sbv

According to a Bank of Canada report:

Investors were responsible for 30 per cent of home purchases in the first three months of the year, according to data released by the Bank of Canada. That is up from 28 per cent in the first quarter of last year, and 22 per cent in the same period in 2020. The central bank defines an investor as a buyer who took out a mortgage to buy the property while maintaining a mortgage on another home.

The effect of investor buying is:

“During housing booms, greater demand from investors can add to bidding pressures and intensify price increases,” said the note. “Similarly, when prices are stable or declining, a lower influx of investors can add downward pressure on housing demand and prices.”

Welp. Interest rates are staying steady (at least) until the next announcement in October.

I don't feel like inflation has decreased. Housing is still exorbitant. But there haven't been mass layoffs, so we've got that going for us.

Granting an ever-growing number of student visas to people we know will struggle to find housing is unethical at best and fraudulent at worst.

We need to dramatically cut the number of student visas, especially for private colleges, some of which are offering a quality of education that is less than desirable. We then need to tie student visas to housing availability – that is, a university shouldn’t be allowed to take on more international students than it can house in that community, for the duration of that person’s time studying in Canada.

Why is Canada trying to attract so many international students? Because it's easier than properly funding post secondary institutions:

international students are cash cows. Tuition fees for domestic students are regulated by provincial governments. Not so for their international counterparts, which makes bringing in foreign learners incredibly lucrative for perpetually cash-strapped schools and universities. (The real growth is increasingly not just from universities, but also from private colleges.)

The housing crisis has a bunch of causes, from Airbnb, to shitty taxation policies, to NIMBYs, to regressive zoning. Tying student visas to available, reasonably priced housing would be a simple first step to reducing prices.

The Liberals and NDP need to up their housing game before the next election. They're more worried about protecting paper gains for existing homeowners than than getting prices back to affordable levels.

Why is the Liberal Party still droning on about protecting high home values while promising to make new home ownership easy? The Liberals should drop this obvious lie – voters can see the impact of housing speculation on increasing generational wealth inequalities for themselves – and heed their own legislation by focusing on the federal role in ensuring renters’ equal rights.

And why is NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh prioritizing owners’ returns over renter rights? British Columbia, which is the only NDP government in power in Canada, is the most pro-housing supply province. Build on that. Income-based housing targets, leasing public land to scale up non-market housing, and tax change to lessen wealth inequalities should be talking points for the “workers party” right now.

Time to loosen zoning restrictions and say no to NIMBYs Ms. Mayor. *

Despite earning around $90,000 a year between her work as mayor, regional councillor and with the local electric utility, she says she can’t afford to buy a home in the municipality she leads.

* yeah, she's still paying off student loans, and I don't know what zoning restrictions are like in her community. But still.

I've been enjoying ORAX. Not as synth heavy as some of my other favourites, but it has a great vibe.

I'd like to be able to cross post across communities and instances. How do I do that?

reinsurance premiums rose between 25 and 100 per cent in the last year, and while not all of it was passed on to consumers, some of it had to be. He said the analysis found Canada among the countries where climate change has affected insurance risks the most.

this is fine 🫠

The Globe is going with a pretty click-bait-y title. But, I've seen others call for coordinating federal immigration numbers with infrastructure planning by municipalities and provinces. It looks like National Bank is on the same wavelength.

“The federal government’s decision to open the immigration floodgates during the most aggressive monetary tightening cycle in a generation has created a record imbalance between housing supply and demand. According to Statistics Canada, the working-age population surged 238,000 in Q2. That was the largest quarterly increase on record and 6.8 standard deviations from the historical norm of 82,000 per quarter. Unfortunately, Canadian homebuilders can’t keep up with this influx. Housing starts for Q2 2023 stood at 62,000 units (or 247,000 annualized). At just 0.26, the ratio of housing starts to working-age population growth fell to a new and stands at less than half its historical average of 0.61 (the ratio is normally below 1 to account for the fact that there is more than one person per household). To meet demand, builders would need to break ground on 144,000 units per quarter (or 576K annualized), double the best performance ever!

At an absolute bare minimum, post-secondary institutions should show students have decent housing before visas are granted.

But enough about my love life

Tell this calculator roughly what you buy at the grocery store and it will tell you how much more you're spending thanks to inflation.

Apparently I'm spending 29% more than I did in January 2017.

Navigator has represented Canadians with PR problems: everyone from the Special Rapporteur on Foreign Interference to Jian Ghomeshi. Even the Ottawa Police hired them when they were getting bad press during the Convoy.

This covers the history of Navigator, names a few of their clients, and describes how Navigator's spins news.