Subsidizing rental property holders.

Given how ridiculously inflated housing prices are in Canada, it is understandable that governments turn to rent subsidies to help distressed households make their rent. It is important, however, to understand that rent subsidies, while intended as a subsidy for renters, in fact wind up in rental property holders' pockets and thus properly speaking it is they and their creditors whom these payments subsidize.

Rent subsidies, in other words, do not address the root cause of ridiculously inflated rents – namely structures in which households dwell having been repurposed as financial assets – but rather encourage individuals and institutions who benefit from the financialization of housing to inflate its prices further.

Canadians have been told for years that increasing "supply" of "market-rate" rentals will drive down rents, but anyone with eyes can see that building no number of units of unaffordable housing can ever make those units affordable, the logic of expecting otherwise being equivalent to planning success in business by losing a little on every sale to profit in the long run.

The only way to make housing affordable is to build affordable housing.

Industry spokesmen themselves admit this over and over again, and yet neoliberal ideologues insist tirelessly that "building more housing, critically including market-rate housing, is a powerful tool to improve affordability for everyone."

Facts on the ground, however, do not lie.

A Dec 17, 2024 CBC News article, "Canada added record rental supply in 2024, but most units were too pricey for the average renter", should have come as a surprise, therefore, only to the most willfully blind of neoliberal ideologues.

Only not-for-profit, purpose-built rental housing financed with no- or low-interest government loans, built on public land and contractually obligated to rent in perpetuity for what it costs to build and maintain it should be approved for construction for the foreseeable future.

And 100% of capital gains on sales of houses, condos, and townhouses to holders who deploy these structures as either short-term or long-term rental properties should be taxed away, not only to slow price inflation among these objects, but also to arrest spillover inflation into purpose-built rental housing as holders of these units are emboldened to demand higher rents when house, condo, and townhouse rents increase.

Dwellings proposed, approved, and built with the assumption they will be purchased by households who will occupy them personally should not under any circumstances be allowed to be traded or repurposed as either STRs or LTRs.

Definancializing housing is critical because one in five dollars in BC, for example, is spent on rent.

This means that dollars that could otherwise fund critical public services such as healthcare, education, childcare, eldercare, and mental health and addiction services (this is a partial list) or invested in developing new technologies, innovative materials such as photovoltaic cladding for buildings, non-fiber, light-weight building materials, green aluminum, and green steel, industrial machinery and other material goods is extracted from the productive economy and sequestered in rent-seekers' hands.

Above all, deflating Canada's housing bubble would reduce the cost of living for everyone, thus easing upward pressure on wages and therefore prices and, by increasing the competitiveness of Canadian labour, increase that of Canadian products in global markets.