I'd be happy to comment.
Mr. Goldstein mentioned the issue about the existing stock and about losing it. We haven't seen the data yet from 2021, but from 2011 to 2016 in this country we lost 322,000 units that were renting below $750 a month. That was 60,000 units a year of very affordable existing housing, most of which was in the private sector. It didn't entirely disappear. Some of it was demolished for redevelopment as a result of intensification policies. For most of it, though, the rents simply went to a higher rent level and they were less affordable to the folks living there.
That process, which is generally referred to as “financialization”, has various capital funds. I think REITs have been targeted in this, but it's not just REITs. It's a variety of investors, including individuals, buying three- or four-unit properties. They're seeing opportunities, because of high rent pressures and opportunities to increase the rents, to simply increase the rents. As a consequence, that stock moves out of it, and then we try to build new affordable housing for low-income people at $400,000 a unit.
The idea of the acquisition fund is to enable non-profits to emulate the behaviour of REITs, essentially non-profit REITs, and go and acquire some of these existing older, as in from the sixties or seventies generation, relatively affordable market rental properties that are renting at close to the average market rent. With a small amount of equity assistance and some financing through the federal government—by repurposing, for example, the rental construction financing initiative—they could actually acquire those. Because they're non-profit, they would tend to preserve the lower rents rather than push them upmarket.