I wrote a pretty good article (fb shared 154 times, retweeted 67 times including by Richard Florida) a few days ago pondering January's median multiple affordability study that now notes that a median house in Montreal would take 5.1 median years of salary to pay off. That's not good and sure makes me think that we're on the edge of a bubble now.
A reasonable number is about 3.0 and many cities, Windsor, Trois Rivieries, Saguenay, Detroit, Phoenix, meet or beat that, meaning in those cities you'll have a lot of cash to put aside after paying for your roof.
The study authors note that Montreal is one of the worst performers since the study began in 2004 and that the city needs to rethink its policies.
I tend to agree with their answer, being that we simply need to build more. That's all.
Many lefties think the opposite, that constraints must be put into developers forcing them to earmark units in their buildings for the poor.
You can't really compare Montreal to those cities. They are either small cities, depressed cities or sprawling cities that share very little with Montreal other then that they are called cities.
ReplyDeleteBut, I definitely do agree we are in a bubble and have been for some time. People get mad when I say that, but Montreal is a boom and crash city, I have suffered through many as I am sure you have as well, and we are long overdue for a bust.
We keep building like crazy yet prices keep going up. Something doesn't add up.
When everyone and their plumber is becoming a Real Estate investor on the side you know you're in trouble, and you know the cause of over inflated prices and unsustainable amount of construction.
All it takes is someone like Marois to say something stupid, which is daily but one day someone might listen.
Building more could just open more doors for speculators looking to make a quick buck, it wouldnt make things more affordable. In the most expensive cities like San Francisco, rent increase is also controlled and California government forces every city to allocate land for low-income housing where houses or apartment are priced under market (read high income market). I am not sure anyone would envy #1 ranked Detroit which is half abandoned and losing its people rapidly...
ReplyDeleteYeah, once again, I'm still surprised that people don't see that building more units is the obvious solution.
ReplyDeleteIn the mid 90s Montreal had 30,000 empty apartments. Rents were very low. Why? Because landlords took whatever they could get. The only two ways back to that is to build more units or re-elect the Parti Quebecois.
San Francisco, being one of the most expensive cities out there, is hardly an example to be using as a success story for keeping rents low.
And the point about Detroit, etc, made by both commenters, if you comb through those median multiple studies every year, you'll see cities switch very quickly from being low cost to becoming higher cost.Quebec City was a cheap city only a couple of years ago. This indicates that you can actually become rich by moving to whatever city is cheap and then selling out in a couple of years after it has become more expensive, and relocating once again to a cheap city. This might seem all very abstract and flies in the face of this civic nostalgia and controved sense of community that we force upon ourselves (who are my neighbours anyway?) but it might also be a real surefire, foolproof way of getting a lot wealthier than you already are.
The solution is not building more, it's breeding less !
ReplyDeleteHaving lived in SF, I can testify that its "rent control" is barely that, with many loopholes and excuses for landlords to boot out tenants and raise rent to whatever they want. (Our trio of investor landlords, which included a nasty piece of work, a white "refugee" from South Africa who was their mouthpiece, hired a notorious tenant-busting law firm to write our leases.) There's nothing with the teeth of our Regie de Logement's regulations.
ReplyDeleteThere is some low-income housing, but the fact that most of my friends who are still there have had to decamp across the bay to Oakland to find affordable housing speaks volumes.
We are definitely in a bubble.
ReplyDeleteA friend of mine -- well-known TV multimedia producer -- just flipped a house.
Bought in November for X. Knocked down one wall, repainted house.
Sold last week for X+25%.
That's a six-figure return for about $10,000 investment.
-Kevin
The solutions proposed by your "lefty" friends = more social housing, will help part of those with housing problems but not all. The issue is that as long as housing is a for-=profit commodity, its supply will be limited by profit, not people's needs. What do you do about that?
ReplyDeleteFurther to this, much harm is done to our community by greedy commercial property landlords who jack up retail and restaurant rents arbitrarily.
ReplyDeleteEvidently, such commercial property owners are under fewer restrictions by the Quebec Rental Board than those who lease apartments.
Case in point: the commercial office building on the southeast corner of Van Horne and Cote des Neiges had a very successful La Belle Province restaurant which eventually had to move out because their rent was raised unreasonably. This was told to me by the proprietor of the La Belle Province restaurant on Decarie Blvd., located just north of Harvey's.
The premises then remained empty for a very long time, where the landlord obviously collected no rent whatsoever, until another fast-food place moved in briefly, only to move out themselves and be replaced by the current Pizza Pizza establishment.
By the way, that very same office building on Van Horne and Cote des Neiges for a time once housed a notorious telemarketing scam "boiler room". Exactly how such seedy operations both there and elsewhere manage to set up shop without arousing suspicions from the outset is something that is never adequately explained whenever they are busted by the police.
Anothe sure-fire way how to decimate a neighbourhood: Monkland Avenue in NDG was a thriving, friendly street of well-matched retailers and restaurants until the "curse of the greedy landlords" forced many out. The street has never been the same since.
No doubt there are many other examples of such community carnage.
Further to this, much harm is done to our community by greedy commercial property landlords who jack up retail and restaurant rents arbitrarily.
ReplyDeleteEvidently, such commercial property owners are under fewer restrictions by the Quebec Rental Board than those who lease apartments.
Case in point: the commercial office building on the southeast corner of Van Horne and Cote des Neiges had a very successful La Belle Province restaurant which eventually had to move out because their rent was raised unreasonably. This was told to me by the proprietor of the La Belle Province restaurant on Decarie Blvd., located just north of Harvey's.
The premises then remained empty for a very long time, where the landlord obviously collected no rent whatsoever, until another fast-food place moved in briefly, only to move out themselves and be replaced by the current Pizza Pizza establishment.
By the way, that very same office building on Van Horne and Cote des Neiges for a time once housed a notorious telemarketing scam "boiler room". Exactly how such seedy operations both there and elsewhere manage to set up shop without arousing suspicions from the outset is something that is never adequately explained whenever they are busted by the police.
Anothe sure-fire way how to decimate a neighbourhood: Monkland Avenue in NDG was a thriving, friendly street of well-matched retailers and restaurants until the "curse of the greedy landlords" forced many out. The street has never been the same since.
No doubt there are many other examples of such community carnage.