No silver bullet when it comes to solving Toronto's rental woes, experts say
CBC
When it comes to solving a problem as complicated as Toronto's housing crisis, there's no such thing as a silver bullet, says one expert.
CBC Toronto spoke to Douglas Kwan, the director of advocacy and legal services at the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario, and other housing experts after hearing from hundreds of our readers about how hard it is to be a tenant in the city. We asked them about some of your most popular ideas to help curb the rampant unaffordability.
"There's multiple solutions that every level of government could enact," Kwan said.
Here's what you suggested some of those solutions could be and what the experts think about them:
After the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the provincial government froze rent on most residences in 2021, meaning it couldn't be raised. But that freeze ended at the end of the year, while advocates pushed for it to be extended.
"I would say yes for rent controls, absolutely," said Ricardo Tranjan, a senior researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. "A blunt freeze may not be necessarily the best solution."
Tranjan said one argument against rent control is that it slows down housing starts and makes it harder for landlords to afford repairs and maintenance. But empirically, he said, those arguments only held true in the 1950s and '60s when rent control was more "blunt" — like a straight freeze.
These days, he said the research recommends a more targeted form of rent control that keeps up with inflation but doesn't exceed wages.
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