The operative phrase in that entire article “housing without profit”.
Until that makes sense in north america, we will not take a page from Europe.
I’m curious to see if Build Canada Homes is going to include any kind of support for non-market or co-operative housing. I looked it up last year to see what the requirements are to secure funding from CMHC, and I found that unless you’re an established developer, and/or have considerable pockets, and/or already own significant areas of empty land, it just isn’t feasible to start a new housing co-op from scratch. The barrier to entry is too large.
It should be made easier for smaller co-operatives to get started with buildings under 10 units to better fit as urban infill instead of the current requirement of 32+ units which would need to get pushed to the outskirts of the city where land is cheaper and more available.
I can actually speak to this, I’ve lived in and been on the board of a housing coop in Manitoba.
Housing coop regulations vary widely by province. BC and Ontario have robust housing coop regulation structures that promote the start and upkeep of coops. Other provinces not as much, but I understand the maritime provinces are catching up.
The CMHC often works with financial partners like credit unions and others to secure interests free loans and grants for startup and capital projects.
If you are in fact interested in starting a coop, contact the cmhc and ask about grants, then work with them to find those grants and start writing. There is a lot of money available for housing coops, it’s in provincial governments’ interest to let coops govern themselves, rather than managing housing projects.
Do not pursue partnerships with for-profit companies long-term, make sure your financial partners support social housing as a premise before engaging them.
For the sake of anonymity, I’ll let it slip that I’m also in Manitoba although outside Winnipeg.
Would you be able to speak more on what it takes to be involved with a coop? Like I guess that once the building is finished and all the residents are settled, the board is more focused on budgeting and maintenance projects?
I’m a solo homeowner but I’d gladly give up the absolute control over my own decisions to have more security in a collective.
How do we make it make sense?
1/3 of the price of a new home in Canada is taxes, so profits for who exactly?
The answer is existing homeowners, which helps places like Toronto have one of the lowest property taxes in the world despite insane prices.
Do you have stats to backup that 1/3 price argument?
From my experience it was more like 5-10% cost was taxes
Yeah, it does sound suspect. I just bought an existing house and it was about 10% and I got most of that back via the first time home buyers rebate. I’d have difficulty believing they would incentivize existing houses so heavily and discourage new housing.
You do realize the Toronto Sun is an American-owned publication, right? And none of those figures are referenced.
Thanks for the link, looks like that’ll change drastically depending what city you’re in.
Did a lil research and it looks like it would indeed be in the 10% ish range for my city, but yea sounds like it’s too high in some areas.
Explain to me please why existing owners should subsidize the building of city infrastructure in new developments.
I don’t live in Toronto but building new sewers, water systems, roads, community centres etc. shouldn’t be funded by existing taxpayers who still have above ground utility cables and no sidewalks.
Because those “existing owners” benefited from subsidies before them.
Fuck this “I got mine” mentality
Actually, they did not get subsidized by prior generations of owners - unless you’re talking about people in their 90s.
That’s what the development fees and taxes were put in place for - especially in places where extending services out across greenbelts into suburbs was incredibly costly.
Having crumbling roads and community infrastructure in the core and polished, higher quality infrastructure in the burbs was an equity issue that was taken on in the 1970s, long before my generation was anywhere near buying homes.
I do think it’s fair to have lower development fees where there’s densification - that bringing more people to use and support existing infrastructure.
But subsidizing sprawl remains as problematic as it was in the 1960s.
Last thought, Intergenerational Inequity wa ma first recognized and discussed in the 1990s regarding GenX.
GenX remains the most ignored generation but the fact is that the generation suffered two very deep recessions in 1983 and 1987-1991 plus faced incredibly high (18%) interest rates and inflation in the 1980s. This meant that none of them were buying homes before their 40s without the help of parents. While Canadian GenX ducked the US mortgage-backed securities disaster in 2008, it’s really a false narrative to suggest they are or have been in the ‘I’m all right Jack, devil take the hindmost’ frame of mind. If anything, they know the social safety nets and equity provisions were the only thing that made things possible for them.
So let’s not subsidize sprawl. Let’s make it so all Canadian cities look like Montreal: dense, walkable, pretty, and transit and cycling oriented. But the idea that existing owners should be given a pass is antisocial.
My point is that the principle of existing homeowners funding infrastructure for new homes is only tenable when
- developers are not creating huge externalities by creating ever larger suburbs with infrastructure funded by the core (take Ottawa as an example for that dynamic)
- when the base of established homeowners is large enough to support the rate of growth.
In the first case, development fees based on lot size for new sprawling burbs are a reasonable way to push the market towards density.
In the second case, with a high rate of growth in a specific market, other means of redistribution such as government subsidies may be a better way to redistribute.
Yes that makes sense.
I’d be fine with a free market approach. Let developers build density where it is in demand, and sprawl where it is not.
But you’re not in agreement with charging the full economic cost of the sprawl to the homeowners who choose to live there?
Why? Because we live in a society.
We live in a society - yes.
But that’s the reason many of the development fees were put in back in the 1970s and 80s - there were significant equity issues where the exponentially growing new shiny suburbs were built on the property taxes of a much smaller base of urban homeowners who were left with old, inferior and unmaintained city infrastructure.
So, let’s seriously consider whether what the equity issues are now and whether those fees are reasonable cost recovery for infrastructure vs a tax cash grab - or if there’s enough of a base of established homeowners that they could carry the development costs for new homes through reasonable tax increases.
Actually its generally new buyers who haven’t used or benefited from the infrastructure paying to maintain and replace it. Which is the opposite of how it should be.
We’re in Ottawa, so that may be an exception, but generally here it’s been extraordinarily expensive to develop the suburbs beyond the greenbelt, and until the development fees were increased in the late 90s, studies showed that new homeowners only bore about 1/5th of the cost.
Much of the development classification from farmland was effectively unplanned and forced through by suburban municipal councils before the amalgamation in the 1990s.
The costs of extending utilities across the National Capital Commission lands was extraordinary and no one inside the greenbelt benefited. A major bridge had to be built because the traffic impact was not considered etc.
There have been more recent improvements such as the retroactive construction of separate wastewater and storm water systems in the core that benefit everyone by keeping sewage out of the rivers.
The O-train construction unfortunately has been a burden on all without the benefits that should come with a modern rapid transit system.
We (here in Portugal) also need to take a page from Europe…
