It may be several years yet before home prices fall back into an affordable range for the average Canadian, according to Oxford Economics.
Homes will never again be affordable because the system is completely broken (and not broken in the Millhouse expression, but rather in a normal definition). We made housing a commodity rather than a necessity of life and it ended with predictable results.
Now we have the unpleasant decision of diluting the investment of millions of Canadians or continuing to allow millions of Canadians to never own a home.
Sorry, you misunderstand slightly.
I don’t mean investors in the sense of speculative parasitic humans who are devaluing life by overvaluing housing.
I mean, people like me who have worked from the age of 15-49 and now own a very modest sized apartment that is grotesquely overpriced and has quite literally enslaved me to mortgage payments for years to come.
If we devalue my apartment, why did I spend decades of sweat and toil to purchase it? Then it feels like I was playing the stock market.
And this isn’t the same argument as the “why should people get free school when I had to pay student loans” since one doesn’t affect the other. In this situation, if the value of homes come down too significantly, it’s literally devaluing my work.
I didn’t create the horrible dystopian system we live in but I do unfortunately have to abide by its rules. And now that I have a tiny piece (on paper but owned by the bank) I am hoping (like most Canadians) to take that piece and cash out to retire on in 10-15 years time.
What I’d really like to see is some kind of national housing strategy that guaranteed people basic housing regardless of their income (even if it’s “zero”). That housing wouldn’t impact the market but it could slow down the unhealthy growth of the valuation of housing.
If we could totally slow housing valuation growth to the normal 2% inflation, while also creating affordable housing for lower income/no income earners, then the system could adjust and that could be a true win win.
If we devalue my apartment, why did I spend decades of sweat and toil to purchase it?
a place to live?
If we devalue my apartment, why did I spend decades of sweat and toil to purchase it? Then it feels like I was playing the stock market.
I considered the price of housing to be inflated, so instead of buying a home, I rented and invested the difference in the stock market.
Why is it okay for me to lose the the hard-earned money I invested in the stock market, but it is not okay for housing prices to go down? When stocks go down I still need to pay rent every month, but when house prices go down you don’t lose your home.
Either we treat housing as an investment, in which case we need to accept the risk that prices will go down, or we treat it as a basic life necessity, in which case it must be affordable. We can’t say: “I bought a home with my hard work, so now it must pay for my retirement”.
When you say “fuck investors” do you also mean everyone who has any savings or pension? Because these people are investors.
Like, fuck me for opening a HISA and contributing to my RRSP?
Nah I know the system that regular workers have to use for retirement, because the system’s warped to only work that way. And then they get shitty, or no retirement because of how it works, they’re competing in a contest that rewards the wealthiest, and the prize is more money. It should be truly savings, from an income not obliterated by the wealth inequality we have from an investment economy, or better supported by taxes from the new generation of workers, that right now have been steadily becoming less and less able to support retirees, again from wealth inequality because investment is a broken feedback loop that concentrates money away from the bottom.
Lots of people have to make use of systems they dont agree with.
The math is very simple:
There are more people wanting to buy a house than the number of houses available
Are you talking about Canada explicitly? Cause according to this article there’s about 28 vacant homes per every by homeless person (but this is for the US):
https://unitedwaynca.org/blog/vacant-homes-vs-homelessness-by-city/
It’s similar for Canada.
Quote from 1st link below:
Even more disturbing are the figures comparing vacant homes to the homeless population of a given country. While Canada ranks lower on this list at 13, it is still not a ranking that we should be proud of at all. It would take just 9% of the over 1.3 million vacant homes in Canada to give every homeless person in the country a place to live.
Also of possible interest, a comparison of some major Canadian and US cities:
We made housing a commodity
We didn’t, though. A commodity is interchangeable. Housing is not interchangeable. A house in Iqaluit cannot meaningfully replace a house in Toronto. If housing were made a commodity it is likely we wouldn’t have the problems we have, but since we have never done such a thing…
The referendum on Berlin expropriating 240,000 residential properties from corporate ownership. Something to consider.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/29/berlin-vote-landlords-referendum-corporate
Canada needs a more socialist government. Both the CPC and LPC are neoliberal fucktards.
The main article is about Canada though. Not the US. They are different countries
Lol my bad, still too Socialist for North America*
Fixed it :)
P.S. Thx for telling me they’re diff countries. Would have NEVER known. :0
I know the YIMBY movement has been growing tremendously across North America lately, but we still have a long way to go to actually eliminate the core problems manufacturing this housing crisis, e.g., mandatory parking minimums, exclusionary zoning, and rampant NIMBYism.
Housing ought to be a consumer good like any other – you buy it, use it, and it depreciates with use. Nobody expects a car to increase in value once you drive it off the lot. But somehow with housing, we’ve all bought into the delusion that housing is an investment. But to be a good investment, it has to appreciate faster than inflation, which means it cannot be affordable!
But this delusion is exactly why we have so much NIMBYism. If you manufacture an artificial scarcity to block out competition, suddenly the class of people who own homes or property can milk it for lots of money, at the expense of the rest of us. And almost all our politicians are homeowners.
Any solution, no matter how perfect, will take years to implement and have a real effect on housing prices.
That said, it’s either a half decade form now with a great policy, or several generations from now with bad policies, so don’t give up the fight to have good housing within our lifetimes, as it will transcend elections.
It’s never coming back down, corporations figured out it was a choice between a finite sum of money through selling, or indefinite income through renting. So they’ve been buying up property like crazy and outbidding anyone actually trying to live somewhere, of course corporation is gonna have more money and the RoI is virtually infinite no matter the price.
This is only a small part of the problem. The issue is that corporations are bidding on an extremely limited number of lots. Like a hundred firms on five lots kinda insane. By bidding on each other over and over, the prices inflate, and the end result ends up having to rake in more money just to recoup the costs.
It’s just plain illegal to build multiplexes on single lot residential. That’s why you can get several square km in the middle of downtown of only single family houses with front and back yards, with 50 story sky scrapers a few blocks down.
and the end result ends up having to rake in more money just to recoup the costs.
that’s not how prices work
This is exactly how prices work. The minimum price of something is the price at which something costs to procure and produce, with anything added on top being profits. And this being typical western capitalism, they do what they can to increase profits as much as possible, and with housing being a requirement not a luxury, people pay whatever is asked.
