I think the solution to this issue is a Henry George-style Land Value Tax (LVT) [1]. Properly implemented, this sort of tax would totally wipe out any returns from buy-and-hold investment in real estate, essentially turning it into a depreciating asset. Holders of unproductive/underproductive real estate would be forced to sell to developers or continue to lose money.
LVT is also nice because it cannot be passed on to tenants in the form of rent increases. Raising rent causes the value of the land to go up with it, leading to higher taxes which claw back all of the gains from the rental increase. If the landlord chooses to continue raising rent to stay ahead of the taxes, this upward spiral will price the property right out of the rental market, leading to high taxes and vacancy, causing the landlord to lose money.
The whole “millions of immigrants” is just a property of the recent alt-right attempt at a take over of HN.
Looking around, it appears that immigration rates were raised due to aging population issues. While other places around the world are looking at moving retirement to 75.
Crony capitalism is causing higher immigration, so it’s somewhat hilarious for these people to think that an even more crony party is going to help offset this.
I was looking separately and I think I found where the claim comes from:
> The federal government's latest immigration levels plan, released last fall, would see Canada welcome 500,000 immigrants annually by 2025. In contrast, the immigration target for 2015 was under 300,000.
Can you please not post in the flamewar style to HN, and also please stop using HN for ideological battle? We're trying for something different here.
I'm not going to ban your account right now because it looks like you've also posted other things using HN in the intended spirit, but I saw quite a bit of this other kind of thing in your history too and that's definitely not ok.
We've banned this account for using HN for flamewar and ideological battle. Please don't create accounts to do that. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for—so we have to ban accounts that do it, regardless of what they're battling for or against.
That’s a lot of people. Where are all those people going to be housed? Where will the resources for their education and gainful employment come from? Is the Canadian job market exploding with a huge amount of well paying jobs such that Canada’s children have multiple options to pick from, or will everyone be competing for scraps?
So I don’t know how much you know about economics but it’s well known that gaining an increased population of working aged adults is actually pretty good for the economy, because they generate demand (create jobs) and then also take up jobs (generate supply). Immigrants are more likely to be entrepreneurs and statistically consume less social services.
It should, but the mouth pieces have stuck with their spiel that their own policies can't be helped, are necessary, because of "labor shortages". In other words, horseshit. I think people at the top are positioning themselves because they made large investments and want their return, so the lobbying efforts are to stall the slowing rate of immigration, or anything else that would increase housing starts / availability.
Labor shortage is such a lie. when they say that they just mean there aren’t enough low-information workers who will work for meager wages in a high taxation environment in a race to the bottom while some political dynasties always skim from the top. I hope you can all muster up the strength to vote in better leaders who put the citizens first.
