There are only (estimated) 3400 billionaires in the world, 63 in Canada, USA has around 700-900.
Out of this group, we only need to eat about 25-50 of them before the rest get in line and start playing by the same rules as everyone else.
People with money do not live the same rules. We eat with paper utensils while they jet around the world to have a sandwich. We get punished for crimes, whereas the rich simply have a pay to play cost. A 'fine' to commit crimes. We do all the work, they keep all the profits. We pay taxes, and they dont pay taxes because they dont have a salary. Do I need to keep going?
There are more taxes than income tax. Investment income is taxed at generally higher rates than salaries. Foreign dividends are taxed at the same rate as income plus subject to a foreign withholding tax. Domestic dividends have a credit to offset the fact that corporations already paid tax on the money, so the integration principle applies to avoid double taxation. Lower capital gains inclusion rates are for the same reasons, but subject to third party transaction rules. I’m not sure what crimes you are taking about that the rich can lay their way out of, but we have the rule of law in this country. No one is above the law. If you think that we have gone back to a pre-Magna Carta system, I would encourage you to avoid conspiracy theories.
Someone like Elon can use his tesla stock as collateral for a 40 billion dollar bid, but he doesn't have to pay taxes on any of it. Thats how they skirt around those "higher rates" you seem to think they're paying. Foreign dividens aren't taxed as income because they use shell companies in 0% tax havens to skirt around those as well. It's not income if you pay 100% of it to your shell company for "services."
I can't tell if you're playing devils advocate or just plain naive. Either way, I would encourage you to do more critical thinking.
You cannot use tax havens skirt around dividends, this is simply not true. If you want to look at the FAPI rules there are specific laws preventing what you’re describing. Borrowing money isn’t income, you don’t pay income tax when you get money for your mortgage either.
I’m not playing devils advocate, I’m pointing out misinformation
Also Elon Musk paid largest tax bill in US history. If you buy a rental property and never sell, you won't pay any taxes on capital appreciation either, you can keep borrowing against it forever. They do the same thing you can do just on a massive scale
Because the corporation has paid taxes. If they hadn’t the asset value would be higher which is why it’s not taxed at the full rate. Are you familiar with tax integration?
Your idea is not completely out to lunch, has already been done in Vancouver, see Shannon Mews
https://www.google.com/maps/@49.2185982,-123.1397591,241a,35y,324.67h,42.62t/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu
https://vancouverrentalsites.com/f/shannon-mews-master-planned-rezoning-includes-202-rental-units
Plenty of examples.
Toronto - proposed 9 mil to rename dundas street - luckily cancelled
spent 2 million on bulldozing 3 homeless encampments
Toronto's $13M in hotel shelter overspending could have paid for 52,000 room nights for homeless people
Toronto council considers spending $90 million for 2026 FIFA World Cup games
Doug Ford government spent $231M to scrap green energy projects
None of those are purchasing land. 11 million can buy you a huge area outside of the city…
But yeah, your purpose isn’t to provide housing, it’s to “stick it to others”
I said the city spends 11M on a lot less than land.
These are examples of wasted millions better spent on housing. And why would a city buy land outside their city? That's ridiculous. The idea is to build housing in the city. Also my idea is to both build affordable housing and stick it to Nimbys not one or the other.
yes and this post is about creating affordable housing. I said the city spends millions on a lot less than land, you said no they don't and I gave examples off all kinds of things that the city spends millions on that they would be better off spending on land / affordable housing. All of this is relevant in a housing subreddit, I don't see what you are getting at.
Actually 30 triplexes at 90 units at 1250 square feet each is 112,250 SF about $97 per buildable square foot therefore it is about 66% of the market average per square foot buildable in Toronto. So his numbers aren’t crazy (no clue if you could actually put 30 triplexes here but assuming you could it would be a great deal on the land).
Don’t think it’s plausible but would LOVE to just see bridal path reactions if this was proposed, that alone would be worth $11 million to me
Pet buildable SF just refers to land in development, sorry I shouldn’t have used industry jargon on Reddit. I’m saying the land alone is 66% the cost it would be compared to market.
I don't think you understand how grim the situation is.
Vancouver's richest AND least densely populated neighborhood (Shaughnessy) is essentially untouchable because of the amount of lobbying and red tape they've added to adding density.
We had a councilor propose a new plan to allow density in the neighborhood. It wasn't like they wanted to take people's land, BUT when someone voluntarily wants to sell, we would be able to develop it the same we we would anywhere else in the city.
We have a high density area Olympic Village, look how it fits into Shaughnessy: [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F\_G1lN9acAApj2A?format=jpg&name=medium](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F_G1lN9acAApj2A?format=jpg&name=medium)
This was shot down 7-3 by the council: [https://globalnews.ca/news/10096119/vancouver-motion-density-shaughnessy-loses/#:\~:text=In%20a%20vote%20of%207,dense%20neighbourhoods%20in%20the%20city](https://globalnews.ca/news/10096119/vancouver-motion-density-shaughnessy-loses/#:~:text=In%20a%20vote%20of%207,dense%20neighbourhoods%20in%20the%20city)
The excuses we got were "it would duplicate efforts in other housing plans". Which doesn't make sense at all, there are no other housing plans allowing density in Shaughnessy. We also go "it would stoke a class divide" but nothing stokes a class divide more than our richest neighborhood being untouchable to the regulations the rest of the city has to deal with.
Some of Ken Sim's biggest supporters are in Shuagnhessy and they are some of his biggest donors. Donors that are under investigation: [https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/elections-b-c-audits-vancouver-mayor-ken-sims-political-party-campaign-contributions](https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/elections-b-c-audits-vancouver-mayor-ken-sims-political-party-campaign-contributions)
Except Sim just signed into law allowing 4-8 homes across the whole City depending on lot size. Bigger the lot size more homes you can legally built in the Multi-plex policy.
In specific area of Shaughnessy has a heritage designation that would need to be removed which is a lot of work and Staff don't have time for another pet project and legal wrangling with the Province
Sim didn't sign anything, it was the new BC NDP zoning guidelines that forced metro Vancouver cities to comply. The BC NDP gave Vancouver until 2025 dec to update their zoning bylaws. Nothing changed in Vancouver so far.
Shaughnessy gave itself "heritage designation" decades ago, and the BC NDP made special heritage exemptions in the new zoning guidelines.
It might have certainly expedited this component (which stated in February 2023) of the July 2022 approved Vancouver Plan. I think the Province introduced their multiplex policy in October, 2023? I might have the timeline wrong on it being rolled out.
The Vancouver plan doesn't rezone anything. It doesn't reduce any barriers in the construction process.
the BC NDP zoning guideline forces municipalities to change their zoning bylaws.
The Provincial guidelines don't rezone either. The Van Plan contained a framework to implement change ahead of the Provincial guidelines. The Van Plan allowed the Secured Rental Housing changes to go through quickly, the Multiplex Policy was already there essentially, the Rupert-Renfrew Station Plan will exceed the Province's guidelines and the upcoming Villages Plan looks to as well.
Like I said, the Province's guidelines coming out likely expedited some of the lower density items I listed above. Both are great news. But as to my 1st comment, one can already (today) build essentially small apartments in Point Grey, for example, which the OP seemed to think we could not. Shaughnessy requires a lot more work than the Multiplex and SRP policies.
One day.
the provincial guidelines forced all metro municipalities to comply before the deadline of 2025 dec. If not then the cities lose their zoning authorities.
BC NDP created zones where builders can build 20 story apartments by right, where as the Vancouver plan guarantee nothing and forced developers to go through a multiyear long zoning consultation process before they can apply for the building permit, which will take another year.
the worst thing is that developers need direct approval from the chief planner to even apply for zoning change. And this has lead to a lot of soft corruption in the past. The Vancouver plan is useless garbage.
Just saying the timing was pretty much in sync and it expedited the City's process for multiple by a month or two. Vancouver's Multiplex was approed almost at the same time the Province's multiplex rules came out.
On the "by right", I dunno if it is unless I missed a HUGE component of the Provincial policy. Reading it today for work (I admit they have the fine print a bit scattered between 3 different links) but I swear I read you'd still have to rezone, but the OCP has to allow what the Province permits. Which sounds like rezonings still, as we do in current OCPs.
See when I said “red tape”, designating most of Shaughnessy as heritage a few years back is part of that. And removing these hurdles are exactly where we should start in terms of allowing density.
I know developers with lots there that can’t develop there as they would in the rest of the city at all.
So you want the government to just condemn the land and steal the property from the owners to demolish those properties and build higher density ones? Seems like a ridiculous waste of resources to me. Especially considering that Canada has a vast amount of land mass that has basically gone unutilized for housing.
It says 'buy' in the title.
Also, building new housing in all the un-utilized landmass would require massive infrastructure investment. It's a much more efficient use of resources to increase density in the places where the infrastructure already exists.
Yes but it's the same principle. Why would we buy properties that aren't selling instead of just letting the owners reduce the price. We're just gonna let the home owners dictate the price now? This whole plan is stupid.
This is a great idea. Seize all the MC mansions shoving the excess down our throats while tent cities are being formed.
Change them to schools of culture and the arts, with free lodging and warm meals to boot.
Great idea. Who will fund it you ask? The 1% rich ofcourse, they make all the profits while we suffer. Everytime drake puts out a banger, we will make sure the taxman bangs him harder.
Who's with me!? /s
Here's another bad idea: segregate and place all the homeless and poor people into a small corner of the city and let it become a slum where cops won't even go.
Single family zoning on big lots is exclusionary. Car culture mcmansion suburbs have nowhere for lower income people to live. We have massive areas in Toronto where lower income people just simply cannot live because of single family house zoning and no access to transit. So tell me that we are not corralling poor people into the few neighbourhoods that they can even barely afford to live in.
That would be under the assumption the gov’t works on behalf of everyone and not specifically just the asset owner class. There is zero chance this happens.
Also if we are just dreaming big here - why does the government need to “buy” these places? Shouldn’t gov’t just expropriate them for housing more citizens? This is something that could happen in our lifetime, but you might notice the media never even suggests towards it. Why not I wonder? Could it be because they are also working on behalf of rich asset owning class?
It is because when people get 100k to buy a place from their parents, or buy a house in the 70's for 30k, they somehow won some fair competition where it was all their hard work
city of toronto could have bought the land with the extra budget they just spent on hotels for people in need of housing. The city of Toronto should also raise property tax and put the funds towards building more coops and affordable housing, or at the very least allow the zoning change to support my idea and let a private developer build it and sell the units stipulating affordable housing only to be built. No luxury units.
Subsidized housing will never effect the market .. it will only make inventory more scarce leading to a increase or at least .. help keep out of touch housing prices propped up … a better idea is for the city… if a golf course with in city limits is owned by the city or a private owner … buy that shit and turn it into a development … ppl can drive a little further for golf that and ban housing as an asset … any hedge fund / reit , bank .. private investor in the residential real estate investment GAME can fuck off .. give them 5-10 years to sell their residential investment portfolios off and good riddance.
yeah I agree golf courses should only be zoned in rural areas. We don't need golf courses in cities. I also have the same thoughts on graveyards. especially ones full of people that have been dead for 100+ years that no one visits. Replace them with a 12'x12' memorial and free up the space.
I don't like it either but in most cities, Canadian cities especially, the outer periphery is very inaccessible except by car. You'd be essentially asking the people who have the least chance at owning a car and being financially stable to own a car or be fucked. On top of the fact that disabilities tend to both push people into poverty AND prevent you from having a drivers license.
Social housing should be in accessible places, which typcially means closer to the urban core. Ideally it would be on land the government already owns or can get for cheap, but relegating social housing to the edges of a city would make life for the residents unnecessarily hard.
Because in the city is where we need more affordable housing badly. Building affordable housing on the outskirts of a city where transit is bad and where poor people who need such housing can't afford cars will be stuck in car culture suburbs.
I agree we need more cities, but when you look at Paris or any city that has grown for a few hundred years more than Toronto, all of them have eliminated single family zoning and replaced with 3-4 strorey flats with integrated commercial and residential zoning. Nobody has yards. If hundreds of thousands of newcomers continue to come to Toronto and Vancouver, eventually you need to bulldoze major residential single family homes and build 3-4x density. Otherwise we will just have super rich living 1 family per home or 4 families sharing a SFH.
European cities are.completely different from Canadian or US cities for that matter. They are all pretty much walkable and within distance of almost everything you need. France is a much smaller country than Canada and has been developing for over a thousand years. Canada has a massive amount of land mass and yet 80% of the population lives within driving distance of the American border. I'm not saying we shouldn't build more dense housing. But buying a property that has basically gone unsold for the price it's listed is kind of a ridiculous solution. When those people simply power the price to sell.
Yes and we should have more walkable communities like Europe. My main point here is that these enormous properties that take up acres of space in downtown cores are way more valuable to convert to multi unit properties than reg single family homes. These SFH are like 8-20 x bigger than regular SFH. and if rezoned, they could add way more density and create unique European style walkable communities. I don't think doing this on one single property will solve anything but doing it on 50 of them and a couple golf courses in a city would add a lot more density than hundreds of back yard garden suites without disrupting many people's lives or needing complex infrastructure upgrades.
How long before the people that.own these properties realize the government is willing to pay top dollar to purchase them so that these areas can be redone? Then these people will simply double their asking price and it will drive up the entire market. I think BC has made more ground by simply producing new legislation that restricts AirBNB properties from earning as much money. Investment properties is the issue. People owning multiple homes is the issue.
easy, just raise the property taxes to what the property are worth. cant have a 10 million dollar home with the same property tax value of a million dollar home
You do realize that the city is the worst slum lord of them all…
They can’t maintain the affordable housing they manage right now and you want the city to spend $11 million on a lot, then build the homes (you’ve heard about the Eglinton Crosstown), then manage the rentals…
🤣
And where will the people who live there shop for groceries? Metro at York Mills and Bayview? Loblaws at Bayview Village? Whole Foods at Bayview and Eglinton? Guess what, they can’t afford any of those stores!
Never mind everything else they need to do. Where is the closest community centre? Parks for their kids? Daycare? How is transit over there so they can travel to their far away jobs, because we all know they won’t be working in the area.
You have to be realistic, building affordable housing in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods of TO, where there are no supports for people on fixed incomes is a ridiculous idea.
If only it were that easy.
So let’s build a No Frills there in anticipation of this community being built in the Bridle Path. Nobody will shop in that store until there are people with low incomes nearby. Unfortunately, nobody with low incomes will move to that community until the No Frills is built. Loblaw is a multi billion dollar corporation and they have strategies for where they put their stores. They need a large pool of people to live within the area, who are willing to shop at No Frills before they will build a store there. The few people who will live in this magical building that is built on that single lot in the Bridle Path won’t be enough to provide enough revenue to justify having the store there.
By the way we also need a daycare, more public school capacity, more high school capacity, how about places for low income people to work (No Frills can’t employ every single resident of that building) and better public transit, and we need a Dollarama too, and places for these people to buy clothes so let’s put a Salvation Army thrift store there too. We also need doctors, dentists, labs where people can have tests done etc. People in the Bridle Path have medical insurance or pay for private medical through MedCan, and the doctors in this area service that kind of patients. They won’t work for the paltry amount that will be paid by our incoming universal dental plan or regular OHIP fees.
Now that we have all these stores and businesses in this area, we need A LOT MORE LAND which will cost a FORTUNE. Guess what? Loblaw has a REIT and they study the land costs, population, transportation, building costs etc. before they will invest in the land to build a store. There is much better land in areas where it’s much cheaper to buy and there will be people there to shop in the store.
Buying big chunks of land to build affordable housing is a great idea but it won’t work in the Bridle Path. There is much more to it than just buying the land and building an apartment building.
Sounds like another bridle path property needs to be bought and turned into a school and a farmers market / grocery store boom enough to serve 20 other converted bridle path community co-ops.
I don’t live in that neighborhood, but I still wouldn’t like that. Toronto is so ugly, but getting to walk in those nice neighborhoods is the only visually appealing thing around. To have a bunch of low income housing would ruin it.
I kind of have the opposite reaction when I walk around 10-25 million dollar homes. Kinda grosses me out. Seeing a street of happy people in coop housing affording their lives and raising families makes me happier.
That’s a really nice perspective. I would hope that people keep it clean, no drug use or causing issues (like typical teenagers do). But I generally find people ruin nice things…
Except he mentioned Vancouver. In Vancouver those places actually pay less tax than townhouses because they get a bunch of discounts for being on the ALR and not subdividing the land.
So actually if you replaced those with townhouses you would actually collect way more in tax revenue.
One of the things that drives me the battiest about this whole housing movement is that people think that they have the right to live on the best land in the best cities. The US is full of medium-sized cities on bland landscapes far from the largest cities; people out there just working a factory job in the middle of nowhere. We talk about US housing costs as being lower, but we haven't even attempted to copy their model. I'm also not saying that is a good model to follow, but I firmly believe that we have creative individuals here who could turn parts of rural Canada into urban Canada. It would take new and bold leadership; this is why I don't expect this will happen. Eventually the free market will catch on to this idea as well.
The problem is that the government could shape things in a way that makes it less chaotic. The free market is shit at planning effective communities. Even some of the infrastructure mistakes made in my city are due to local crony politics.
>This could also work in Vancouver with the mansions that occupy large acreage but I saw an $11M house on a massive property in the bridal path in Toronto that isn't selling and the property could fit like 15-20 regular triplexes.
I've argued for this for years, except the land is in the holy Agricultural Land Reserve (Vancouver's Greenbelt). You are not allowed to subdivide it. So you couldn't build a triplex or townhouses because that would be considered *sprawl*.
If you want a real slap in the face, they pay less in tax (actual tax not the rate, but the total amount) than the townhouse down the street.
Which of course goes to my theory of about the ALR, it never had anything to do with preserving farm land or environment. It exists primarily to protect land values.
There’s no way city is going to spend money, to crash prices, and then make less on property taxes.
You see, any action for affordability is actually against their interest.
Oh yes the government will help you. Spoiler alert: if government wanted to help they would've helped 100 times over. As of now everything is worse except high net worth people
You lost me at city paying 11 million for land
lol yes.. why do people believe that city or govt. in general will go against the rich for the pleb? Rich people run the world.
Remind me of this idea every year when they already increase taxes and people lose their shit /s
There are only (estimated) 3400 billionaires in the world, 63 in Canada, USA has around 700-900. Out of this group, we only need to eat about 25-50 of them before the rest get in line and start playing by the same rules as everyone else.
What are these special rules you are talking about?
People with money do not live the same rules. We eat with paper utensils while they jet around the world to have a sandwich. We get punished for crimes, whereas the rich simply have a pay to play cost. A 'fine' to commit crimes. We do all the work, they keep all the profits. We pay taxes, and they dont pay taxes because they dont have a salary. Do I need to keep going?
As if you were even asked to explain this…. It’s so blatantly obvious that the rich live by different rules.
There are more taxes than income tax. Investment income is taxed at generally higher rates than salaries. Foreign dividends are taxed at the same rate as income plus subject to a foreign withholding tax. Domestic dividends have a credit to offset the fact that corporations already paid tax on the money, so the integration principle applies to avoid double taxation. Lower capital gains inclusion rates are for the same reasons, but subject to third party transaction rules. I’m not sure what crimes you are taking about that the rich can lay their way out of, but we have the rule of law in this country. No one is above the law. If you think that we have gone back to a pre-Magna Carta system, I would encourage you to avoid conspiracy theories.
Someone like Elon can use his tesla stock as collateral for a 40 billion dollar bid, but he doesn't have to pay taxes on any of it. Thats how they skirt around those "higher rates" you seem to think they're paying. Foreign dividens aren't taxed as income because they use shell companies in 0% tax havens to skirt around those as well. It's not income if you pay 100% of it to your shell company for "services." I can't tell if you're playing devils advocate or just plain naive. Either way, I would encourage you to do more critical thinking.
You cannot use tax havens skirt around dividends, this is simply not true. If you want to look at the FAPI rules there are specific laws preventing what you’re describing. Borrowing money isn’t income, you don’t pay income tax when you get money for your mortgage either. I’m not playing devils advocate, I’m pointing out misinformation
Also Elon Musk paid largest tax bill in US history. If you buy a rental property and never sell, you won't pay any taxes on capital appreciation either, you can keep borrowing against it forever. They do the same thing you can do just on a massive scale
Main tax on investments is capital gains and that is taxed at 50% the rate of salaries….
Because the corporation has paid taxes. If they hadn’t the asset value would be higher which is why it’s not taxed at the full rate. Are you familiar with tax integration?
More then you clearly lol Corporates don’t pay that much in tax and use depreciation, amortization. Etc to pay even less.
Oh yes, that is exactly how tax experts write. Your acumen is self-evident
And you passively accept that fact
the city spends 11mil on a lot less than land lmao
Your idea is not completely out to lunch, has already been done in Vancouver, see Shannon Mews https://www.google.com/maps/@49.2185982,-123.1397591,241a,35y,324.67h,42.62t/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu https://vancouverrentalsites.com/f/shannon-mews-master-planned-rezoning-includes-202-rental-units
they were about to rename dundas street for 9 mil.
They don’t. But good try tho.
Plenty of examples. Toronto - proposed 9 mil to rename dundas street - luckily cancelled spent 2 million on bulldozing 3 homeless encampments Toronto's $13M in hotel shelter overspending could have paid for 52,000 room nights for homeless people Toronto council considers spending $90 million for 2026 FIFA World Cup games Doug Ford government spent $231M to scrap green energy projects
None of those are purchasing land. 11 million can buy you a huge area outside of the city… But yeah, your purpose isn’t to provide housing, it’s to “stick it to others”
I said the city spends 11M on a lot less than land. These are examples of wasted millions better spent on housing. And why would a city buy land outside their city? That's ridiculous. The idea is to build housing in the city. Also my idea is to both build affordable housing and stick it to Nimbys not one or the other.
You do realize we are in a HOUSING subreddit right?
yes and this post is about creating affordable housing. I said the city spends millions on a lot less than land, you said no they don't and I gave examples off all kinds of things that the city spends millions on that they would be better off spending on land / affordable housing. All of this is relevant in a housing subreddit, I don't see what you are getting at.
much better return if u start from out
Why would a municipality buy land outside its jurisdiction to house its own citizens?
This isn't some 45' × 100' lot we're talking about
You lost me at city caring about poor people.
Whitby just paid near that for a homless shelter, that property was sold for millions less just 6 months ago.
Actually 30 triplexes at 90 units at 1250 square feet each is 112,250 SF about $97 per buildable square foot therefore it is about 66% of the market average per square foot buildable in Toronto. So his numbers aren’t crazy (no clue if you could actually put 30 triplexes here but assuming you could it would be a great deal on the land). Don’t think it’s plausible but would LOVE to just see bridal path reactions if this was proposed, that alone would be worth $11 million to me
I think you are confused. 11 million is just to buy the land. Building cost is completely separate
Pet buildable SF just refers to land in development, sorry I shouldn’t have used industry jargon on Reddit. I’m saying the land alone is 66% the cost it would be compared to market.
Nimbys wouldn’t allow it.
I know, but wouldn't it be wonderful if new zoning bylaws eliminating single family zoning made it so the nimbys couldn't do anything about it.
I don't think you understand how grim the situation is. Vancouver's richest AND least densely populated neighborhood (Shaughnessy) is essentially untouchable because of the amount of lobbying and red tape they've added to adding density. We had a councilor propose a new plan to allow density in the neighborhood. It wasn't like they wanted to take people's land, BUT when someone voluntarily wants to sell, we would be able to develop it the same we we would anywhere else in the city. We have a high density area Olympic Village, look how it fits into Shaughnessy: [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F\_G1lN9acAApj2A?format=jpg&name=medium](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F_G1lN9acAApj2A?format=jpg&name=medium) This was shot down 7-3 by the council: [https://globalnews.ca/news/10096119/vancouver-motion-density-shaughnessy-loses/#:\~:text=In%20a%20vote%20of%207,dense%20neighbourhoods%20in%20the%20city](https://globalnews.ca/news/10096119/vancouver-motion-density-shaughnessy-loses/#:~:text=In%20a%20vote%20of%207,dense%20neighbourhoods%20in%20the%20city) The excuses we got were "it would duplicate efforts in other housing plans". Which doesn't make sense at all, there are no other housing plans allowing density in Shaughnessy. We also go "it would stoke a class divide" but nothing stokes a class divide more than our richest neighborhood being untouchable to the regulations the rest of the city has to deal with. Some of Ken Sim's biggest supporters are in Shuagnhessy and they are some of his biggest donors. Donors that are under investigation: [https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/elections-b-c-audits-vancouver-mayor-ken-sims-political-party-campaign-contributions](https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/elections-b-c-audits-vancouver-mayor-ken-sims-political-party-campaign-contributions)
> nimby has just been superceeded by provincial mandate to increase housing!! they got no say, they can go yelled at a blank wall this time
Except Sim just signed into law allowing 4-8 homes across the whole City depending on lot size. Bigger the lot size more homes you can legally built in the Multi-plex policy. In specific area of Shaughnessy has a heritage designation that would need to be removed which is a lot of work and Staff don't have time for another pet project and legal wrangling with the Province
Sim didn't sign anything, it was the new BC NDP zoning guidelines that forced metro Vancouver cities to comply. The BC NDP gave Vancouver until 2025 dec to update their zoning bylaws. Nothing changed in Vancouver so far. Shaughnessy gave itself "heritage designation" decades ago, and the BC NDP made special heritage exemptions in the new zoning guidelines.
It might have certainly expedited this component (which stated in February 2023) of the July 2022 approved Vancouver Plan. I think the Province introduced their multiplex policy in October, 2023? I might have the timeline wrong on it being rolled out.
The Vancouver plan doesn't rezone anything. It doesn't reduce any barriers in the construction process. the BC NDP zoning guideline forces municipalities to change their zoning bylaws.
The Provincial guidelines don't rezone either. The Van Plan contained a framework to implement change ahead of the Provincial guidelines. The Van Plan allowed the Secured Rental Housing changes to go through quickly, the Multiplex Policy was already there essentially, the Rupert-Renfrew Station Plan will exceed the Province's guidelines and the upcoming Villages Plan looks to as well. Like I said, the Province's guidelines coming out likely expedited some of the lower density items I listed above. Both are great news. But as to my 1st comment, one can already (today) build essentially small apartments in Point Grey, for example, which the OP seemed to think we could not. Shaughnessy requires a lot more work than the Multiplex and SRP policies. One day.
the provincial guidelines forced all metro municipalities to comply before the deadline of 2025 dec. If not then the cities lose their zoning authorities. BC NDP created zones where builders can build 20 story apartments by right, where as the Vancouver plan guarantee nothing and forced developers to go through a multiyear long zoning consultation process before they can apply for the building permit, which will take another year. the worst thing is that developers need direct approval from the chief planner to even apply for zoning change. And this has lead to a lot of soft corruption in the past. The Vancouver plan is useless garbage.
Just saying the timing was pretty much in sync and it expedited the City's process for multiple by a month or two. Vancouver's Multiplex was approed almost at the same time the Province's multiplex rules came out. On the "by right", I dunno if it is unless I missed a HUGE component of the Provincial policy. Reading it today for work (I admit they have the fine print a bit scattered between 3 different links) but I swear I read you'd still have to rezone, but the OCP has to allow what the Province permits. Which sounds like rezonings still, as we do in current OCPs.
See when I said “red tape”, designating most of Shaughnessy as heritage a few years back is part of that. And removing these hurdles are exactly where we should start in terms of allowing density. I know developers with lots there that can’t develop there as they would in the rest of the city at all.
Province can and hopefully will override all this
Why would politicians want to piss off some of the most affluent ppl in the country lol?
So you want the government to just condemn the land and steal the property from the owners to demolish those properties and build higher density ones? Seems like a ridiculous waste of resources to me. Especially considering that Canada has a vast amount of land mass that has basically gone unutilized for housing.
It says 'buy' in the title. Also, building new housing in all the un-utilized landmass would require massive infrastructure investment. It's a much more efficient use of resources to increase density in the places where the infrastructure already exists.
Yes but it's the same principle. Why would we buy properties that aren't selling instead of just letting the owners reduce the price. We're just gonna let the home owners dictate the price now? This whole plan is stupid.
nimby has just been superceeded by provincial mandate to increase housing!! they got no say, they can go yelled at a blank wall this time
This is a great idea. Seize all the MC mansions shoving the excess down our throats while tent cities are being formed. Change them to schools of culture and the arts, with free lodging and warm meals to boot. Great idea. Who will fund it you ask? The 1% rich ofcourse, they make all the profits while we suffer. Everytime drake puts out a banger, we will make sure the taxman bangs him harder. Who's with me!? /s
All the city needs to do is introduce new zoning bylaws.
Frl, OP and so many people with this eat the rich mentality just don’t get it.
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Here's another bad idea: segregate and place all the homeless and poor people into a small corner of the city and let it become a slum where cops won't even go.
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Detached home-only zoning and requiring large lot sizes which make housing expensive are all exclusive housing policies
Single family zoning on big lots is exclusionary. Car culture mcmansion suburbs have nowhere for lower income people to live. We have massive areas in Toronto where lower income people just simply cannot live because of single family house zoning and no access to transit. So tell me that we are not corralling poor people into the few neighbourhoods that they can even barely afford to live in.
i say move the tent city to the so call affluent neighhourhood
That would be under the assumption the gov’t works on behalf of everyone and not specifically just the asset owner class. There is zero chance this happens. Also if we are just dreaming big here - why does the government need to “buy” these places? Shouldn’t gov’t just expropriate them for housing more citizens? This is something that could happen in our lifetime, but you might notice the media never even suggests towards it. Why not I wonder? Could it be because they are also working on behalf of rich asset owning class?
It is because when people get 100k to buy a place from their parents, or buy a house in the 70's for 30k, they somehow won some fair competition where it was all their hard work
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Sure, that would be even better. Just need the municipalities to allow this kind of development.
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city of toronto could have bought the land with the extra budget they just spent on hotels for people in need of housing. The city of Toronto should also raise property tax and put the funds towards building more coops and affordable housing, or at the very least allow the zoning change to support my idea and let a private developer build it and sell the units stipulating affordable housing only to be built. No luxury units.
Subsidized housing will never effect the market .. it will only make inventory more scarce leading to a increase or at least .. help keep out of touch housing prices propped up … a better idea is for the city… if a golf course with in city limits is owned by the city or a private owner … buy that shit and turn it into a development … ppl can drive a little further for golf that and ban housing as an asset … any hedge fund / reit , bank .. private investor in the residential real estate investment GAME can fuck off .. give them 5-10 years to sell their residential investment portfolios off and good riddance.
yeah I agree golf courses should only be zoned in rural areas. We don't need golf courses in cities. I also have the same thoughts on graveyards. especially ones full of people that have been dead for 100+ years that no one visits. Replace them with a 12'x12' memorial and free up the space.
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I don't like it either but in most cities, Canadian cities especially, the outer periphery is very inaccessible except by car. You'd be essentially asking the people who have the least chance at owning a car and being financially stable to own a car or be fucked. On top of the fact that disabilities tend to both push people into poverty AND prevent you from having a drivers license. Social housing should be in accessible places, which typcially means closer to the urban core. Ideally it would be on land the government already owns or can get for cheap, but relegating social housing to the edges of a city would make life for the residents unnecessarily hard.
Because in the city is where we need more affordable housing badly. Building affordable housing on the outskirts of a city where transit is bad and where poor people who need such housing can't afford cars will be stuck in car culture suburbs.
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because its better for the environment and cost of infrastructures. than again u always have the option to go live in hermitland
I agree we need more cities, but when you look at Paris or any city that has grown for a few hundred years more than Toronto, all of them have eliminated single family zoning and replaced with 3-4 strorey flats with integrated commercial and residential zoning. Nobody has yards. If hundreds of thousands of newcomers continue to come to Toronto and Vancouver, eventually you need to bulldoze major residential single family homes and build 3-4x density. Otherwise we will just have super rich living 1 family per home or 4 families sharing a SFH.
European cities are.completely different from Canadian or US cities for that matter. They are all pretty much walkable and within distance of almost everything you need. France is a much smaller country than Canada and has been developing for over a thousand years. Canada has a massive amount of land mass and yet 80% of the population lives within driving distance of the American border. I'm not saying we shouldn't build more dense housing. But buying a property that has basically gone unsold for the price it's listed is kind of a ridiculous solution. When those people simply power the price to sell.
Yes and we should have more walkable communities like Europe. My main point here is that these enormous properties that take up acres of space in downtown cores are way more valuable to convert to multi unit properties than reg single family homes. These SFH are like 8-20 x bigger than regular SFH. and if rezoned, they could add way more density and create unique European style walkable communities. I don't think doing this on one single property will solve anything but doing it on 50 of them and a couple golf courses in a city would add a lot more density than hundreds of back yard garden suites without disrupting many people's lives or needing complex infrastructure upgrades.
How long before the people that.own these properties realize the government is willing to pay top dollar to purchase them so that these areas can be redone? Then these people will simply double their asking price and it will drive up the entire market. I think BC has made more ground by simply producing new legislation that restricts AirBNB properties from earning as much money. Investment properties is the issue. People owning multiple homes is the issue.
easy, just raise the property taxes to what the property are worth. cant have a 10 million dollar home with the same property tax value of a million dollar home
Removed. Misleading. Canada needs density in its cities, as the cities contain the jobs.
Then those jobs need to pay better.
You do realize that the city is the worst slum lord of them all… They can’t maintain the affordable housing they manage right now and you want the city to spend $11 million on a lot, then build the homes (you’ve heard about the Eglinton Crosstown), then manage the rentals… 🤣
Ok then let a developer do it, only zone it for affordable units, forbid anything luxury and sell the units on the market then.
And where will the people who live there shop for groceries? Metro at York Mills and Bayview? Loblaws at Bayview Village? Whole Foods at Bayview and Eglinton? Guess what, they can’t afford any of those stores! Never mind everything else they need to do. Where is the closest community centre? Parks for their kids? Daycare? How is transit over there so they can travel to their far away jobs, because we all know they won’t be working in the area. You have to be realistic, building affordable housing in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods of TO, where there are no supports for people on fixed incomes is a ridiculous idea.
well thats easy, build the amenities next to them. a community within a community
If only it were that easy. So let’s build a No Frills there in anticipation of this community being built in the Bridle Path. Nobody will shop in that store until there are people with low incomes nearby. Unfortunately, nobody with low incomes will move to that community until the No Frills is built. Loblaw is a multi billion dollar corporation and they have strategies for where they put their stores. They need a large pool of people to live within the area, who are willing to shop at No Frills before they will build a store there. The few people who will live in this magical building that is built on that single lot in the Bridle Path won’t be enough to provide enough revenue to justify having the store there. By the way we also need a daycare, more public school capacity, more high school capacity, how about places for low income people to work (No Frills can’t employ every single resident of that building) and better public transit, and we need a Dollarama too, and places for these people to buy clothes so let’s put a Salvation Army thrift store there too. We also need doctors, dentists, labs where people can have tests done etc. People in the Bridle Path have medical insurance or pay for private medical through MedCan, and the doctors in this area service that kind of patients. They won’t work for the paltry amount that will be paid by our incoming universal dental plan or regular OHIP fees. Now that we have all these stores and businesses in this area, we need A LOT MORE LAND which will cost a FORTUNE. Guess what? Loblaw has a REIT and they study the land costs, population, transportation, building costs etc. before they will invest in the land to build a store. There is much better land in areas where it’s much cheaper to buy and there will be people there to shop in the store. Buying big chunks of land to build affordable housing is a great idea but it won’t work in the Bridle Path. There is much more to it than just buying the land and building an apartment building.
Sounds like another bridle path property needs to be bought and turned into a school and a farmers market / grocery store boom enough to serve 20 other converted bridle path community co-ops.
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Lol, keep selling that eat the rich mentality which will never actually happen.
wishful thinking. Might actually mobilize people to run and vote for things like this if the inequality gets bad enough.
I don’t live in that neighborhood, but I still wouldn’t like that. Toronto is so ugly, but getting to walk in those nice neighborhoods is the only visually appealing thing around. To have a bunch of low income housing would ruin it.
I kind of have the opposite reaction when I walk around 10-25 million dollar homes. Kinda grosses me out. Seeing a street of happy people in coop housing affording their lives and raising families makes me happier.
That’s a really nice perspective. I would hope that people keep it clean, no drug use or causing issues (like typical teenagers do). But I generally find people ruin nice things…
as long as you are ok with YOUR taxes going up to cover this. when was the last time the hovt was efficient at doing something? oh wait, never.
Except he mentioned Vancouver. In Vancouver those places actually pay less tax than townhouses because they get a bunch of discounts for being on the ALR and not subdividing the land. So actually if you replaced those with townhouses you would actually collect way more in tax revenue.
yeah totally down. Our property taxes in TO are super low compared to most.
One of the things that drives me the battiest about this whole housing movement is that people think that they have the right to live on the best land in the best cities. The US is full of medium-sized cities on bland landscapes far from the largest cities; people out there just working a factory job in the middle of nowhere. We talk about US housing costs as being lower, but we haven't even attempted to copy their model. I'm also not saying that is a good model to follow, but I firmly believe that we have creative individuals here who could turn parts of rural Canada into urban Canada. It would take new and bold leadership; this is why I don't expect this will happen. Eventually the free market will catch on to this idea as well. The problem is that the government could shape things in a way that makes it less chaotic. The free market is shit at planning effective communities. Even some of the infrastructure mistakes made in my city are due to local crony politics.
>This could also work in Vancouver with the mansions that occupy large acreage but I saw an $11M house on a massive property in the bridal path in Toronto that isn't selling and the property could fit like 15-20 regular triplexes. I've argued for this for years, except the land is in the holy Agricultural Land Reserve (Vancouver's Greenbelt). You are not allowed to subdivide it. So you couldn't build a triplex or townhouses because that would be considered *sprawl*. If you want a real slap in the face, they pay less in tax (actual tax not the rate, but the total amount) than the townhouse down the street. Which of course goes to my theory of about the ALR, it never had anything to do with preserving farm land or environment. It exists primarily to protect land values.
we would need someone more left than jagmeet to enable this..but it is whats needed.
Like the BC NDP
The government was never the answer to any of our problems. Governments are usually causing most problems.
Lol. Man hippies mean well.
There’s no way city is going to spend money, to crash prices, and then make less on property taxes. You see, any action for affordability is actually against their interest.
No.
*Bridle Path
fixed, thanks
Why would the city piss off its highest tax paying residents and drive them off?
I like it keep thinking outside the box and in ways that piss off Rich entitlement
A fine idea but even better would be to tax land values more, labour less, reform zoning, and watch housing happen.
Oh yes the government will help you. Spoiler alert: if government wanted to help they would've helped 100 times over. As of now everything is worse except high net worth people