Removing rent control ONLY on new units won’t ease Toronto’s housing crisis – November 15, 2018,
There’s a leftist myth about rental controls that are destroying cities all over the globe, I want readers, reading this to understand that I’m a renter, I rent, I benefit from rental controls and I think it’s the dumbest regulation ever created. I view rental controls the same way I look at minimum wages. Now more than ever with the creation of the internet would be the best time historically to get rid of horrible landlords, the reason why I don’t like the Bank of Canada controlling interest rates is that higher interest rates could actually help to get rid of horrible landlords, as many of you know my personal belief is that the Federal and provincial governments should get the least taxes while municipalities should get the most taxes from citizens.
If municipalities got more tax revenue they couldn’t parade around their cities and towns preaching flawed economic philosophies because when people give their municipalities their tax dollars and their municipalities waste it, well municipal government offices are a lot closer and accessible than Federal offices are so all of this big government socialist nonsense would get exposed very quickly, which would allow people to focus on doing things that work. What works when it comes landlords and rents is raising the costs for the government to solve rental disputes. What works is market rents and explaining to landlords that if their rents exceed particular market rents then there’s less the government will do for them.
What works is getting rid of CMHC as Federal crown corporate insurer of mortgages, what works is getting rid of minimum wages. When you get rid of minimum wages there’s no excuse not to have a job or even start a business because to work or to be self-employed will now cost a person $0! At this point the government can decide where the poverty level begins, once the reality of where the poverty level begins to take form, housing for those area’s can have an actual real value attached to it.
Therefore you can determine market rental prices in particular areas. Furthermore, what’s better about rental units over condominiums is that it’s in a rental apartments best interests to build rentals with more than 2 bedrooms. In Toronto the coming real estate disaster will be exposed once people realize how many 1 and 2 bedroom condos are available, most people don’t want a 1 bedroom condo, who in their right mind wants to host a get-together or a party in a tiny 1 or 2 bedroom condo? when it comes to rentals, prices stay low when there’s an abundance or a surplus of rentals and you achieve this by removing the rental controls.
when there’s a surplus of something prices come down, there are enough apartments in Toronto right now to house New York cities population, the problem Toronto has is that the condos being built aren’t meeting domestic demand, so people aren’t buying them, flippers and real estate investors are buying the properties, now this problem probably wouldn’t even exist if Toronto didn’t have rental controls.
In the 1990’s I could rent an apartment and sometimes get the first 2 months free, it was so competitive because there were so many vacancies, there were rental controls then, but buildings weren’t as old, the government enforcement wasn’t at the level it is now. I get it, there are poor people, that either live beyond their means or who are looking for a stable place to live, but rental controls aren’t the answer.
Solutions to getting rid of rent controls
The answer is increasing court costs to landlords, people hate going to government offices and it should be explained to both renters and landlords that if the two parties can’t come to a compromise or an agreement that it’s best the two part ways. Signing leases, if you have a problem as a tenant after your lease expires leave, it would also be in the tenants best interest to leave a review on the internet about their experience in a particular building.
These reviews will keep landlords in line and again what’s important to remember is that no rent price controls equates to more apartment buildings being built which equates to more options, which equates to lower rental prices. Now lower rental prices don’t mean that everybody is going to be able to rent an apartment right by the CN Tower, that’s not what this means, in-demand areas will cost more than areas that are not in as high a demand, what it will mean however is there will be a surplus in housing and competition.
You can still drive around Toronto now and see empty land or land that’s not being occupied. But no one in their right mind would build a rental there because the truth of the matter is that a bunch of leftist morons will fight for rent controls. The message needs to be clear that the government won’t intervene if you don’t like the rental prices in Toronto move out, which is what a lot of people did in the 1990’s which lead to a surplus in apartments.
What happened next if people remembered is CMHC began to insure mortgages again, which in reality meant that they would be competing with rental controls. Being that CMHC is federal and rental controls are provincial/municipal the incentive to build condos happened and in case Ontarians haven’t realized there is actually a demand for detached housing, which is why that market shot up. But the condo demand is a myth, there is no real domestic demand for these shoebox-sized condos.
But those condos have been built and they are taking up space and because they’ve been built and taking up so much space the government, of course, has to do something, but not to rattle people like me who benefit from rental controls, no Doug Ford wants to discriminate and only allow the new apartments developments to not have to abide by rental control laws. This is the coward way out and this is why I can’t stand the Conservative Party. Doug Ford knows supply management is wrong and he knows this discriminatory rental policy is wrong but he supports it. The moment some idiotic Leftist gets voted in they’re going to restart this rental control problem all over again.
What I want so badly for Canada is higher interest rates, if you want lower housing prices you should be praying interest rates are forced to spike upward. This is where central banking ruins nations, because hey, the market solves all problems if rates were based on the market and an apartment was vacant chances are they’d lose the property in foreclosure/power of sale or be forced to sell that property to someone competent of running it in.
If you know anything about renting or being a landlord you’ll know that good tenants are hard to find, so when you get them you treat them like royalty and when you accidentally find a horrible tenant which is inevitable you kick them out, the problem is when you kick out bad tenants a lot of them run to the government and ask the government to remedy their internal problems. Some people are just mean-spirited a**holes who don’t respect private property and have a 1 sided worldview.
These bad tenants often end up in Metro or government housing and once they end up there and you have things like minimum wages and other government programs that incentivize them not to work, then the whole province has to pay for these people and of course these types of people tend to have a lot of children because more children equates to more money from the government and then the government, of course, makes a plea to the taxpayers that they (the people) need to pay more taxes to pay for the poor, then of course as welfare grows the people who actually work for a living then want more protections and welfare too.
So the government packages this up as helping the poor and middle class so taxes are raised some more, as the government grows and the public sector grows there’s of course going to be more demand to regulate more of the private sector so the public sector can be protected and can collect more money in revenue and then before you know it the cost of living is skyrocketed, more people are in debt and even though a lot of politicians know what the problem is nobody wants to solve it because it’s political suicide.
Because trying to solve it would ruin their political careers, what politicians will do is do what Doug Ford is doing or do what U.S President-elect Donald Trump is doing which is trying to do things in small increments without explaining to people that a monster has been created and the way to solving it will be a little painful at first. That aside in time Doug Ford’s plan will blow up in his face because what he’s saying is Rental Controls don’t work but he’s going to keep them anyway because the people currently renting would kick him out of office if there rent controlled protection disappeared while he was in office.
Rental Controls like minimum wages and most of the other government regulations do not work. Get rid of them!
Interesting times ahead