I dunno. It’s like Carney’s “we’re gonna build 500k houses a year without a plan trust me bro just elect me bro” strategy is not effective.
But on the plus side, it looks like existing homeowners won’t have to worry about the price of houses going down. /s
The federal government is under pressure to relax the foreign homebuyer ban, as builders deal with one of the worst real estate slowdowns in decades.
…
At the time, the federal government said it would help stabilize housing and ensure Canadians had more access to purchasing homes. The policy prevents foreigners from buying existing and preconstruction homes.
But as borrowing costs increased in 2022 and 2023, the real estate market slumped, and demand dried up for preconstruction homes. Sales have dropped significantly in the regions of Toronto, Vancouver and Ottawa. And over the past few years, developers have postponed and canceled projects because they are unable to sell the minimum amount needed to obtain construction financing from lenders.
Okay, at least one of the other recommendations is good:
The alliance is also recommending that the federal government expand and speed up the approval process of its $55-billion apartment construction loan program. It provides cheap loans to developers to build rental-only housing as long as specific affordability requirements are met.
…
The letter also urges Ottawa to provide the GST waiver on new rental-only buildings for projects currently under construction. The tax break, which was announced in September, 2023, does not apply to projects that started prior to that date.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-foreign-homebuying-ban-ottawa-pressure/
Agreed. I’m trying to improve Lemmy by adding interesting posts, and some users respond with this kind of drive-by crap. I get that downvotes are a Redditism that users like, but they make it easy to crap on a Lemmite’s effort without conversation, which is the entire point of the platform.
I think some users see a headline they don’t like (the foreign buyer’s ban may be lifted) and downvote based on the subject, rather than the content.
I’d really like to see platform-level fixes for this. Like, users only get x downvotes a day, or they need to provide a downvote reason, etc.
I think we could start with just encouraging people to provide reasons when downvoting posts, by just showing a small box for comment for example. If we see improvements on engagement and that it ends up encouraging good conversations, then we’re all good. Otherwise, we can then get feedback on how people feel about that addition, or just observe from anonymized data, eg “How often does someone make a comment after downvoting?”
I think going straight to harder requirements might backfire in this particular case; I can see a lot of people to just stop downvoting things because they’re too lazy to provide a reason.