Stop preventing new housing construction too. Instead of relying on protests to change landlords’ behavior, use the protests to change government’s behavior, then let the profit motive of new construction to overpower the landlords’ ability to engage in price fixing.
Landlords are greedy. They’ll raise rents as much as they can. Fortunately, markets have the power to limit how much they can. But only if the market is free, ie if people can engage with the market as they see fit.
Right now we have a huge deviation from freedom, in the form of heavy government suppression of new investment, ie new construction of housing. This results in a market with artificially-limited supply, and those conditions allow the landlords’ greed to run un-checked by any opposing negotiating power.
The more landlords there are, the less power any given landlord has, because landlords compete with one another for our tenancy.
But if the supply isn’t allowed to naturally grow with our demand, ie if new housing can’t be built, then there’s no negotiating power on the side of tenants because they have no alternate choices about where to live.
Best the Ontario conservative government could do was to open up protected Greenbelt land so his developer buddies could make a quick buck without actually developing anything. Sorry.
IMO better than converting park land to space for housing is to just lift zoning restrictions that say you can’t build an apartment building over a certain height, or that every dwelling in a certain neighborhood needs at least 0.25 acres under it, that sort of thing. Density restrictions.
Like, in Boulder CO there are limits to how high you can build, and also limits on how far out you can build. Boulder is surrounded by publicly-owned land. Cows graze there, but there are also trails running through it. It’s very nice to have around Boulder. But rent prices are impossible to keep up with for anyone other than the richest, because of the tight restrictions. I’d rather see Boulder just raise the height limit on new construction.
I understand that it can be “unsightly” to have a big apartment building go in, in a neighborhood of houses. But I don’t think anyone is entitled to the government protecting their monetary investments, except insofar as the government protects everyone’s investments equally (like by providing fire department services, or a fair system of laws). Protecting house prices by preventing new housing from being built is basically a huge government thumb on the scales of that market, preventing the improvement of the many’s lives for the benefit of the few.
