One of the biggest issues that we face today, of course, is that you can make a tremendous amount of money in the housing market. Anyone with eyes to see knows this. There was, in fact, a 60 Minutes piece on a Toronto-based company that is buying up single-family homes in America and now owns over 30,000 single-family homes, precisely because they are an asset class. They're a significant way to generate profit.
We need mechanisms in place that turn housing back into homes. The suggestion that I have put on the table is that for investors who own homes, we tax the revenue they generate as income, which we do not do today. Take, for example, a rental company that owns an entire rental building. The revenue it generates is taxed as income, but an investor who may own an entire floor in a condo building is taxed 50% less in our current taxation system.
We have an opportunity to put a fairer taxation system in place that will also act as a disincentive to investors buying up floors. That's literally what happens. They're even marketed that way in Toronto and Vancouver. They buy up an entire floor of homes in a condo building and turn them into investment units. There's a real opportunity to take the taxation tools we have today and create some fairness, but also turn down the heat on treating housing as an asset.
The second piece is with respect to incentivizing affordable housing and incentivizing the building of affordable housing by taking away the HST on affordable housing. At Markee Developments, we currently have over 2,000 homes under development in Toronto, and we try to put together projects in which we can either create a cross-subsidization or, in partnership with the landowner, maximize the amount of affordable housing. We've found that HST is often the difference between being able to make a unit affordable and needing to make a market unit viable.
Those are two ways.