2y ago

Delinquent owners make the housing crisis worse

Someone bought a century home in Saint John and is allowing it to rot. The buyer apparently lives in Toronto and doesn't care that the building is falling apart.

This is shitty. Someone has the money for "an investment", which means other people don't get somewhere to live.

28 comments

Yeah, landlords suck fucking ass. They're a bunch of greedy dickbags who want money for doing no work, by definition.
All non primary residences should have a massive tax slapped on them, not just these dumb foreign home buyer / vacant home taxes that nibble away at tiny edges of the problem instead of the core issue.
If we're having a housing crisis then why are we allowing people to hoard more than 1 home?
- There is no landlord. This property is empty. Nobody is living there.
  
  Took awhile to interpret what you meant here. I guess I never thought about it but by definition the noun landlord is tied up in some capacity with tenants paying a rent.
  Intuitively, landlord sounds really simple. Lord being a ruler of a household and land in this context being a territory marked by political boundaries i.e 'someone's yard', you'd think they'd mash up easily to become 'Ruler of the house on the land' i.e landlord, but it's entirely more than that. In all definitions I've found it's tied into tenancy.
  Kinda weird and I don't like it.
  
  I meant it more collequially and was including real estate investors squatting on land in the same category since it doesn't really roll off the tongue
- Vacant home taxes can work if they are serious numbers. I want to see a vacant home tax at 25% of the property value annually.
  
  No issue there, but why just vacant homes? Why are we not taxing all non primary homes when so many people who want and should be able to afford a primary home, cannot?
- Calm down
Yes this is true everywhere in Canada. Property owners have very few obligations beyond mowing the lawn and paying property taxes which have shrunk by 70% since the late 90s relative to the sale price of a home. It's dirt cheap to own a property once you've acquired it.
Winnipegs mill rate is 12.9 today. In 2002 it was 29! Before that it was even higher.
- Mill rate?
  
  Common term. It means dollars of tax per 1,000 dollars of assessed value.
People shouldn't be allowed to buy land just to do nothing with it
Do they not have a vacant home tax? I know Vancouver, Toronto and Ottawa do. It just makes sense
- The vacant home taxes seem pretty low. I'm not sure they're enough to stop wealthy folks from parking their cash in rapidly approaching real estate.
- IIRC Winnipeg is in the process of implementing one, but it only applies to vacant single family buildings, not vacant multi-tenant ones.
  It's start, but it needs to go farther.
Seems like y'all having a terrible time in general with this.
I'll pull out the relevant bit:
At the time, PMV's chief operating officer, Dave Loten, said the company would renovate many of the buildings and demolish a handful that were in poor condition. But the company quickly ran afoul of city inspectors after several of the properties were discovered to be vacant, often open, and in disrepair. Over the past two years the company has quietly sold off a list of its remaining properties in the city.
Ahh, the ol' "I pwomise I'll do it!" trick. Works literally every time.
- The regulations should say "finish the work, pass inspections, and get some tenants. then we'll cut you some slack".
Won't happen, but I like the following hypothetical law: If someone owns a non-primary residence in any municipality large enough to call itself a "town" or "city", it cannot be left vacant more than six months in twelve unless construction or repair work is being done on the property at least 20 hours/week by a licensed contractor. If the owner fails to find a tenant, the municipality is permitted to assign the property a tenant at what the municipality considers an acceptable rent without the owner having any say (although the owner still receives the rent). If the building isn't habitable without repairs, the municipality can arrange those and then bill the owner.
Use it or lose (control of) it, in other words. And it would prop up the local construction industry a bit.

28 comments