Dr. Landlord

Bylaw departments would have you believe the law is clear about who is responsible to clear snow and ice off city sidewalks. But that’s not true.

I recently looked at the government’s substantial revenue stream from investment properties and realized that government has an affordable housing conflict of interest. The more affordable the housing, the less affordable it is to government.

There are thousands of stories about what’s causing unaffordable housing. Rather than regurgitate symptoms and causes, the following are actionable items to create immediate and near-immediate results to alleviate housing availability and affordability.

While the Ontario Real Estate Association’s proposal is a good first step, these suggestions address symptoms, not causal factors of housing unaffordability.

One of the least understood and arguably the most abused affordable housing misperceptions is what I call The Affordable Housing Paradox: the higher the property tax, the lower the property value on which the amount of property tax is based.

The Conservative Party's Recovery Plan includes the party’s platform on housing affordability actions if they are elected, on pages 55 to 56. Here are my comments about their plan.

According to Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., one in four Canadians will be over the age of 55 within five years and many of them won’t have enough money to see them through “aging in place with dignity”.

The Ford government introduced Ontario Electricity Rebate (OER). The rebate is not free, it can’t last and it has not met its purpose of saving money for Ontarians. The government is “stealing from Peter to pay Paul.”

From what I have researched I don’t see anything that indicates that the Canadian insurance industry and 82 per cent of its member companies were hurt by COVID-19 – quite the opposite.

The Toronto Regional Real Estate Board might survive the technology sea change by morphing its MLS into a Zillow-like service but where does that leave Realtors?