Housing

The city has unveiled a $36-billion plan to build 65,000 rental homes in Toronto over the next seven years, a target that would require a massive unconfirmed investment from the federal and provincial governments.

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“We are reversing the destructive thinking over the past two decades … that only the private sector can build housing,” Chow said. “The path in front of us is ambitious. It is urgently needed.”

Across Australia, 3.7m households have experienced food insecurity over the past 12 months, a jump of almost 350,000 on the previous year, Foodbank’s annual hunger report has revealed.

More than 2.3m of those households were “severely food insecure”, meaning they were actively going hungry, reducing food intake, skipping meals or going entire days without eating.

“The primary purpose of the law is to fill empty homes,” supervisor Dean Preston, the law’s chief backer, told Fortune Friday. “Holding housing off the market for a long time, when there are people who need housing, is bad for our city,” he said. “Our hope is that [the tax] is enough to change the decision making of the real-estate speculator or the owner of the property.”

Sometimes, developers have a strategy of buying buildings, removing longtime tenants, and then reselling at a profit, Preston said. More recently, some new constructions have failed to sell units amid a market slump, creating “zombie buildings,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported last month.

Infrastructure Victoria has used a major new report to call for changes including building 130 more buildings taller than nine storeys in the city centre, setting targets for constructing new homes in established areas and replacing stamp duty.

It sounds the alarm on the social, environmental and economic costs if Melbourne’s growth continues to be predominantly in outer suburbs, where 56 per cent of the city’s development has been occurring.

The B.C. government is taking aim at rule-breaking short term rental operators with a proposed law that would increase fines and ban most short-term rentals that aren’t in the operator’s principal residence.

The goal is to discourage landlords and investors from taking desperately needed suites off the long-term rental market by listing them on websites like Airbnb and VRBO. But housing officials acknowledge that almost 50 per cent of short-term rental operators are already flouting bylaws that exist in local communities.