I have maintained critical support for Singh despite being significantly to the left of him. I have appreciated that he has made significant progress for working people with the supply and confidence deal despite the relatively weak electoral position held by the party.
That aside, this is the sort of thing to make me question judgement. The NDP has the fewest landlord MPs by a wide margin which is a significant public image victory. Having the leader of the party connected to owning rental properties like this is a huge own goal that would have been very easy to avoid. There are a lot of other places Singh’s family could have placed it’s wealth and made a fine return, it didn’t have to be this one.
“but see how you did 1% of the shit we did” is a common, cheap republican trick.
You can’t both-sides this one.
Personally I have no problem with him being a landlord, but when he blames the housing crisis on “greed” instead of the very obvious housing shortage that enables the greed, it’s worth noting the hypocrisy.
Except that the housing shortages are vastly exacerbated by greedy landlords buying up the housing supply.
It’s literally like we have a water shortage and instead of just taking what they need, landlords decided well fuck you guys I have more my money so I’ll buy your water before you can and lease it back to you at a profit.
The “greed” goes all the way up to financial and monetary policies that influence the price of housing. It would not be that hard to tank the real estate market and make it essentially worthless to investors for anything other than being a fucking roof over your head. It is for the benefit of investors and property owners that prices are allowed to soar and it is a consequence of intentional decisions from the ruling class, who benefit from this situation.
I truly don’t understand the greedy landlords restrict supply thesis.
Why isn’t this a phenomenon we see everywhere? Why is it only the last few years? Haven’t landlords always been greedy? Why is housing currently cheaper in Calgary or Edmonton than Vancouver?
These are all very simply explained using principles of supply and demand. It’s now illegal to build apartments in 80% of the land in our largest cities, of course there’s a housing shortage.
Why isn’t this a phenomenon we see everywhere?
It is.
Why is it only the last few years?
It’s not.
Haven’t landlords always been greedy?
Yes that is why the literal textbook definition for a drain on the economy is a “rent-seeker” as in a rent seeking landlord. When you buy an assett and then just lease it back to people for profit, you are a leach that makes things more expensive while providing no value to anyone.
Like I said, in the 70s the Ontario Liberals dropped the price of houses by 30% just by taxing landlords and getting some of them out of the market, and that’s before the ballooning of landlords and investment properties in the past 50 years.
To add to this “simple supply and demand” is not simple at all. The X curve model that everyone has seen is a purposefully oversimplified model made to get across an extreme oversimplification of the relationship.
When you buy an assett and then just lease it back to people for profit, you are a leach that makes things more expensive while providing no value to anyone.
I don’t understand this view. A person buys a house and wants to rent it out. Are they supposed to take a loss on the property just to make a cheap home for someone who is renting? Are you (collectively, not you specifically) expecting that rental properties must be some altruistic lower than buying cost thing for renters at the expense of owners?
For context, I own a house. I rented it out for a while and am intimately aware of how much it costs to actually be a responsible landlord.
I don’t understand this view. A person buys a house and wants to rent it out. Are they supposed to take a loss on the property just to make a cheap home for someone who is renting?
Oh wow, a landlord who doesn’t understand the concept of breaking even, i.e. not profiting off those poorer than you. What a surprise!
If you’re renting out your own personal home while you rent a different home there’s no real issue, but if you’re buying an investment property, renting it out at a profit, and not keeping it as nice as you keep your own home, then you’re just being a rent seeking leach that’s providing no value to society. You’re just enriching yourself on the backs of people poorer than you. It’s literally the same thing as Nestle buying up drinking water rights and then selling the people back their bottled water at a profit.
Everyone who rants and raves about landlords seems to totally misunderstand just how goddamned expensive it is to be a landlord. As the property owner you are responsible for:
- The mortgage
- Property taxes
- Sewer, garbage, water
- Appliance maintenance (any breakdown will be expensive)
- Exterior maintenance (rain gutter cleaning, power washing driveways, etc.)
- Duct and dryer vent cleaning
- Fence and all exterior care, maintenance
- Optional property manager at about 8-10% of the monthly rent… valuable if you’re not nearby
With all that you get nailed on your income taxes. You can claim only mortgage interest, property management fees, and maintenance expenses against the rental income. The balance of the rent collected is treated as income and you’re taxed on that income… so you have to factor that in as well.
I bought my property at a decent (local) price before the prices skyrocketed during the pandemic. My mortgage is at a reasonable interest rate (I didn’t mortgage when interest rates were super low). To rent out my property (2500 sq ft 3 bedroom with top of the line appliances and finish) and simply break even over all expenses and have a zero gain/loss at the end of the year I’d have to rent my property at about $3400/month.
When I did rent it out I made the conscious choice to rent it out much lower and eat the loss each month. It sucked… but I was able to keep my house while i was working elsewhere, and eventually move back in once I was back in BC (I rented a different property until my tenants gave notice they were leaving).
Your example of a landlord renting a property for profit while not taking care of the property… well yeah that happens everywhere in the world. Some people suck. Those landlords are not the majority in my experience. They stand out because they are shitty people and you and I notice them.
We have just gone through a period of historically cheap debt. It became possible for landlords to leverage their existing properties to obtain new ones at a rate that was extremely uncommonly high. There has been a massive leap in wealth disparity.
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Why can’t the renter afford to buy a home? It only costs at most $100,000 to build a house in material and labour costs. That’s a downpayment of a $10,000 and mortgage payments would be less than $1000, far far lower than the prospect of paying rent for years while you save for a $100,000 downpayment.
But guess what, the price of housing isn’t just material and labour plus the competition of people who need homes, it’s also filled with landlords who are buying up the supply to make money renting the houses back.
Like I said, it’s literally a limited resource and instead of making sure everyone can afford a basic necessity of survival, landlords use their existing greater money to outbid actual first time home buyers, drive up the cost of housing, and then lease it back to renters who “can’t afford a home”.
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Umm did you read the link you sent or do the math provided?
They cite at the low end a cost of $120/square foot, with small houses being around ~1000 square feet that’s $120,000, a completely reasonable mortgage for most middle and lower class people to afford and pretty much exactly in line with my ballpark gut guess.
It only costs at most $100,000 to build a house in material and labour costs.
Where? Seriously… where? Keeping in context and looking at building costs in BC (since Mr. Singh’s house is in Burnaby)… the materials cost to build a 2000 sqft house is more like 3 to 5 times what you guessed. Just the foundation and excavation costs can easily hit $60,000 - $75,000. Add to that the lumber for the flooring alone which can easily exceed $30,000. Just those two things and you’re over your $100,000 guesstimate. And you haven’t accounted for permits, surveying, connections to city utils. The real cost of materials in a home in BC is more like $500,000… to START. Plus you have contractor fees that can easily hit 20% of your materials cost… if not more.
I own a house in BC that we built in 2019… I saw the materials cost… and the costs have gone up a LOT since then. You are way off on your cost of building materials estimate.
Building costs on average range from $120-$260 / square foot in Canada. A small sized starter home is not 2000ft but 1000, which puts us firmly in the $100-200k range, not the $600k they actually sell for at minimum. And this isn’t getting into the fact that once a home is built it will typically be good for many many owners.
That’s still not accounting for foundation costs… contractor rates… and so on. Even with a 1000 sqft home, you’re still going to find youreslef pushing over $200,000 in materials and other costs… then there’s the land value. Lumber costs will make you cry… the wood you use in construction is bloody expensive nowadays. I don’t think that you can honestly get away with $120/sqft…
But taking your price of say… .$200k (I picked the upper end because I think you’re low and using reference data that several years old) in materials cost… add in surveying, foundation, building permits, licenses, services, and the one big expense you’re missing… land to build on… and you’re not going to have a house built (even if you do almost all the work yourself) for $200k.
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Congratulations on reading comprehension! We are discussing the current housing system and its flaws! Good job!
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Is it only the one property? Could it be they own a plex? Could it be their primary residence?
I wouldn’t judge until I have more details.
You would make a very bad Conservative.
LoL!
I genuinely don’t understand, maybe because I’m an immigrant from a place where housing issues are very different from Canada.
Is owning a rental property generally considered a “get rich quick” scheme?
It’s often presented that way.
Buy a house, rent it to pay the mortgage, then use a loan against it to buy another house, rent that house out to cover the mortgage, repeat.
Now you’ve got multiple income properties and real estate in the last 20 years has grown in value quickly.
No bank should ever allow this to happen as they’re giving out highly correlated loans, but the backs don’t really do much verification beyond asking if the down payment comes from debt to which you can say no.
Makes sense. Thanks.
Too be fair, he was lamenting that they let this happen… He didn’t say he wouldn’t take advantage!
Sincere out-of-the-loop question:
Has Jagmeet made statements that make this especially hypocritical, or is it just the general sentiment that being a landlord is inherently problematic?
What he said is in the image.
The rest of the world is shocked to learn that his wife leans Liberal and/or Conservative and are bemoaning the suffragette success that allows her to express that.
Oh lol I totally overlooked that the tweet on the bottom was FROM HIM.
Thanks for helping me learn to read.
Could they simply be renting their own house while they live elsewhere?
And still paying for it, what a crime! /s
Question is if makes strides to take losses. He has ownership in this stupid game being played - hopefully he uses the leverage to say “look, I own property and I’m working against these other landlords to act in the favour of the majority”.
Nobody can call him out for some stupid “easy for you to say when you don’t have any rental properties”
What the actual fuck though? If this isn’t some temporary situation then I never want to hear him bring up the housing crisis again without someone mentioning this. Go ahead and watch the “we’re proud to provide a rental for a fellow Canadian” BS that no one ever calls out PP on.
Like nah, you’re taking advantage of a fellow Canadian. You didn’t “add a rental” you took away a unit for purchase and force someone to pay a surcharge to rent it from you.
I’m not a landlord, but I also don’t feel like all landlords are grifters, there’s a non zero chance they saved up and bought/mortgaged a second place, and are renting it out.
I’ve been a renter, i’ve had good and bad landlords, most were just people trying to get by doing a job. Being a landlord isn’t an easy job.
Also people selling you shit aren’t taking advantage of a fellow canadian, their just selling you shit, i don’t see how landlords are any different.
Sorry, but being a landlord in a non purpose built unit is amoral during a housing crisis. You are making the crisis worse by enriching yourself on the backs of others.
The world isn’t so black and white. Maybe what some landlords are doing is exploitative. However some people do need a place to stay, and renting is an option for them, this is alleviating the housing crisis. What’s he supposed to do sell rather than rent? Say he sells, should he get less than it’s value?
You are giving no options but saying “oh this guy is a hypocrite”, without any more data (is it one house, that seems kind of legit to do), is it a complex of houses and he’s charging above market rates, then maybe yeah he’s a hypocrite – but we don’t know that.
It really isn’t that complicated though…
You are in no way alleviating the housing crisis by adding landlords for single family homes. That ONLY raises the prices, unless those landlords are renting below their actual costs and even then the market speculation would still likely make it more expensive for everyone.
You aren’t increasing supply by taking a sale unit off the market and renting it out to make a profit off “providing” someone a basic human need. That concept wouldn’t pass a simple thought experiment.
You are providing a house for people to rent, people who may not be able or willing to by a house. That house is (presumably occupied) reducing the demand.
That ONLY raises the prices
There is still a market for renters, you could make the exact same argument in the opposite direction, by not renting you are only rising the costs of rents.
Now if this was the case, I’d be more in agreement with you, but we simply don’t know.
The VAST majority would rather buy a house. The idea that landlords are helping our people who would like to rent a home is tone deaf given the current state of affairs. I would wager 1% or less would rather rent a home vs buy if they had the option - for what I thought were very obvious reasons.
They aren’t “providing a home to rent”. They removed a home for sale from the market, making buying a new home more expensive, and then rent at a rate that makes you money. So you’re simply adding a middleman to pay. Rents are set based off the sale prices, as sale prices go up, rental prices go up, because that’s the alternative.
Hey, if landlords are creating purpose built rentals, great. But buying up SFH and renting them out as an investment? You’re a parasite.
I’m not a landlord. Ive rented in the past. Ive definitely preferred renting in the past. I don’t view owning a home as an investment, because even if I sell I very likely have to buy in the same market.
I’m not a parasite by your definition.
Maybe since we’ve both provided zero data to back up these speculations we both don’t really know. I’m really not going to go do research.
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All landlords are parasites.
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Not a tankie.
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Yes the difference is the severity of your greed and moral failing?
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Telling someone to grow up when you counter an argument with ‘no you’re wrong’ certainly is one take.
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When did I claim to be morally superior exactly?
You seem incredibly defensive. A landlord perhaps?
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Why don’t you link the tweet instead of sharing a screenshot? It is important enable people to access the context.
This is the website where you can access the records, it is the Public Registry of the Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner.
If we were to compare him to someone else I’m sure we would find bigger red flags like being an investor real estate investment company. There are many things we don’t know here. One thing we do know is that he is from BC (Burnaby) so he could be renting a property he purchased to live in.
We could easily enter this infinite loop of whataboutisms which is extremely tiring. I just don’t understand the hate Jagmeet Singh gets compared to other politicians.
Because that place is a nazi bar, you shouldn’t link to it
I’m done with the NDP and Liberals and will be switching to Green in next election.
The Greens are a bunch of crackpots with conservative policies who think wifi is killing us. They’ve had like 20 years to build a sensible eco-centric party, and we’re in the midst of a civilization-threatening global climate disaster, and they’ve done jack shit to build support around that. They’re just not serious about politics and getting the exposure needed to galvanize public support around key topics. Instead, we had Elizabeth May (who I voted in as MP) stay on for way too long and then the party leadership degenerated into infighting.
There needs to be a second “green” party that takes key issues serious, has liberal social and fiscal policies, prioritizes the environment (and the crises of global warming we’re in), and sheds all the weird fringe shit.
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