[BeaverFever]

If forums can have a flame dumpster, why don't they also have a Levant dumpster? Just garbage and bile and hyperbole. The man knows nothing else.

[andyt]

Lemmy Lemmy:

PublicAnimalNo9 PublicAnimalNo9:

For example, my wife's nephew lives in a "co-op" complex but they don't do fuck all about problems. The light at the top of his stairs has been dead for over a year. It's not that the light bulb is burnt out or there's a problem with the light fixture, it's a problem with the goddam wiring going to the fixture. At one point they told him that they won't fix it because he doesn't have enough "cop-op participation points" or some shit. That, despite the fact that a light at the either the top or bottom of a stairway is actually part of the building code. But the "co-op" doesn't care. Some of the units are townhouses, many of which have rather sizable cracks in their foundations. There's been no effort to fix that either.
I rather suspect they went the co-op route to do an end run around part of the landlord-tenant act.

OH, and the rent he pays is $890/mo for what is essentially a ghetto apartment. Hell, the entire south end of Oshawa is just one big ghetto and you'd be hard pressed to find a two bedroom for less than $900/mo.

There's a high-rise dump right by the beer store in South Oshawa. And I mean it's a dump. I wouldn't live there if you gave me an apartment for free, for life! And yet they're charging over $1000/mo for a 2 bedroom, although the cockroach and rodent infestation comes with no charge.

You're illustrating exactly what I meant in my statement. When the landlord can't get market value for his units, of course he's going to let them fall into disrepair. That's how we get ghettos. If the landlord got fair market value, instead of the government-imposed price ceiling, then he'd likely do the repairs. But if he has a property he knows is worth $1500 a month and he's only allowed to charge $1000 for it, he's going to refuse to do repairs and let the unit fall to the point where it really is worth what he's allowed to charge for it.

And we haven't even talked about the homelessness, the reduced number of units on the market or the nasty schemes like "key money" or the "points" scam that your nephew is subjected to.

This is what rent control gets you. This is New York City, not Beirut:

Co-ops don't have landlords.

[DrCaleb]

peck420 peck420:

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

"Anytime"? When has anything like this been proposed before? Never.

These topics have come up in Alberta Legislature a couple of times. The most recent being 2007.

But not by the NDP. A_R was once again irrationally ranting about the 'communist party of Alberta', as if they keep proposing legislation specifically to name him a slum landlord and take his properties away.

[peck420]

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

But not by the NDP. A_R was once again irrationally ranting about the 'communist party of Alberta', as if they keep proposing legislation specifically to name him a slum landlord and take his properties away.

Lol, fair enough.

[Khar]

I agree with what DrCaleb and Lemmy have said, in my own opinion. As a prior resident of both Cromdale and Parkdale, it's not hard to recognize either the name of the guy, or the properties. The rowhouses mentioned in the article I could see from my living room window (they're actually at 113th street and 83rd avenue, the CBC article is in error) when I lived in the area for a year, before deciding it was worth paying a lot more to live elsewhere. It was pretty clear the homes were not taken care of, and a lot of the local crime and goings-on were coming from particular rental homes. Not all were Shah properties, but a lot of them were.

There is probably something wrong in the market at the moment if slumlords and druglords like that are able to get away with this, and given Shah is only one guy and we've got issues on top of him, I feel it's worth looking into to see if there's ways to block guys like him from being able to have such a powerful market share. If the government wants to reduce crime and deal with poor living conditions, targeting slumlords is the first thing on the list, and the first step to doing so is exactly this kind of discussion. Providing rights to those in the properties so they can actually have a living is important to; if I depended on a guy who didn't care about my well being to pay for my water, or my heating, I'd like to have recourse (which, as Caleb points out, is pretty limited right now). Good land lords shouldn't worry about that kind of stuff; the people being targeted are the landlords who actively are involved with and responsible for the slow degradation of parts of the city into slums. They're creating a harm for us all, especially when a lot of the drugs coming in and out of the city are going through those properties, and they should be stopped.

I also seriously doubt the NDP will put in rent controls. First and foremost because in the last few years, the method that more left leaning parties in Canada have begun to prefer far more is having state-constructed, funded, or assisted "affordable" housing, the idea being that if the buildings are created to house lower income people become available as part of the general market that are safe and reliable, it would price or crowd out the slumlords. The Liberal budget put 2.3 billion dollars into such programs. It's not a new idea, but it's dominance over market controls has been. Generally, it's better than rent control; the government is less involved in the market, gets out of private deals, and improves available inventory, especially in areas with high rent in need of low skill workers, like Alberta (or, alternatively, places like BC). Hopefully the secondary reduction in crime and improvement in property values/poverty levels in the current slums would offset the cost. Whether it's good for Canada in general I'll leave down to the eye of the beholder.

It's why, shortly after they were elected, the NDP declared themselves opposed to rent controls. It's pretty easy to get people's attention by calling for them in the past when seeking more seats, but once you are in the hot seat with a hundred policy experts telling you not to, it's kind of hard to dismiss them broadly. My bet is that this report will also be an NDP method of shoring up support for the billion dollars they just planned to spend on upkeeping and building affordable housing for the next five years, a program they just expanded the user base of, to expand inventory for the first time in over 20 years with mostly mid- to high-density housing.

I definitely think that DrCaleb is right when he says Levant has missed the point, and probably by a lot.

[andyt]

I think slumlords always exist even in slacker markets, because there are always people who need the lowest cost housing. Given what welfare pays for rent allowance, there is no way anybody can make money renting to welfare recipients. So cities try to force the landlords to keep up the buildings, but if they push too hard, the landlords will just will just shut down and put people on the street. Or now, in Vancouver at least, the landlords can renovate and advertise on AirBnB and make more money, again displacing the poor.

As you say Khar, the solution is building subsidized housing, something the federal govt used to be involved in and has now said it will be again. But we have a lot of catching up to do. Didn't Brenda say that in the Netherlands most people's housing is subsidized to some degree.

[Lemmy]

It's better to just give people money than to build them housing or subsidize it.

[Thanos]

Lemmy Lemmy:

It's better to just give people money than to build them housing or subsidize it.

Pretty much. Except that fails too in time, the way it does almost every time someone gets a frebie and has no moral/ethical/financial stake in it. Going by the example of the Native treaties where Canada is obligated to provide them housing, you just don't have to give them a house once. You have to give them a house every time they want a new one, even if they're entirely responsible themselves for wrecking the previous house through neglect or purposeful destruction. I can only imagine the utter hilarity of this same kind of thing happening, the way it does in the US with Section 8 housing for the underclass, in Canada's cities if/when free housing is given away to those who are either incapable of taking care of the property, or have zero intention of even bothering to try, or who are going to wreck it on purpose because they're insane/think it's funny to do so.