this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2025
34 points (97.2% liked)

Canada

9789 readers
626 users here now

What's going on Canada?

Related Communities

🍁 Meta

🗺️ Provinces / Territories

🏙️ Cities / Local Communities

Sorted alphabetically by city name.

🏒 SportsHockey

Football (NFL): incomplete

Football (CFL): incomplete

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer

💻 Schools / Universities

Sorted by province, then by total full-time enrolment.

💵 Finance, Shopping, Sales

🗣️ Politics

🍁 Social / Culture

Rules

  1. Keep the original title when submitting an article. You can put your own commentary in the body of the post or in the comment section.

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage: lemmy.ca

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
34
2 opposition MPPs have created a plan to solve Ontario's homelessness crisis in 10 years. Could it work? (www.cbc.ca)
submitted 5 days ago by HellsBelle to c/[email protected]
9 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

A Green and Liberal MPP have worked together to develop a plan they say could fix the Ontario housing crisis in 10 years.

Kitchener Centre MPP Aislinn Clancy and Etobicoke-Lakeshore MPP Lee Fairclough are co-sponsoring a private member's bill that they say creates a housing-first plan. Experts CBC News spoke to say while not perfect, if passed, the bill would take important steps to really addressing the homelessness crisis being felt in municipalities across Ontario.

Bill 28, Homelessness Ends with Housing Act includes the creation of a portable housing benefit, setting up an advisory committee of people with expertise and collecting data on supportive housing to make sure the province is meeting its targets.

"Every Ontarian deserves a stable, safe, affordable place to live, and this new legislation offers a solution and a clear path rooted in evidence, compassion and a commitment to housing as a human right," Clancy said in a news conference on Tuesday.

top 9 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] sbv 5 points 5 days ago

Parker says the Green party and NDP in Ontario and nationally have put forward practical solutions to tackle different aspects of housing and why it's become unaffordable, including building non-profit housing on public lands, implementing vacant home taxes and using inclusionary zoning, which require private developers to include a certain percentage of affordable units within new, multi-unit housing developments.

Those all sound fine. The article doesn't dig too deeply into what those solutions would actually look like, but I don't think anyone would disagree that starting with them is a good idea.

Inclusionary zoning is interesting. The City of Ottawa has been doing that for a while (not really, but there are affordability requirements that builders will agree to in order to get zoning exemptions), and I haven't seen any stats or anecdotes saying it makes a difference or helps anyone.

Maybe they exist and I missed them. I hope that's the case.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 4 days ago

I'm not interested in a homelessness solution put forward by someone with "Green" in their title...

[–] [email protected] -2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Building enough housing to the currently homeless will not solve homelessness.

Especially if it's setting up a benefit to pay for housing, because that's just going to push lower rents up and force other people out.

[–] HellsBelle 9 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Perfect is the enemy of good.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

In the case of the housing crisis, it really isn't.

The longer we continue this pyramid scheme of propping up house prices the more people will be hurt by it.

We need to pass government policies that crash the value of housing by 50-80% instead of continuing to pretend that we can build our way to cheaper houses after the market has shown again and again it will not do that.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I question what that policy will look like though. All house listings must be set to 20% of their 2024 assessed value or last MLS listing?

What I'm hoping to see is government creating non-market housing, but even if not, the government spurring building new affordablly built and dense standardized homes will provide enough places for homeless and struggling people to live.

It's not just creating the market conditions and then sitting on our hands whistling, but actually acting as a housing developer that forces the rest of the market to compete that will bring prices down. Legislation won't, it will just be a boon to the "can we find a loophole around this" business.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

There are multiple ways to crash the value of housing.

One of the easiest would be a 100% capital gains tax on property values (not building value). You can no longer profit from simply holding onto land. You can develop it and earn a profit from the building work you do, but just holding it and doing nothing no longer generates any value. This profit motive is what's pushing the investment in property that drives up prices, and removing it would crash the value of land overnight.

Or, and this is my preferred option, a monthly land value tax (again not on buildings) that is set high enough to replace all of the income taxes, then drop income taxes to 0%. This way we tax people based on how much land they use (which includes how desirable that land is just based on the assessments) not based on how much work they accomplish. People who live in smaller amounts of land (like a condo) pay less tax, and people who want giant mansions near cities can pay the rest of us a bucket load of money that the rest of us workers now save on taxes. Instead of replacing income taxes, I also wouldn't mind seeing a similar universal basic income system.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

By easy you mean of course conceptually easy. I love land value taxes conceptually but politically they will not be easy to implement. In fact none of the solutions to housing affordability will be easy to implement because homeowners don’t want the value of their property to decrease under any circumstances. That is their nest egg and they guard it with extreme jealousy.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

You're absolutely correct. People are yelling for change, but refuse to vote for that change.