It may be several years yet before home prices fall back into an affordable range for the average Canadian, according to Oxford Economics.
It’s been rough out there. My wife and I recently moved and purchased a home in Edmonton as it is one of the few “affordable” cities left in Canada.
I moved to Winnipeg 5 years ago. You’re right.
The place would be a lot better if the provincial government would stop putting barriers up for anything that would benefit the city. As it is, we might as well not even have a mayor and council as the province regularly overrules decisions they make.
It won’t last. Various “armpit” towns throughout Ontario are now unaffordable. North Bay, Timming, Peterborough, Thunder Bay: all of them were cheap, and fell to investor speculation-based increases.
I’d encourage other provinces to preemptively smack down speculation hard, now, before the problem metastasizes. Don’t wait until GTA or GVA property investors have played Monopoly in your small town; do it now, even if it offends a few established property owners.
So, the big plan is to free up housing supply by making a few million working-class people homeless and doing absolutely nothing to claw back all the homes those “investors” bought up. Fantastic.
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.
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.
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”.
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…
I encourage everyone to check the source cited, it’s a PDF with some great extra info that isn’t in the BNN article.
