Canadian real estate prices have surged in almost every market, with a typical home price doubling in many regions. A median household in major cities like Toronto and Vancouver would need to save over 20 years for just the down payment, more than 3x the historic average. Seems absurd? The outlandish scenario was apparently a […]
If you need to have a home to afford to retire;
And most young people will never own a home;
How do we expect this to play out?
I think what’s being said is: if housing prices lower, you are going to ruin some people’s retirement plan – at least some of those people will have worked hard their entire life to purchase and pay off that house. There’s been some incentive to save in this way as well (first time home buyer plan, tax deductions for more ecologically sound houses, that kind of thing).
I suspect he’s probably right, that letting house prices drop would over all make things worse in Canada. My goto solution would be to subsidize housing by increasing taxes on corporations and people/corporations that own more than one house. but i’m not any kind of expert
If I stay in my house for my retirement, why would I care how much it is worth? I would only care about monthly costs like energy or insurance, what am I missing?
People have been told that their house is an investment first and a home second for years. This has caused some people to not be happy they own a home, they can only feel happy if that home is getting more valuable. It really is an unfair system but many people aren’t intentionally being greedy, they are playing by the rules they were taught and many are thinking towards the future for their children. We can’t blame poor policy and lack of housing investments/developments on the average owner.
Nearly every other physical asset will lose value with time and use, such as a car. Somehow houses can maintain value, and even go up as their condition worsens because we have been lacking in supply and increasing demand for at least a decade.
@Mkengine @karlhungus You are missing the high cost of aging in a retirement home/long term care facility. Because you retire in a home that you worked decades to pay off does not mean that will be your last “home” before death. Some retirement “homes” are charging $60,000 year.
Sometimes home owners will sell their house after retirement for something smaller, live off the difference, then sell that house and use the money from that for long term care, or inheritance.
There’s also the obvious: they worked for something, possibly quite hard, why do they have to pay the price for others? Presumably they’ve been paying taxes all along, and have already been contributing to the greater good.
I guess my feeling is, it’s not so simple to just wreck housing prices. I absolutely feel like corporations, and probably some ultra wealthy don’t work that hard and get most of the rewards (or aren’t even people), like if the money has to come from somewhere there is a clear set of people who could afford to lose some wealth, and not materially effect their life; and that’s not necessarily single dwelling home owners.
Not their problem. They, and especially their backers, expect to be well out of it by that point. The rich don’t really think about the future; they think about how things were in the past, and how to keep it going, but they don’t really plan or fret about the future because they don’t have to.
If you want this problem to be fixed sooner, the government and their backers need to start being afraid enough for their bank accounts, if not their lives, to do something now.
That’s how we got the modern welfare state: the rich and their pets in government were afraid they’d get Russia-in-1917’ed and begrudgingly put in the supports needed to prevent people from being that pissed off. After all, we’d just had a world war and there were millions of vets returning with PTSD and training and an informal support network, and they weren’t going to put up with a repeat of the 1930s.
Every action since then is the rich trying to claw back the New Deal and it’s equivalents in other countries.
