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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 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.