Politically speaking you fall either into the conservative or liberal categories. PoliSci profs will define the two as roughly this: lefties believe in the concept of revolution, righties in reform.
I'm not sure which I am because I basically don't even really want anything reformed, as new rules just bring a new set of problems.
Marijuana? I don't want to see kids blatantly smoking dope in the park, too many young people waste too much of their life stoned anyway, let's not encourage this.. Prostitution? Keep it as it is, tolerated when discreet, but police should have tools to respond to complaints that a hooker is standing in front of their front door. Gay marriage? As long as gay couples are able to have legal rights and recognition, I'm ok with traditional marriage, (but if it's such a big deal to folks, then go ahead and allow it, don't really care much either way). I'm almost even ok with the language laws: if the French speaking majority wants to make their folk unable to cope in the larger stream of international communications, that only makes us anglos more special and gives us a greater advantage living here.
Wow, sorry for the long, boring preamble.
So when I heard that Montreal city council recently passed a new motion urging more meddlesome bureaucracy, urging the creation of a lease registry, I thought it'd be fun to know exactly which councillors supported this dumb idea.
The idea of a lease registry is that a landlord has to supply a copy of every lease to the province, which will then be able to intervene when a person pays a rent that has been hiked up from the previous lease more than some particular percentage.
This latest artificial intervention into the residential rental market is as misguided as the city's many previous ones, which have all coincided only with a massive hike in rents around the city.
Not only would this require the creation of a new bureaucracy to rule, but it would be futile.
Firstly, the rent hikes have already taken place, so most people are already paying market value.
Many landlords around the city have a unit or two that is massively underpriced for various reasons and are waiting for that tenant to leave so they can bring it to market value.
So for example, if some guy is paying $300 in a building where everybody else is paying $700, why would the landlord not have the right to put it at that price after the guy moves out?
What would be the philosophical argument to force a landlord to keep a unit artificially underpriced?
Of course the landlord wouldn't rent it out at all.
He would turn it into storage, or do a airbnb thing with it, let his sister move in and just wait it out until the rule no longer applied. Nobody would win in that scenario as that's one less apartment unit available.
An of course such an attack on landlords doesn't go unnoticed by investors, who would then have a further reason to not build rental units.
As for who voted for this motion to meddle in the pricing of apartments.. they didn't actually take a vote, they only asked who objected, and the only person who did was councillor Dominique Perri of St. Leonard.
I'm not sure which I am because I basically don't even really want anything reformed, as new rules just bring a new set of problems.
Marijuana? I don't want to see kids blatantly smoking dope in the park, too many young people waste too much of their life stoned anyway, let's not encourage this.. Prostitution? Keep it as it is, tolerated when discreet, but police should have tools to respond to complaints that a hooker is standing in front of their front door. Gay marriage? As long as gay couples are able to have legal rights and recognition, I'm ok with traditional marriage, (but if it's such a big deal to folks, then go ahead and allow it, don't really care much either way). I'm almost even ok with the language laws: if the French speaking majority wants to make their folk unable to cope in the larger stream of international communications, that only makes us anglos more special and gives us a greater advantage living here.
Wow, sorry for the long, boring preamble.
So when I heard that Montreal city council recently passed a new motion urging more meddlesome bureaucracy, urging the creation of a lease registry, I thought it'd be fun to know exactly which councillors supported this dumb idea.
The idea of a lease registry is that a landlord has to supply a copy of every lease to the province, which will then be able to intervene when a person pays a rent that has been hiked up from the previous lease more than some particular percentage.
This latest artificial intervention into the residential rental market is as misguided as the city's many previous ones, which have all coincided only with a massive hike in rents around the city.
Not only would this require the creation of a new bureaucracy to rule, but it would be futile.
Firstly, the rent hikes have already taken place, so most people are already paying market value.
Many landlords around the city have a unit or two that is massively underpriced for various reasons and are waiting for that tenant to leave so they can bring it to market value.
So for example, if some guy is paying $300 in a building where everybody else is paying $700, why would the landlord not have the right to put it at that price after the guy moves out?
What would be the philosophical argument to force a landlord to keep a unit artificially underpriced?
Of course the landlord wouldn't rent it out at all.
He would turn it into storage, or do a airbnb thing with it, let his sister move in and just wait it out until the rule no longer applied. Nobody would win in that scenario as that's one less apartment unit available.
An of course such an attack on landlords doesn't go unnoticed by investors, who would then have a further reason to not build rental units.
As for who voted for this motion to meddle in the pricing of apartments.. they didn't actually take a vote, they only asked who objected, and the only person who did was councillor Dominique Perri of St. Leonard.