Canada

I think you're assuming waaay too much about the seriousness of this statement. It's a politician assuring the losers of a policy they won't lose by rewording the policy a different way.

Supply and demand control prices. Period. Adding supply will only fail to control prices if demand keeps rising. And if buyer demand keeps rising to keep up with prices? It would suck, but there's actually a silver lining to that: Rent goes down then.

Remember, now that we're punishing vacant units, every investment unit must be rented out. So as the investors make a mad dash to build and buy our endlessly-rising housing units, more and more inventory gets dumped onto the rental market.

Now, there's obvious downsides to this story, I'm not going to pretend the "own nothing and be happy" end is ideal. But it's better than the "own nothing and live in a fucking tent" ending.

If government had the power to just snap their fingers and halve the price of all real estate, regular home owners should not be negatively affected.

It's mostly only the people who own multiple homes as investments, developers, and people who rent out their properties.

If you own a home that you live in, yes it will suck that prices dropped after you signed your mortgage, but you already agreed to pay that before so you should be able to afford those payments wether your house is $1M or $500K.

If you need to move, the house that you need to move to will now be half price so you didn't lose anything with your own house going half price. If anything you win by not having to pay as much taxes.

House: 1 million $.

Job: 22k$/years.

So, how can this work? Magic 🪄✨

This is the simplest solution. But the annual property tax on 2+ properties has to bite otherwise corporations hoarding housing stock would just see that as cost of doing business.

The best approach would be progressively higher (like, exponentially) property taxes according to the number of properties held

We do tax homes past a primary residence. In fact, we also tax the primary residence.

Or as in the case of vancouver realestate a foreign owner buys it then never even occupies it

Can't have the common folk building any sort of equity, gotta keep them renting from us forever

You say that in jest but I know far more previous functional alcoholics who drink occasionally vs went teetotaler.

I could see something like that working. I think it works pretty well for most since two adults could own two homes (one each) so most Canadians wouldn't be affected, so it would get broad support, but those with large real estate portfolios pay a lot more.

I think maybe BC's model would work better, just scaled up much more dramatically. Here, you get a property tax rebate for living in the home (and an extra small rebate for also being a senior). Make that a $5k rebate and increase property taxes to match and now there's a real incentive to sell. As it is, $1000/yr or whatever it is doesn't bite enough to move the needle.

And even if he doesn't, a large percentage of MPs do, either because they needed that passive income to actually be able to afford to run for parliament (campaigning is a full time, temporary job, and it's difficult to go a month without an income), or because an MP's salary and position makes it so much easier to afford the rental properties after they've won the election.

And if you can find yourself in the position to set yourself up for life with a passive income, most people are going to take that opportunity. Especially the neo-liberals that dominate all of the viable parties who don't even have a theoretical problem with the idea .

It really isn't in this case, unfortunately.

Lets says I I have a farm that produces all the food people need, but because I own the only farm, I can set the price for food to whatever I want.

Helping me build ten more farms doesn't solve the problem. The problem is that I'm in a position to decide the price. Helping someone else build more farms, might work, but I already make so much I could probably buy them the moment they're done. And even if I don't, we don't actually need more farms. The one I have could already feed everyone.

Building more farms at that point, would be a irresponsible waste of this already overloaded planets resources.

The real solution is dividing up ownership of the already sufficient existing resources. This will crash prices, but that will only hurt those who already have what they need, not those currently unable to get it.