[BeaverFever]

OnTheIce OnTheIce:

BeaverFever BeaverFever:

That's the thing- nobody in Toronto has a house worth 400k. Average fully detached house price is now one mil. The house in Toronto worth 400k is a one bedroom condo. And thanks to poor regulation of the housing market, speculation forces prices to skyrocket one year to the next. Fix the housing market and end these ridiculous housing prices first and then I'll support a raise in TO property taxes.

The price of the house is irrelevant.

The housing market doesn't need to be "fixed". It's driven by the consumer.

The issue is the low tax rate. The City that needs the money the most to support it's aging infrastructure and services shouldn't have a tax rate at 1/2 it's neighbours.

If you can afford a million dollar house, you can afford to pay the taxes that comes along with it.

No, whats unreasonable is that you can't afford the taxes on the the shoebox bungalow you inherited from your parents because the Sultan of Dubai's hedge fund is buying up the block and driving up everyone's valuation.

Your problem is that you think the consumer of the housing market is the investor who buys and trades hosing stock for profit, when in fact the consumer is the person who actually lives in it.

Houses should be first and foremost places for people to live in, not toys for bored rich fucks to drive up the price on as a trading commodity. A city where none of the citizens can afford to live and everyone is forced to be tenants of millionaires who buy up all the property is a city with a failed housing policy.

[andyt]

1:

Capture.PNG [ 461.07 KiB | Viewed 82 times ]

http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/04/ ... rt/389805/

[andyt]

PublicAnimalNo9 PublicAnimalNo9:

Lemmy Lemmy:

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

Try this one:

http://www.conferenceboard.ca/press/new ... rists.aspx

http://www.conferenceboard.ca/e-library ... x?did=5697

Oh, wait . .

From that Conference Board study:

$1:

CONCLUSION
Motorists in Ontario meet at least a large portion of the
costs that they impose on the road infrastructure—and
in major urban areas probably much more than those
costs. If we look at the total cost of driving, including
vehicle costs, cost recovery will tend to be closer to
100 per cent.

There is another conclusion that probably has little to do with that particular study. Increased gas prices or taxes on gasoline do NOT decrease the amount of traffic or vehicles hours on the road.
There will likely be short-term reductions as people adjust but the adjustment period usually ends pretty quickly. If you want a real world example of that, look at Britain where they pay on average $10/gallon for gas. The price of gasoline` has not reduced traffic in any way over the long term.

The City of London tried a slightly different tack to reduce traffic congestion in the core area by charging a fee for every vehicle entering the core area. This reduced traffic congestion in the core but only for a short period of time. As people adjusted to to the new fee, traffic ended up pretty much back to "normal" volumes.

Funny, in Vancouver they don't want to increase the gas tax to fund transit, because they found that it had declining returns.

If you look at Britain, they have much more fuel efficient cars - that's the response to high gas prices. As for reducing traffic, populations keep growing, so there will always be pressure on traffic unless you give people a viable alternative at a reasonable cost.

[Thanos]

BeaverFever BeaverFever:

......not toys for bored rich fucks to drive up the price on.......

I wouldn't compare someone who owns a few houses or condos and rents them out to any of the great capitalist monsters of history. Most of them are just average folks who made a smart investment in something that never really loses it's overall value. The 'bored rich fucks' though? I'm at a loss to think of anything, or of anyone they generally regard as beneath them, anymore in this world that isn't a chew-toy for them to gnaw on. The purpose of the Reagan revolution was to unleash a worldwide plutocracy the likes of which has never been seen before and, by and large, that revolution succeeded beyond it's wildest dreams.