That graph is insane
Did they stop making houses in Canada?
If I recall correctly, there is a ton of foreign money buying up all the housing in Canada, which drives up pricing.
It’s just money in general. Not every province tracks foreign ownership of residential housing, but those that do show only about 5% of houses are owned by foreigners. It’s mostly rich Canadians and Canadian businesses that have purchased a huge amount of housing as a form of market speculation.
However, houses being worth a small fortune is good for anyone who already owns a house, which is most Canadians. The issue is that not everyone wants house prices to drop.
This is one of many pieces of the puzzle. There are also terrible zoning laws preventing density in cities. Also, to be clear, immigration is essential to our country and we have a responsibility as a wealthy western to country to accept refugees. However, we have been increasing our immigration rates a ton and our new builds has been really low. Many of these new Canadians are sold a false promise.
Housing is a main factor to Canada’s GDP which is scary, so the government is propping it up.
This graph is so location dependent for the US. Where I am, home prices have gone up well over 10x since 1980. There are many places in the US where it is just as bad, or even worse than the average in Canada.
The issue in Canada is also location dependent, some areas 10x plus others not. But even worse is that housing across the board has gone up as people flee the high price areas, bringing demand to the cheaper areas, and therefor raising the prices.
There are a few areas that have become so impossible to afford (Canmore, Banff, Vancouver etc.) that the lower earning workers are living in tents (this also happens in the states but is new there I hear).
Someone better at such things than me needs to add a trendline for the ratio of median employee to median CEO earnings for publicly traded companies over the same period of time. Maybe it wouldn’t look like I think it would - but maybe it would.
So, are we screwed?
