Housing Affordability – Not Just a ‘Made in Canada’ Issue!

Folks, we have to figure out a way to address the real cause behind housing affordability.

In Canada.

In the US.

In Europe.

This CBS News report shows us how 99% of Americans CANNOT afford to buy a house in their own country.

This is a CNBC report about how Wall Street is buying up all available residential property and renting it out at higher prices.

Institutional investors may control 40% of U.S. single-family rental homes by 2030, according to MetLife Investment Management. And a group of Washington, D.C., lawmakers say Wall Street needs to back away from the market.

“What we’re saying is don’t have private equity buying up single-family homes,” said Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat representing California’s 17th Congressional District. Khanna is the lead author of the Stop Wall Street Landlords Act of 2022. “What’s outrageous is your tax dollars are helping Wall Street buy up single-family homes,” he said in an interview with CNBC.

The single-family rental industry got its start with government backing in the fallout after the 2008 financial crisis. “It was that rare opportunity that attracted the institutions to build a portfolio out of these foreclosed properties,” said Steven Xiao, an assistant professor of finance and managerial economics at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Since the early 2010s, Tricon Residential, Progress Residential, American Homes 4 Rent and Invitation Homes have each bought thousands of homes. They’ve also added to the housing supply in some cases with built-for-rent communities.

So … I’ll remind us all again that Pierre ‘Everything is Broken, It’s All Justin’s Fault’ Poilievre’s endless, exhausting meme is entirely BULLSHIT.

And Doug Ford’s repeated nonsense that more homes will increase affordability.

What’s more exhausting is watching all of our country’s politicians dance around the issues and respond to the accusations rather than just zeroing in on the REAL cause of the problem: private companies scooping up ALL of the available residential properties and converting them to expensive short-term rentals.

I don’t know how we can collectively begin a process of informing Canadians that we don’t need to plow over the world’s greatest farm land and natural habitats for animals that are fading from this planet faster than a winter’s sunset.

All I can ask or even beg fis that people in Canada share this CBS story with their MPs and MPPs and demand that we exclude private investment and ownership from the very homes that individuals are supposed to have access to.