TheStar.com: Why has Toronto failed to provide affordable housing? Response! – May 18, 2019,
The short article is in response to the TheStar.com article titled:
The answer is simple, rent controls and impatience! Let’s be honest a lot of people don’t want to wait on the free market to solve problems, so people turn to the government to solve the problem for them. The Profit based market, Churches and most charities would solve this housing problem within a few years if they were allowed too, but you see voters, want specifics, what voters want first and foremost is not to pay market rents.
Is Toronto a jail? Is there a Pharoah telling current residents of Toronto that they’re being forced to live here? No, of course not, despite rental/lease and mortgage inflation there are still a lot of places I Canada with lower-priced living, but you see most people want to be where the action is, currently Toronto is where the action is, furthermore there are a lot of individuals that like the individual who wrote Thestar.com article titled; Why has Toronto failed to provide affordable housing? who believe that’s it’s the governments job to create equality of outcome. In the article I’m responding too, the writer states the following:
Homelessness is an old, old story that governments at all levels promise to fix.
“Every Canadian should be entitled to clean, warm shelter as a matter of basic human rights,” states the Canadian Federal Task Force on Housing and Urban Development Report.
Guess when this important report was published. In 1969 — 50 years ago!
You know what else has been around for more than 50+ years The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) which was originally founded in 1946! Now, wh hasn’t anyone questioned if this program has worked? CMHC in the modern era has contributed to mortgage price inflation which actually has forced rental prices up in many parts of Canada. You see, when a government program doesn’t work, that government program doesn’t go bankrupt, it usually never shrinks in size, people rarely if ever question its existence and rarely do people even consider that more maybe there’s a market alternative to do things. Let’s assume you’re the type of individual that believes that free market needs training wheels, is there ever a period of time when you take those training wheels off? or do those training wheels remain on the bike Ad infinitum?
If there’s a condo or housing boom happening in Toronto that’s making housing unaffordable, why would we allow a government agency that allows homebuyers the opportunity to put 20% down? Why would we as a people fuel our own homelessness? If you’re confused with the relationship between a lower down payment for a mortgage and homelessness, consider this for a moment, if fewer people qualify for a mortgage, does that mortgage or sale price go up or down? If there are fewer qualified applicants, prices fall, that’s how the market works.
If fewer people qualify to purchase a condo at an inflated price, the price for the condo goes down. The average condo price in Toronto I believe exceeds $500,000 as of 2019, now in case people don’t realize, most of the people purchasing these condo units aren’t paying full price, most people meet the downpayment requirements and with favorably low-interest rates are able to service the monthly payments. But why am I wasting all this energy writing about mortgages when the article is focused on adequate housing for the homeless?
Toronto condo market expected to moderate in 2019 – TheStar.com
Well, again nobody is forcing the homeless to remain in Toronto and basically because the government via taxation and legislation that’s resulted to price controlled regulations has actually made it more expensive for The Profit based market, Churches and most charities to fight the homelessness problem. Rental price controls mean that even CHARITIES have t abide by those rules and I’ll give a co-op as the example. Let’s say I start a co-op housing development, the property gets built but some residents don’t want to contribute to the maintenance of the building, which could result in them either being kicked out or opting to take legal matters or opting to be homeless because they don’t want some Nanny organization interrupting their lifestyle.
I worked with church charities, now, because of this I instinctively have a habit of asking homeless people what they’re going to do with any money I donate to them. Why do I do this? Because many of them give my money to the “dope man” I don’t like money I give to someone for food or shelter going to some drug dealer, sure I could simply give a homeless person my money and not think about it, but you see when you actually communicate and get to know some of the homeless people in Toronto, you’ll learn that not all of them or as innocent as they seem. Some people are homeless because of the bad financial and social choices they’ve made, and in many instances, once they’ve made these bad choices they want to blame external sources for their internal problems.
Now, what I do believe exists in many homeless people are mental health-related issues. As a Chrisitan, many of us have minds that are structured and rooted in Christian beliefs and morality, a lot of children who aren’t raised with any structure often times view the world the way a leaf blows in the wind, they’ll be doing something that works today and maybe out of sheer boredom them start to go down a bad path and because they don’t have a guidepost or structural belief system to turn too, their lives often will spiral out of control and before they know it, they’re out on streets, sometimes with a drug habit. This is not a problem resources or money will fix, this is a mental health problem and it’s something that if you’ve worked for a charity and took the time to listen to many homeless people, you’d figure out very quickly.
But you see, often times these social workers or many of these people who think they’re helping are in fact making the problem worse and also giving these people with mental health issues more resources to abuse themselves. Now, a lot of people in the modern era when they think Christianity take the Bill Maher atheistic approach and think that when Christians refer to God, they’re merely referring to some sort of sky daddy, but no, that’s not what Christianity is about, it’s about giving an individual purpose and structure in their lives, a reason to be a good human being. Now is Christian or any religion for that matter perfect? Of course not, but religions and charities typically don’t throw money at problems, the for Profit Private Sector also doesn’t throw money at problems, but all three of these entities are built by trying to solve problems and the entity that ruins these three sectors is the Government!
The Government is built on throwing money at problems and hoping these problems eventually get fixed. What’s typically happens in Government housing projects? Maintenance related expenses typically go through the roof, people forget that humans are needed to maintain these government housing projects because government people typically don’t come from the Private Sector, they often assume that paying more equates to longer lasting and problem free. Now, if you’re getting into housing every little detail counts, every step of the way. If a particular steel pipe comes from a particular steel pipe company and that company the government paid 10 years ago is now bankrupt, potentially a small pipe replacement might balloon into a complete renovation. If let’s say a particular sealing product is found to contain a substance that causes cancer, that’s a huge job to fix and if the government owns that housing project, the government now has to use taxpayer funds to pay to fix that job.
That’s the real world and politicians are often voted out and even if one politician was business savvy doesn’t guarantee that their Successor will have the same business sense as they did. This is, of course, the long version to why Toronto failed to provide affordable housing, it’s because we have rental controls and rental controls are now competing with the federal government who is decided that CMHC should also help solve a housing problem by making mortgages more readily available to more people.
Which obviously means that if you’re a developer, it would be smarter to build condos instead of rental apartments. Rental apartments have rental controls, which mean that if an apartment building has maintenance problems, the landlords can’t raise rents on current tenants to cover the costs, however, if a developer builds a condo and wants to raise maintenance costs, but the tenants refuse legally the condo owners can take ownership of the condo or at the same time not be blamed in the event that the condo long term is unlivable because the tenants refused to pay for higher maintenance costs. If you purchase a car and don’t take care of it, eventually that car will stop working, in the real world when don’t allow private entities the freedom to raise prices to justify their expenses, those entities especially when given a CMHC incentive will opt for the housing type that allows them more flexibility.
This again brings me back to Why has Toronto failed to provide affordable housing? Well, if a place is unaffordable, why would you want to live there? Especially if you have the freedom to leave, most homeless people don’t have jobs based on my experiences, one of the main reasons people are unemployed revolve around another government price control, minimum wages but that’s another post for another day.
Interesting times ahead!