The operative phrase in that entire article “housing without profit”.
Until that makes sense in north america, we will not take a page from Europe.
1/3 of the price of a new home in Canada is taxes, so profits for who exactly?
The answer is existing homeowners, which helps places like Toronto have one of the lowest property taxes in the world despite insane prices.
Do you have stats to backup that 1/3 price argument?
From my experience it was more like 5-10% cost was taxes
You do realize the Toronto Sun is an American-owned publication, right? And none of those figures are referenced.
Explain to me please why existing owners should subsidize the building of city infrastructure in new developments.
I don’t live in Toronto but building new sewers, water systems, roads, community centres etc. shouldn’t be funded by existing taxpayers who still have above ground utility cables and no sidewalks.
Because those “existing owners” benefited from subsidies before them.
Fuck this “I got mine” mentality
Actually, they did not get subsidized by prior generations of owners - unless you’re talking about people in their 90s.
That’s what the development fees and taxes were put in place for - especially in places where extending services out across greenbelts into suburbs was incredibly costly.
Having crumbling roads and community infrastructure in the core and polished, higher quality infrastructure in the burbs was an equity issue that was taken on in the 1970s, long before my generation was anywhere near buying homes.
I do think it’s fair to have lower development fees where there’s densification - that bringing more people to use and support existing infrastructure.
But subsidizing sprawl remains as problematic as it was in the 1960s.
Last thought, Intergenerational Inequity wa ma first recognized and discussed in the 1990s regarding GenX.
GenX remains the most ignored generation but the fact is that the generation suffered two very deep recessions in 1983 and 1987-1991 plus faced incredibly high (18%) interest rates and inflation in the 1980s. This meant that none of them were buying homes before their 40s without the help of parents. While Canadian GenX ducked the US mortgage-backed securities disaster in 2008, it’s really a false narrative to suggest they are or have been in the ‘I’m all right Jack, devil take the hindmost’ frame of mind. If anything, they know the social safety nets and equity provisions were the only thing that made things possible for them.
So let’s not subsidize sprawl. Let’s make it so all Canadian cities look like Montreal: dense, walkable, pretty, and transit and cycling oriented. But the idea that existing owners should be given a pass is antisocial.
I’d be fine with a free market approach. Let developers build density where it is in demand, and sprawl where it is not.
Why? Because we live in a society.
Actually its generally new buyers who haven’t used or benefited from the infrastructure paying to maintain and replace it. Which is the opposite of how it should be.
