Canada’s first Federal Housing Advocate: The solution is to banish the private sector from the housing market entirely.

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Marxist
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Canada’s first Federal Housing Advocate: The solution is to banish the private sector from the housing market entirely.

#1 Unread post by Marxist » November 11th, 2022, 12:46 pm

Marie-Josée Houle, Canada’s first Federal Housing Advocate, recently announced that transacting rental housing on the basis of free-market principles — what she calls the “financialization of housing” — is “denying people their fundamental human right to affordable, dignified, and safe housing.” In other words, it’s a bad thing.

In September, Houle released a series of little-noticed reports and recommendations blaming Canada’s rental housing affordability problems on investors who “profit from rent increases” — a condition that captures essentially all privately-owned rental housing, since rent increases are a necessary component of any market-based business model. Houle also blames greedy landlords for “worsening conditions and a rise in evictions.” The apparent solution is to banish the private sector from the housing market entirely.

Among the recommendations: regulating banks and pension funds to prevent them from lending to profit-making rental firms; denying these firms access to federal mortgage insurance and other government programs; placing a cap on how many rental units such firms can own; and expropriating any “affordable” housing units they might be planning to buy. Other demands include a call for coast-to-coast, iron-clad rent control and an end to Real Estate Investment Trusts’ (REITs) special tax status.

All this has the goal of making it impossible for profit-seeking private investors to continue to participate in Canada’s rental housing market. With 89 per cent of the country’s approximately 4.8 million rental units already in private hands, such an extreme policy agenda would push the entire sector towards government ownership or control.

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/peter ... 38870.html

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Laura
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Re: Canada’s first Federal Housing Advocate: The solution is to banish the private sector from the housing market entire

#2 Unread post by Laura » November 11th, 2022, 12:52 pm

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