Toronto real estate summit could yield solutions for Vancouver’s reheating housing market
Posted April 18, 2017 11:18 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – If you think the cost of real estate in Vancouver is too high, check out what’s happening in Toronto.
The region’s housing market has seen prices jump more than 33% over a year, with the average detached house selling for $1.21-million dollars.
Toronto Mayor John Tory met with the federal and provincial finance minister today to talk about how to cool down the market.
One expert says potential solutions in Ontario could be the same ones we need here.
“The ways you can fix the housing markets in Toronto and Vancouver are pretty similar. There’s not enough supply, so you need to encourage more supply particularly of family-friendly housing,” says Tom Davidoff with UBC’s Sauder School of Business.
He says neither city is focused on the construction of town homes and duplexes, but instead are building more condos with small one and two-bedrooms style apartments.
Davidoff says the government needs to try and make life in cities more affordable, and that’s partly done by creating more housing options as well as by reforming taxes.
“Essentially in Canada, we’ve got low property tax rates especially in our expensive cities, but high income and sales taxes,” says Davidoff, who says that makes for expensive homes and low take-home pay.
“You increase people’s take-home pay and you put the tax burden on people who own property. That would get rid of speculative investment and that’s what needs to be done.”
When asked whether he thinks enough is being done to address high prices here in Vancouver particularly, Davidoff says no.
“There’s the foreign buyers tax, the empty homes tax in Vancouver… so there certainly has been progress, but generally speaking, we should raise property taxes and cut income and sales taxes, and we haven’t done that yet for the general population,” he says. “I think that would be a good choice”.
Davidoff believes some of that can be done through capital gains taxes with certain exemptions, but says there aren’t a lot of other creative solutions.
