“at least 46 condos with this status have been listed” seems to be “Flooding the market”
That’s stretching the definition quite hard…
46 units is literally a drop in the 160,000+ unit bucket that is the Victoria real estate market. That’s 0.03% of the total units. A third of a tenth of a percent.
This is exactly what I said would happen, people said “there’s so many it’s distorting the market” and I said that there’s not actually that many units and it won’t do a damn thing.
Are you sure there’s 160k units for sale right now, or are you comparing “units for sale” vs “units that could be for sale total”? And is apples-to-oranges comparison intentional?
Asking prices will have to go down then. This is part of The Process. Some of those investors who bought high are going to lose their shirts which sucks for them. This is also part of The Process. I dont think prices are going to drop to 2012 levels or anything, but some correction is better than none.
I say this all as someone who bought a house on the island over the summer. I am not going to lose my shirt on the deal as I am not selling.
So the supply of something went up dramatically, yet prices are still sky high and demand is low? I wonder what basic thing they could do to drive demand back up?
Article specifically mentions the $50k-100k but I agree that is probably optimistic
I just moved my family to the island over the summer and even though we came from a VERY high cost of living area we were priced out of Victoria. Ended up moving to the Comox Valley and paid probably half what I would have for the same house down south. I do miss some of the amenities of the “big” city, but I will adjust.
not an option for everyone I know, but it was for me and I am glad I did it.
Hey, you’re right, lets just march headlong into that future where the rich minority own everything and we are all grateful just to be allowed to work for them.
The market is not free when there are no alternatives to choose from.
People seem to be missing your point. This isn’t a free market reaction, it’s a reaction to a regulatory change. However, any sane buyer should have seen this coming a mile off.
Housing should definitely not be subject to a full free market, no life critical good/service should be. Housing demand has a lower end that is extremely inelastic. If supply drops enough to hit the limit, prices, in a free market, go haywire (prices rise till demand drops to meet supply, but demand can’t drop, it’s life critical).
This effect is prone to gaming by those with the resources. Therefore regulation is needed to artificially stabilise the market. Removing a massive housing sink is an obvious move to free up the supply.
The life critical resources are:
Food
Water
Housing
Basic healthcare
Security
It’s the government’s job to keep these at a level where none are difficult to obtain, at least at a base level. Generally this requires distorting the market in various manners.
Bingo. The problem with a pure free market is similar to the paradox of tolerance. The participants in a free market don’t want to participate in a free market. They want to be a monopoly where they hold all the cards. A real free market with perfect information is great but it will never happen. It’s the Government’s job to ensure that there is still an equitable distribution of surplus in an unfree market.
One of the big things with a free market is that it assumes everyone is out to screw everyone else. Buyers want minimum prices, sellers want maximum. In principle, it all cancels out. Unfortunately, the information and power balance is also assumed to be even. In practice, it’s not. It also requires both parties to be able to walk away. With housing, that’s not an option.
The current struggle in the middle east - and the powerful countries circling the issue and its history - raises an offensive but maybe useful suggestion as to how he could have lobbied successfully against jail time.
It feels like solving the housing crisis is as simple as universally allowing 4-plexes in existing single-family zoning (and, ideally, relaxing zoning height limits to allow these to actually be built on smaller lots), and funding the development of cooperatives.
How many single-family homes do we need? I get that it’s nice to not worry about making noise for neighbours, but it’s more important that people aren’t forced into homelessness.
Maybe I’m just naive and it’s more complicated than this, but at least this would be a start.
It feels like solving the housing crisis is as simple as universally allowing 4-plexes in existing single-family zoning
If you simply increase population density without addressing car dependence then traffic will get much worse than it is now. It is thus imperative that we allow for everyday necessities to be doable within a walking distance of where people live, so that people have the choice to avoid using their car for every single daily activity if they don’t want to. This entails at the very least having grocery shopping, schools, retail commercial spaces and pharmacies/clinics within a walkable distance.
Around the world this is typically achieved by allowing commercial activity on the street-facing ground floors of buildings.
They are indeed tightly interrelated because one of the big reasons why people want to live in the suburbs is in order to be away from traffic, which is tragic because those car-dependent suburbs are a big reason why there’s so much traffic in our denser areas. With better urbanism the denser areas become much more liveable for those of us who have no choice but to live there.
This means we need to address the housing crisis in a holistic fashion: housing, transport, daily errands and recreation all come together in a well planed urban area.
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