even the mere suggestion of rent control will crater investment.
When rent control is allowed to reset upon change of tenant, landlords factor in future expenses. If the average tenant stays for 40 years, then take current rates and add 2 decades worth of inflation plus a bit of a fudge factor to be safe.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Marco2G on Friday September 16 2016, @07:14AM
You can't expect people to live outside the city and not use public or private transportation. And our traffic veins are clogged as it is.
Also, traveling 80km a day just to get to and from work is a problem. Stress induced diseases are on the rise precisely because we have to bend over backwards more and more to make a living.
If you're an IT company, bank or international company, prestige demands you have your headquarters in Zurich. THAT is a big problem. If the work was more decentralized, all this crap would be much smaller of a problem. Home office or mobile office are nice things people talk about but how many people actually have the opportunity to work on the train and have that count towards their workday?
Frankly, I think employers should be made to pay half the travel cost, both monetary and in matters of time. That way, they'd have incentive to hire locally and if people cannot live locally, either move workplaces to other locations or allow more flexible working conditions.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 16 2016, @11:29AM
Vancouver is where Chinese people launder and store their money beyond the reach of their own corrupt government. The Chinese buy up real estate in Vancouver, some as investments and some in shell transactions, but they live in China, which means the houses go unoccupied.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 16 2016, @01:06PM
Oh my chap, China is a big country, believe me Vancouver is far from the only place where this type of shit is going on. I wager it is happening in just about every major city in the Western Hemisphere. And the money they are laundering is the money that they got from all our jobs being sent oversees.
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Friday September 16 2016, @03:53PM
When I passed through Vancouver recently I think the problem is more tied to speculative investors moving properties. The market value is inflating to the point that the gains from flipping the property is much more than potential earnings from renting.