Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - What solutions does the 2021 Federal budget have for Canada’s our riding’s housing crisis?
Houses were selling for between $452,000 and $2.85 million on Cortes Island, during 2020 and the first quarter of 2021.
The Quadra Island Real Estate team website is currently displaying prices ranging from $725,000 to $4.3 million.
No wonder a realtor recently told the Campbell River Mirror that first time buyers, with a downpayment, are opting for a cheap condo in the downtown area.
Close to 35% of Cortes Island’s population rent their homes. On Quadra Island, where rents are higher, the number is about 23%. A number of these people join the seasonally homeless every year, when their homes become vacation rentals.
>>> Taxing vacant homes owned by non Canadians
A large number of houses on sit vacant most of the year.
This was the problem Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland was trying to address in the 2021 Budget, when she announced, “Houses should not be passive investment vehicles for offshore money. They should be homes for Canadian families. So on January 1st, 2022, our government will introduce Canada’s first national tax on vacant property owned by non-resident, non-Canadians.”
“I think it is a step. I have some appreciation of acknowledging that there is some empty housing, especially people who do not live in the community and are from other places … but the challenge that I do not see a strategy that addresses our housing needs,” said Rachel Blaney, MP for North Island - Powell River.
“For the past 35 years we’ve seen two things happening at the same time. One, a decrease in how much supports the Federal and Provincial governments have been putting into housing strategy across the country. And the other side is that private investors were purchasing less and less housing to rent. These two things have been happening for the past 35 years. I’ve seen the graphs where, on both sides, they are slowly coming down. So the fact we are in a crisis actually makes a lot of sense when you look at the data. The problem is no one was watching that data.”
Photo credit: Affordable housing now by fumigene via Flickr (CC BY SA, 2.0 License)
