In order for Canada to overcome the housing affordability crisis, individuals, families, the real estate industry and government all need to work together.
It’s often claimed that reforming tenancy laws to better protect tenants will drive landlords out of the market, leading to fewer rental properties. A new study finds no evidence to support the claim.
Tenants are rarely allowed to make permanent changes to a house. And many landlords know little about the conditions tenants endure, but most who do retrofit homes do it to improve renters’ comfort.
While the idea of rent controls can seem attractive at first glance, the evidence suggests the government is right to be sceptical of their ability to help ease the housing crisis.
A St. Louis woman is evicted from her home.
AP Photo/Jeff Roberson
The CDC’s sweeping eviction moratorium leaves more questions than answers – as well as concerns that it merely pushes the problem into winter.
A department store employee wheels clothes across Melbourne’s Bourke Street Mall on August 5 2020, as retailers prepared to close their doors to customers.
Asanka Brendon Ratnayake/AP
Public housing renewal often aims for a 70:30 private-public mix of dwellings. Modelling shows applying this mix to Waterloo housing estate would cut the suburb’s social housing share from 30% to 17%.
Representatives of tenants and agents agree that leaving individuals to try to sort out rent reductions has created a mess. It calls for government to step in to look after both renters and landlords.
Even landlords think involving social housing tenants is critical to running properties, but too often it doesn’t happen.
A Victorian court decision that an Airbnb agreement had the status of a lease has profound implications for guests and hosts.
Daniel Krason/Shutterstock
In 2016, a Victorian court decided an Airbnb arrangement was a lease. ‘Guests’ could be protected by tenancy law, including against eviction. And in this case the host was evicted for subletting.
Stereotypes that paint landlords as “bad” and tenants as “good”, and pit the two groups against each other, are actually holding back progress.
New York has become a ‘city for the rich’ in recent decades, a shift in its real estate market that impacts policy-making, too.
Alessandro Colle / Shutterstock
New York City’s municipal budget relies heavily on the property taxes of extremely high-value real estate. That drives gentrification and distorts local policy in other ways that hurt residents.
New laws were supposed to protect people from living in unsafe conditions – but in the eyes of a judge, property guardians might not even count as ‘tenants’.