As the City of London battles housing demand far outweighing supply, two politicians want to tip the scale in favour of creating more spaces.
A proposal from Ward 12 Councillor Elizabeth Peloza and Ward 2 Councillor Shawn Lewis - aimed at having staff examine increasing taxes on vacant residential properties - was unanimously approved by the corporate services committee.
"A bonus tax, on residential properties that are left sitting vacant for long periods of time," Lewis told Blackburn News. "People buy (the properties) up, they have no intention of ever living in them or renting them out. They sit on them and wait for the price to go up in the market and then flip them for a profit, without doing any sort of work on them."
"In a city where we have 5,000 on an affordable housing wait list, for people to sit on a residential property and make no effort to live in it or make it habitable, I think imposing an extra penalty on those properties is a fair approach," he said.
Cities like Hamilton, Ottawa, and Vancouver made similar moves, but a cookie cutter approach may not work when bringing this kind of by-law to London.
"We're a university and college town. We do have to take into consideration that there are student rentals that often are unoccupied or under occupied from April until September," Lewis said.
Lewis said housing advocates are in support of the proposal.
"We have at least 100 houses sitting vacant in the City of London," Peloza said at the meeting. "How do we push them into renting them? Occupying them, and making it more lucrative to actually make those decisions and actually house Londoners."
A conversation with Lewis and 519 Podcast host Craig Needles, recorded just before Monday's meeting, can be heard below.
[audio mp3="https://blackburnnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Shawn-Lewis.mp3"][/audio]
