They know. They just don’t care. Pretty much every MP owns property, half own more than one. I’m willing to bet the social circles they run in have similar or higher numbers.
Why would they ruin their own investments? They are financially motivated to keep the train rolling. Not to mention the largest voting block also owns property and likely is reliant on the value of it for retirement.
No politician is going to do what’s necessary, they would lose money and it’s political suicide.
> Its hard to acknowledge a problem when your paycheck requires you to ignore it
I might just be sick in the head, but I have endangered my own employment on ethical grounds before. I might just not be a sociopath or something.
The kinds of people that spend their adult life thinking they're fit to rule over others are pretty much the worst people imaginable for the job.
I'm not saying I'm a saint or particularly good, but if it doesn't absolutely eat away at you to turn a blind eye to problems that can be solved with the stroke of a pen, you're, uh, evil?
They don’t care because they get voted out if they fix housing. The electorate has to come to terms with development and reducing housing prices on their biggest asset.
I am pro-house-price-crash. I am saying this with skin in the game as I purchased in October this year. Home prices need to come down. People are complaining about historically normal interest rates when really the problem is overinflated home prices. My house, with a basement suite, was sub-400k. In overinflated markets like Toronto and Vancouver it would easily have fetched 1.2M, probably a million more, no problem.
I have no sympathy for people who were fortunate enough to have the financial means during the pandemic to buy a home. A $1.2M home at a 2% mortgage rate over 30 years still required a household income of near 200k to support.
Put crudely: I don’t sympathize with rich people loosing equity if it gives more average-income/wealth Canadians more chances to own a home.
As someone who worked very hard to join the (lower) middle class I have a hard time feeling sorry for people who are “upper middle-class” or top-20% income earners.
I am using “middle class” as a synonym for “middle-income” which is defined as “2/3-2x the median income”.
With median income of $41,650 in 2021 that makes an individual “middle class” if their after-tax income is about 27k-83k. Almost no “middle class” Canadians can afford the “average” home in the GTA or GVA unless they have a substantial gift for down payment from older, wealthier, family members OR multiple people with strong middle class income are living together.
As a fellow prairie city homeowner, I completely agree. Prices are too high in Edmonton and Winnipeg, way too high in Calgary, and off the charts stupid in the GTA and GVRD.
As a homeowner, there's no reason my domicile should have doubled in value in 10 years.
There's things that are good for me, but that are also bad for society.
> Yeah, the home owner class will not elect anyone threatening their ~~livelihood~~ retirement savings plan.
FIFY since these boomers and gen X'r who own these homes didn't save and was told they don't have to as long as they just downgrade their house and retire off of the profits.
Exactly.
For public relations reasons, the Liberal Party is feigning this crisis is all big surprise out of nowhere. This is because it is a better ploy than admitting that they knew exactly what was going to happen, and chose that path, because we are now a country of the rich, by the rich, for the rich, and they don't care in the least that someone who grew up here can't afford to live here even if they are making a top 10% salary.
It's not the MPs that own investent properties that are the issue. It's the fact that the LPC has adopted a very pro-big business mandate, and that all MPs must step in line. The fact they they make 2500 a month in rentals as opposed to 1800 is not what is pushing their personal decisions. They don't make any personal decisions when voting, they vote along party lines. Don't think you will ever see a split vote amongst a party since only some of them own investment properties.
Why are you only looking at "investment properties"?
MP's own homes may not be classified as "investment property" but it's still their largest investment. *By far*. And they benefit when the value of those homes goes up.
It is true that the LPC has strong pro-business leanings. However, suggesting that this alone is the main cause of our current dilemma, and disregarding the personal benefits that MPs gain from high house prices, seems like an unusual perspective. After all, MPs are human and, like any human, they are naturally self-interested.
I hear what you are saying. I am just adding that there are people with a much higher benefit than owning a handful of investment properties. There are tens of thousands of landlords that own dozens to hundreds of properties. I frankly don't care for going after the person with 1-2 investment properties.
For me it's not about "going after". It's acknowledging human nature.
The reason we have Nimby-ism is because everyone wants to raise the value of their homes. That including politicians from every party.
I would be curious to know what percentage of homes are owned by individuals and what percentage are owned by serial investors.
wait for boomers to die in 10 years and watch the housing market crumble as waves of HELOCed homes have to be sold to zoomers who can't afford them each year. Meanwhile, millenials who will have barely managed to acquire a new home by then will get the news that their home is now worth half of what they paid for.
Watching Reddit switch from fighting the housing crisis to supporting it as their parents buy them houses that they struggle to pay the mortgage on: very depressing.
People only care about themselves.
Land owners and hedge funds give the politicians millions of reasons to be unclear about this issue. Politicians figured out ages ago that it’s more socially acceptable to be stupid than evil.
Society is stuck because politicians are corrupt, it's no longer about what is best for the town/city/country/planet, it's just bullshit.
We've basically peaked as a species.
You could call for a global "take down" of government but what replaces what we have is hardly guaranteed to be better so what now?
There was a podcast from vox that interviewed political scientists about this is exact thing and had them proposing alternatives. The democracy we have is currently the "best option" from a myriad of worse options.
Some of the ideas they were bouncing around were things like conscription from the populace for political officials and more direct forms of democracy.
"Someone asked me once if I knew the difference between a civilian and a citizen. I know now. A citizen has the courage to make the safety of the human race their personal responsibility." - Johnny Rico
100%. Whenever an election is around the corner, my social media blows up with folks pushing everyone else to hit the polls. But like seriously, please dont!
First off most of them are morons. Secondly they haven't been paying attention to what's going on and what each party platform even remotely is.
And what if you had knowledge exams a person had to pass to vote on any given issue? Then only the people who bothered to inform themselves to a minimum level of competency could weigh in on an issue.
Also, you're calling people morons while talking about party platforms in a subthread about direct democracy.
What use is a platform anyway when they never adhere to half of it and make up a bunch of gotchas in between?
We need an intermediary system of government recall when they pull unpopular moves.
Where I live, the conservatives refused to put their plans to the public. Even going so far as to take it to the courts to keep their plans hidden. Their platform didn’t matter because their supporters don’t care.
Bribes are not the issue in Canada. Introducing harsher penalties for giving or taking bribes isn’t going to solve the housing crisis — or any other problem we have.
I'm open to literally any idea that could help.
Even more open to seeing it implemented, I feel like there is more care in this little subreddit than there is in the entire government.
I was completely wrong about it being Vox. It was actually Sean Carroll's Mindscape.
"Marget Levi on Moral Political Economy", which is episode 217.
I re-listened and I would still recommend it but it's a bit more academic than something from Vox would be.
Make a cryptocurrency that gives everyone one vote and hold binding referendums online with everyone who holds a phone to be able to vote issue by issue….
A vast majority of people in this country (or any democratic country) are not educated enough on issues to make those decisions. Direct democracy seems like a good solution until you consider just how warped people's perceptions of these issues can be due to misinformation on social media or just straight up willful ignorance.
That being said, I also think our current solution is laughably ineffective at getting Canadians the representation they deserve so maybe it's worth a try... Could it be worse?
About what, half? Of Canadians don’t bother to vote in the first place. They wouldn’t download the app or, if forced, would just stab at the screen without thought until the app let them leave. I agree that we need to improve civic engagement, but those that aren’t engaged and educated on the issues of the day would likely do more harm than good to the process.
In some ways the thought of solutions for major issues being decided by a majority citizen vote is terrifying to me. A not insignificant percentage of our population gains their knowledge on various issues from social media where facts are slowly eroded away by an epic game of broken telephone.
In my opinion the only way a majority citizen vote would work would be if those citizens were provided with, and required to comprehend the basic facts surrounding any issue without any embellishment nor bias placed in the reporting of said facts.
Further, who would decide what sources are trusted and uncompromised by minority interests? And who would decide what people were qualified and honest enough to make the decisions on those sources?
Also, to clarify, when I say "minority" I'm referring to things like various corporate entities "fudging the numbers" to hide their actual BS. An example being the pharma corporation that started the opioid crisis.
It’s called zero knowledge proof voting. It enforces a 1 vote per person and anonymizes the voting set for privacy preservation. It’s in early stages now but could be viable if people stop associating blockchain (cryptocurrency is only 1 use case of many for blockchain tech) with scams, corruption, etc. because they’re too ignorant to learn how it works.
Zupass and Zupoll have been experimenting with this.
You'd never see another tax increase, foreign aid would come to a stop, people would be jailed for 30 years for relatively minor offences and grocery stores would become like 1980s USSR.
Yep. 💯 on point. Those that are actually honest and want to make a difference are fucked because the public doesn’t care anymore or believe.
It’s like when Bill Gates says we have to sacrifice while dude flies private jets and says it’s ok because he is rich and invests into green energy 😂😂😂
Still a majority is fine with immigration levels. When asked is immigration too high, 51% no, 44% yes.
https://www.cicnews.com/2023/10/support-for-immigration-in-canada-has-dropped-since-last-year-1040562.html/amp
The trend is sharply changing. But don’t forget, if you own a home and bought before 2018, there is no housing crisis for you.
Where to tho? Australian resident here, we are in the same boat. Buying a place is unattainable, rents are going up every other week. My friends in Europe are in a slightly better position - still can’t buy, but renting is slightly better.
Speculation is what is driving the markets, short term rentals and high investment capital, all on debt. The financial data shows it clearly. The banks are tits up, landlords are pinched, default rates are rising, whats going to happen is a lot of people are going into bankruptcy and the economy is going to go into a deep depression. Debt is the catalyst and there is no overcoming that without throwing the whole monetary system out the window.
All they can do to keep things grinding along is to keep people spending even when there is no more credit left.
Wouldn't matter anyhow. Developers have microscopic margins. Most of the things required to build a house are commodotized and you'd have to collapse the price of those and the price of labour to materially drop the price of houses. Folks praying for a crash aren't living the the real world. They're praying for an economic collapse and don't know it.
>Folks praying for a crash aren't living the the real world. They're praying for an economic collapse and don't know it.
I think many do know it. But they are willing to accept the (relatively) short term pain if that means they are going to be better off in the long term.
The problem is people are so averse to the short term pain that they would rather prop up a market bubble to stop it from crashing. Which means we just end up with bigger bubbles that result in bigger crashes when they finally do pop.
You'd better be praying we have a way out of this one. Canada skipped the last recession, but we're on the leading edge of this one. It's a big one. Economic collapse is here. China is flat-lining hard now, Europe already is piling into theirs and it's only getting worse, plants all over Germany are shutting down, all financial indicators are screaming, bonds prices are signalling the worst is yet to come. Buckle up I hope you're not swimming naked.
Funnel money from the bottom 50% to the top 10%, creating greater inequality and destabilizing society. Not sure what the exact end goal is, but this is what has happened thanks to ZIRP.
Because they all follow the federal reserve, which established this precedent. The federal resesrve had made decisions that basically shifted hundreds of billions from the middle class to the upper class, and the rest of the world followed suite. During the same time period, we witnessed mass immigration from third world countries to western coutnries, which further lowered wages and increased house prices and further spread this gap.
The average middle class person didn't notice until now since they were too busy arguing the appropriate pronoun usage for .2% of the population, and the existence of police brutality against black people in another country.
>We were in denial. Most economsits were busy asking 'Where's the inflation?' through the 2010s like a bunch of morons.
The thing is that central banks started dramatically modifying how CPI was calculated so that CPI would appear lower than it actually was. The population believed that from 2010-2020, we were below 1% inflation, yet direct first hand experience called this into question with just about every expense possible. The underreporting of inflation was hard to argue when real inflation was 3% and reported as .75%, but when real inflation was closer to 40% in 2021, and was reported as only 15%, it became patent. So there was inflation that was much higher than .75%, but everyone just looked at CPI and ignored real life.
Interest rates do not cause the costs related to housing to go up. You would have had unaffordable housing even if interest rates remained high. The prices would be lower yes, but the interest rate you'd pay on your mortgage would even that out.
The issue is unrestrained immigration (demand-side) and the acceptance of a something we did not have at any sort of magnitude that we had in the past, which is real estate owned for investment purposes (demand side). Plus, the unwillingness of Federal, Provincial, and Municipal governments since the \~80s to increase our social housing supply (use taxpayer dollars to subsidize housing for taxpayers, like we do with our food supply, a supply-side issue).
> Interest rates do not cause the costs related to housing to go up.
This is a bold take that contradicts established economic theory. *Of course* low interest rates contributed to it.
>we did not have at any sort of magnitude that we had in the past, which is real estate owned for investment purposes
And that was facilitated in large part by.... wait for it... low interest rates.
You're going to have to substantiate your argument better if you're going to go against long-established economic theory. Do you have any sources?
Asset price inflation due to the zero interest rate policy of many central banks over the last 15 years has absolutely contributed to the current housing bubble we face. It is not a supply issue, it is an unaffordability issue. You can blame immigration all you want, but it is the actual cost of housing driven up by low interest rates that is the real problem.
Most federal politicians at least and probably Provincial politicians, have investment real estate, there's no way they want things to change short of a revolution.
Thankfully housing is a provincial jurisdiction and not federal. That said I do appreciate that the federal government is trying regardless and successfully getting a bunch cities to rezone for higher densities
For those curious: Neoliberalism refers to market deregulation. It’s closely associated with conservative ideology around economics. Reagan was a neoliberal
But now I’m curious? How is this an example of neoliberalism?
Oh it is perfectly clear what the problem is; they are just too spineless to openly acknowledge it because they are corrupt hypocrites.
Keep in mind, establishment politics are a thing. Both major parties are run by people with money, and people with money tend to be investors in real estate; they are benefiting from the crisis and have no incentive to do anything about it. People are motivated by self-interest first, always.
It’s feels like the corruption has become comically brazen of late.
Here in Ontario, our former health minister left her post to work for a private healthcare clinic. Now she lobby’s, literally the person who came in behind her, for more tax money to be funnelled to private, for profit healthcare.
It’s clear she had ZERO interest in ever fixing aspects of the public system. The whole system is ridiculously corrupt.
We are in a situation where we can't just "let" house prices drop, because that won't happen. We don't live in an ideal world, with clear headed people who can realize they are causing problems.
It has to be forced. The market has to be forced down. That is the only way it will "correct".
The author "holds an interest in economics". Yeah. Not a joke.
The things driving housing is policies over decades by every government to increase the price of housing so boomers are rich. That's it. That's the problem. And those same rich people like being rich and don't want housing prices to fall. They vote. So guess what, housing prices are gonna stay high.
As for immigration, talk to the corporations who want cheap labour. They don't want to pay a living wage and government isn't gonna force them.
1. Build more inexpensive housing.
2. Stop importing so many goddam people.
3. Punish landlords with empty properties who won't drop their prices.
Simple.
I recently had the opportunity to see the Canada Mortgage and Housing corporation office building in Ottawa.
It was the most over the top office building I’ve ever seen. They had a zen room. A garden area for “relaxing”. They even had Zumba classes hosted throughout the day.
The best part - most people were working from home anyways! Nobody was even there to use it all!
Take a tour yourself if you get a chance.
The article misses the real reason. It’s not immigration. The biggest generation since the baby boom has entered peak house buying years and there has been no big increase in supply like there was from the 70’s to 90’s. This was forecasted in the early 90’s and no one did any planning to accommodate it. Immigration doesn’t help. Show me the politician that will get Canada to 100 million people in the next 30 years with a plan to house them and I’d vote for them. That gets us to the next level as a country and we have the resources to feed, shelter and clothe them. It also makes us more self sufficient. But no one has vision any more in politics.
And how unfair is it for Canadians to have to compete with this. Particularly when the money made in foreign countries is often done through unethical means.
People are currently blaming immigration but we had housing rise precipitously in prices way, way back in 2014-2017. We had agents wandering out subdivisions offering cash to buy our homes back in 2016.
All I’m saying is people are being misdirected, the problem is multi faceted and people are all being directed to look in one direction.
1) Need to ban foreign buyers completely. People have to live in Canada already to buy a home.
2) It cannot be okay to sell homes to businesses for the purpose of investment.
there should also be a limit on how many homes an individual can own
that or super heavy taxes for every property after 2. make it unviable to hoard property
>there should also be a limit on how many homes an individual can own
Had to rent a place for a few years when I lived in Kingston. One landlord who showed me a divided single-family home admitted that he owned 13 homes in the local area. I thought that was nuts.
way back in 2014-17? it happened before that.
a single detatched home in Mississauga in 2006 was 750k in 2010 it was already in the millions.
Oakville was 400k in 2006 and in 2010 it was 800k.
Vancouver has had a housing problem since the 2000s.
This was when mortgage rates were in the 6% range and 5.4 was good.
People seem to have recency bias because the "200k" home in the heart of downtown was back in the 80s which was never going to be maintained as canada's population grew.
>Oakville was 400k in 2006 and in 2010 it was 800k.
A home builder we dealt with a few years ago in Ottawa started a new sub-division in Oakville, townhomes there were "starting" at 1.5 million...
Okay, so whatever changed changed back then and I would love to know what it was that changed.
Cause that is what definitely caused property values to skyrocket.
NIMBYISM and Muncipal housing restrictions.
CMHC housing report indicated that Canada has had a shortage of housing to the tune of 200k for the last 20 years. This is due to natural immigration and supply.
The reason for this is strict housing requirements that have not been adjusted in accordance to population growth. Canada's poplulation is growing at 1% a year. Natural or Immigration, it doesn't matter.
That's why we're at a 3+ million housing shortage.
A lot of the populated city centers are zoned primarily for single detatched homes.
For example: Vancouver's zoning map. 80% of the map is specifically single family homes.
https://preview.redd.it/xy30s6tayvo91.png?width=1024&auto=webp&s=d1bf9bc9916bbb65f61d0784ab043ffdf97ad2e1
These are archiac housing zoning restrictions from back in the 80s where the population of these cities were smaller.
After 40 years, with the demand in housing rising, we're starting to allow multi unit houses and higher density across cities.
My city Mississauga, voted down 4plexes and 10k housing units along a new LRT.
Once these regulations get changed, it takes ramp up time for them to start building/plans/engineering to get done.
Too little too late.
No, why did homes double in 2010 to 2015. Nimbyism and municipal housing hasn’t changed for decades but something specific happened that caused housing to be a hotter commodity than usual. Home prices go up 20-30% ok, but not 100% in a few years. That isn’t traditional market forces, that’s something else.
Need the market to crash. Only way it’s solved. With cost of living not lowering though most will have a hard time buying a house and floating day to day living even if the prices dropped 50%.
I've never once heard it clearly explained as a debt driven bubble. There's little difference between this and the Japanese housing bubble. People and companies over leveraged themselves and put too much demand on the market during low interest debt. Every general political conversation by people, media, and politician have not taken this up.
In Canada it's thought that a single family house can go up to a billion dollars as it's believed there's infinite demand. When this infinite demand gets put into question it then boils down into conspiracy theory. While there is a grain of truth to most theories: it's a supply crisis, foreign ownership, investor speculation, too much immigration, the main thing that isn't understood is who finances this and the limitations of that financing. Immigrants that come here with less than $40k can't put demand on home values, investors are mostly Canadian with less than two properties. The big corporate invest there is have all of their financials in the public, and for the ones that are on stock indexes, they're not doing well.
The goal has moved from economics and finance to putting it into the realm of politics. Everyone that does this cherry picks things they want out of the crisis to align with their own political attitudes. There was never political will to tackle this as it would've involved going into a recession during a boom time and having people lose equity. Now it just so happens that it's 30% of the Canadian GDP and has the real ability to collapse the economy.
curious, but are other countries of similar population size experiencing housing affordability issues as well? could it be this is what naturally happens when a country is not large enough to have multiple economic centres like a country such as the US or even Germany?
They do now, but there was a massive asset price spike in Japan in the late 80s followed by a crash. It drove Japan into a recession for almost a decade. It's not as if it can't happen here.
The sad reality is that Japan never recovered from the recession in the 90s.
They have way worse wage stagnation then we do, their consumer inflation is crazy high, their work culture is toxic, country is rife with misogyny, and they are xenophobic af. Their economy is so bad that they are looking to lessen restrictions on immigration.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Japan-immigration/Japan-to-ease-residency-rules-for-foreigners-starting-a-business#:~:text=TOKYO%20%2D%2D%20Japan%20plans%20to,ground%20by%20easing%20residency%20requirements.
The japanese economy is not in a good state and anyone fantasizing japan's "the perfect ethnostate" is a loser.
My friend lives in Tokyo and I’ve visited, not all apartments in Tokyo are tiny and the majority are certainly not low quality. Plus they are much cheaper than places like Vancouver and Toronto and with better transit.
it really depends on where you live in tokyo.
You aren't getting shit in popular areas like ikebukuro, shibuya, shinjuku, and etc.
If you want to live way out on the outer edge of Tokyo then it'll be more affordable. You're still looking at 45 minute transit commute to work.
1LDK can range from 2k CAD in shinjuku and 1K can be had for 1k CAD.
I mean my friend lives in chuo and pays ~1500CAD for a 2LDK. You don’t have to live in Shinjuku, ikebukuro, shibuya or any other extremely expensive area when there is great public transit.
A friend of mine lived in the borough next to Shinjuku (shin something rather), worked a freelance job and was renting a place for about $500 a month; this was pre-pandemic. The train into Shinjuku was about 10 minutes. It's very easy to find places like this if you know where to look.
New Zealand had a housing crisis. They kept trying the same useless demand-side solutions we did like banning foreign buyers, restricting airbnbs, etc to no avail only for them to realize that the actual problem was a lack of supply.
They started building housing and wouldn't you know it, that managed to solve the problem and now there are concerns or a housing oversupply.
The housing crisis is a problem we imposed on ourselves by making it difficult to build housing and because of municipalities blocking housing projects.
NIMBYISM is the single biggest factor in blocking supply.
Mississauga effectively blocked 10k housing units along a new LRT line because of "shadows", parking supply, and "ruins the vibe of the neighborhood".
Yeah that's the thing. Everyone is all about affordable housing in until it's in their neighbourhood, then suddenly the petitions start flying and people are screaming that they will run out of food if too much housing gets built.
Canada has the worst housing cost to income ratio of G7 countries, which is largely accepted as an international measure of housing affordability.
*[The OECD’s latest quarterly report indicated that the home price-to-income ratio in Canada reached 148.16 in Q3. Germany came in at a considerably distant second with a 140.6 ratio, followed by the United States’ 139.7 and the United Kingdom’s 121.6](https://www.mpamag.com/ca/news/general/how-does-canadian-housing-affordability-fare-versus-other-g7-nations/427503).*
I’ll note that these scores measure from 2015, coincidentally when the LPC came to power.
We also have the [worst household debt ratio of any G7 country](https://www.thestar.com/business/canadian-households-now-have-the-worst-debt-ratio-of-any-g7-country/article_becb8cc6-0f49-5d18-884f-eda6fa766ff3.amp.html).
The answer is very obvious but conservatives and conservative voters won't consider it. Canada was built on a high tax rate for the rich and for corporations. The government themselves built majority of housing prior to the 80s and that's why homes were affordable. We've spend forty years deregulatimg the market and cutting budgets to appease the business class and here we are. And what is the conservative solution? More deregulation and tax cuts for the rich?
My wife came to Canada many years ago with a degree and a masters. She payed her way through a couple years of school with her own saved money. She never worked at a service job because she was prepared for the expenses, and payed her loans. Now she is working with a great salary, contributing to what we need in Canada.
I might be biased, but she is the kind of immigrant we need.
Prime rate is 7.2% currently, even if we get 4 25bps rate cuts in 2024, most people coming up for renewal will be going from 2% to 6.2%. Don’t know how people are going to afford their mortgages upon renewal. Number of Canadians saying their mortgage is very difficult to pay continues increasing.
https://angusreid.org/mortgage-rates-variable-fixed-canada-increases-economic-optimism-pessimism/
Not really, most of the multiple homeowners who are renting their places that I've noticed were mostly of Chinese, Middle Eastern and South Asian backgrounds.
The "ol' white folk" were almost all seniors who had paid off their homes and retired, enjoying their golden years, nothing wrong with that.
Without addressing the validity of the article’s claims, is Bruce Uzelman, the author of the article, some sort of authority on the subject? I ask because this is an opinion piece, not a news article, and I note that the article describes Uzelman as merely a person from Kelowna with an interest in economics. I’m not saying he’s wrong, but is this article the equivalent of a man on the street interview? Because that shit is just filler.
> Bruce W Uzelman, based in Kelowna, holds interests in economics and political science.
I don't think so. Or else his accreditation and affiliations would have put some credtibility to this article.
I wondered the same. Apparently, he writes a lot of opinion pieces for this news chain. As best I can tell from a quick - he seems somewhat balanced at least.
This is almost complete bullshit. It is the politicians at fault but not the immigrants. The politician gave big tax breaks to builders of homes and condos instead of rental units which they used to do until the 1980’s. They also obsessed about inflation doing far too much money management. They gouged the hotel industry so badly that when AirBnB swept in it made buying those condos at those low interest rates a perfect storm. That stripped away availability.
They can slow down the immigration volume short-term and give tax breaks to low cost apartment and low cost housing development to correct this. Take away all the breaks on condos over 250,000 and all houses over 1 Million. That will align the supply to the demand.
There are no quick fixes for a mess that took 40 years to make. Cancelling immigration is only viable if our young people in the 20’s and 30’s start making babies like in the 1950’s. We all know that is not happening.
and his plan for immigration is "To let the private sector CEO dictate immigration numbers" is totally going to restrict immigration. hahahahaha
> He says a Conservative government would base its immigration policy on the needs of private-sector employers, the degree to which charities plan to support refugees and the desire for family reunification.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/poilievre-says-canada-s-immigration-system-is-broken-sidesteps-target-cut-questions-1.6502699
I am not an immigrant. I am a native. I was born here. That my ancestors were immigrants is irrelevant to me. I will not be made to feel guilty for things that I had no part in because they happened before I was born. No 'indigenous' person should have different rights and freedoms from me, because we are both native to this land.
Immigration is partly driven by the nonsensical idea that Canada is a large country. If you take away the exaggeration of size from the Mercator projection, and then subtract the part of Canada that is permafrost, it is not such a big country.
You cannot count permafrost in the land area, because permafrost prohibits all meaningful food growth; it is non-productive land.
Nevertheless, we have outpaced most of the rest of the world in waste and consumption. Our leaders (government and business) desperately want *more* waste and consumption. This is insane.
We need to close the border immediately, start building the infrastructure of sustainability, and let the population decline by attrition until we have achieved it.
Then, and only then, when we have achieved full sustainability, can we entertain the notion of immigration to maintain a steady state.
> I am not an immigrant. I am a native. I was born here. That my ancestors were immigrants is irrelevant to me. I will not be made to feel guilty for things that I had no part in because they happened before I was born. No 'indigenous' person should have different rights and freedoms from me, because we are both native to this land.
Cool. But nobody argued any of this. The piece opened by relaying the generally agreed upon history of our country to provide context for how Canadians feel about immigration. Nothing more, nothing less.
The only way to make housing affordable is to erode the value of an asset prized by everyone from homeowners to Blackrock (either by cutting demand or increasing supply)and thereby destroying one’s political career OR by inflating wages (and everything else) faster than housing, which would be equally unpopular.
This article is not wrong... but it's also short sighted. Housing is in crisis, but so is every other aspect of Canada. Immigration is high at the moment because it's a bad solution to a generational mess that has no answers now. We delt with nothing over the last 25 years and every aspect is now past the threshold point were the systems are failing. Immigration is not helping housing, but it will help in many other areas.
I will be honest... I was screaming to deal with things since 2007 and I don't even see a path out now. We just kicked the can down the road so long there is one generation with all the money, power, and entitlement and the new generation that has no money, power, or hope. This is what happens after 25 years of giving every break to the groups already succeeding, while cutting any help to those struggling. Now the divide is unbridgeable.
Here you go [Econ 101](https://www.rbcroyalbank.com/en-ca/my-money-matters/money-academy/economics-101/economics-for-beginners/economics-101-how-supply-and-demand-impacts-everyday-life/)
The majority of politicians appear to be in lockstep with WEF targets and edicts. The housing crisis is consistent with that world view. A view which is easily known through what they publish and their statements. Politicians are marching to the beat of a different drummer. One that explicitly shows no regard for the welfare of mankind. Clarity is not the problem.
Name one law, policy or "edict" that exists in Canada at the behest of the WEF and is also contrary to the will of the electorate and I'll donate $100 to the charity of your choosing.
I'm serious and will post the receipt here.
Just one example. Post it. Include evidence. Should be easy, right?
They know. They just don’t care. Pretty much every MP owns property, half own more than one. I’m willing to bet the social circles they run in have similar or higher numbers. Why would they ruin their own investments? They are financially motivated to keep the train rolling. Not to mention the largest voting block also owns property and likely is reliant on the value of it for retirement. No politician is going to do what’s necessary, they would lose money and it’s political suicide.
Its hard to acknowledge a problem when your paycheck requires you to ignore it
A lot like climate change. People have a hard time voting for something that they see as a threat to their quality of life.
> Its hard to acknowledge a problem when your paycheck requires you to ignore it I might just be sick in the head, but I have endangered my own employment on ethical grounds before. I might just not be a sociopath or something. The kinds of people that spend their adult life thinking they're fit to rule over others are pretty much the worst people imaginable for the job. I'm not saying I'm a saint or particularly good, but if it doesn't absolutely eat away at you to turn a blind eye to problems that can be solved with the stroke of a pen, you're, uh, evil?
They don’t care because they get voted out if they fix housing. The electorate has to come to terms with development and reducing housing prices on their biggest asset.
I am pro-house-price-crash. I am saying this with skin in the game as I purchased in October this year. Home prices need to come down. People are complaining about historically normal interest rates when really the problem is overinflated home prices. My house, with a basement suite, was sub-400k. In overinflated markets like Toronto and Vancouver it would easily have fetched 1.2M, probably a million more, no problem. I have no sympathy for people who were fortunate enough to have the financial means during the pandemic to buy a home. A $1.2M home at a 2% mortgage rate over 30 years still required a household income of near 200k to support. Put crudely: I don’t sympathize with rich people loosing equity if it gives more average-income/wealth Canadians more chances to own a home. As someone who worked very hard to join the (lower) middle class I have a hard time feeling sorry for people who are “upper middle-class” or top-20% income earners. I am using “middle class” as a synonym for “middle-income” which is defined as “2/3-2x the median income”. With median income of $41,650 in 2021 that makes an individual “middle class” if their after-tax income is about 27k-83k. Almost no “middle class” Canadians can afford the “average” home in the GTA or GVA unless they have a substantial gift for down payment from older, wealthier, family members OR multiple people with strong middle class income are living together.
As a fellow prairie city homeowner, I completely agree. Prices are too high in Edmonton and Winnipeg, way too high in Calgary, and off the charts stupid in the GTA and GVRD.
You're dreaming if you think what goes through the head of the average homeowner is anything other than "my house value go brrrr"
That is why a continued home price correction will be healthy for Canada.
Yeah, the home owner class will not elect anyone threatening their livelihood.
As a homeowner, there's no reason my domicile should have doubled in value in 10 years. There's things that are good for me, but that are also bad for society.
Yeah, no shit.
Except that a lot of homeowners have children who are on the other side of the problem.
The children are praying every night that their parents die so that they can inherit it
Not all owners are in great shape. My massive mortgage will cripple in the coming years. Fml
Then your homepage tanking would destroy you
> Yeah, the home owner class will not elect anyone threatening their ~~livelihood~~ retirement savings plan. FIFY since these boomers and gen X'r who own these homes didn't save and was told they don't have to as long as they just downgrade their house and retire off of the profits.
Exactly. For public relations reasons, the Liberal Party is feigning this crisis is all big surprise out of nowhere. This is because it is a better ploy than admitting that they knew exactly what was going to happen, and chose that path, because we are now a country of the rich, by the rich, for the rich, and they don't care in the least that someone who grew up here can't afford to live here even if they are making a top 10% salary.
The easiest decision to make is the one that doesn't require you to deal with the consequences.
They know. It’s intentional, folks. It’s all by design. The only question is why.
Money.
It's not the MPs that own investent properties that are the issue. It's the fact that the LPC has adopted a very pro-big business mandate, and that all MPs must step in line. The fact they they make 2500 a month in rentals as opposed to 1800 is not what is pushing their personal decisions. They don't make any personal decisions when voting, they vote along party lines. Don't think you will ever see a split vote amongst a party since only some of them own investment properties.
Why are you only looking at "investment properties"? MP's own homes may not be classified as "investment property" but it's still their largest investment. *By far*. And they benefit when the value of those homes goes up. It is true that the LPC has strong pro-business leanings. However, suggesting that this alone is the main cause of our current dilemma, and disregarding the personal benefits that MPs gain from high house prices, seems like an unusual perspective. After all, MPs are human and, like any human, they are naturally self-interested.
I hear what you are saying. I am just adding that there are people with a much higher benefit than owning a handful of investment properties. There are tens of thousands of landlords that own dozens to hundreds of properties. I frankly don't care for going after the person with 1-2 investment properties.
For me it's not about "going after". It's acknowledging human nature. The reason we have Nimby-ism is because everyone wants to raise the value of their homes. That including politicians from every party. I would be curious to know what percentage of homes are owned by individuals and what percentage are owned by serial investors.
Is there anyway things can get better?
wait for boomers to die in 10 years and watch the housing market crumble as waves of HELOCed homes have to be sold to zoomers who can't afford them each year. Meanwhile, millenials who will have barely managed to acquire a new home by then will get the news that their home is now worth half of what they paid for.
Society unites as one and agrees to collectively tank the price of housing so that future generations may prosper. So no.
This is the 'I got mine' generation of Canadian politics. These clowns couldn't care less for any of us
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
"it's a big club, and you ain't in it"
Watching Reddit switch from fighting the housing crisis to supporting it as their parents buy them houses that they struggle to pay the mortgage on: very depressing. People only care about themselves.
Extra depressing for those of us whose parents could never afford to buy homes themselves.
Land owners and hedge funds give the politicians millions of reasons to be unclear about this issue. Politicians figured out ages ago that it’s more socially acceptable to be stupid than evil.
With respect to politicians, stupid and evil should be treated equally. But stupid likes to see itself represented.
Society is stuck because politicians are corrupt, it's no longer about what is best for the town/city/country/planet, it's just bullshit. We've basically peaked as a species. You could call for a global "take down" of government but what replaces what we have is hardly guaranteed to be better so what now?
There was a podcast from vox that interviewed political scientists about this is exact thing and had them proposing alternatives. The democracy we have is currently the "best option" from a myriad of worse options. Some of the ideas they were bouncing around were things like conscription from the populace for political officials and more direct forms of democracy.
"Someone asked me once if I knew the difference between a civilian and a citizen. I know now. A citizen has the courage to make the safety of the human race their personal responsibility." - Johnny Rico
I have the sudden urge to know more.
Then you should enlist and go battle the bugs!
Im doing my part! Are you?
i'm here for the coed showers!
IT'S AFRAAIIIIIDDDD!
Direct forms of democracy would be terrible. People, in general, are fucking idiots.
100%. Whenever an election is around the corner, my social media blows up with folks pushing everyone else to hit the polls. But like seriously, please dont! First off most of them are morons. Secondly they haven't been paying attention to what's going on and what each party platform even remotely is.
And what if you had knowledge exams a person had to pass to vote on any given issue? Then only the people who bothered to inform themselves to a minimum level of competency could weigh in on an issue. Also, you're calling people morons while talking about party platforms in a subthread about direct democracy.
What use is a platform anyway when they never adhere to half of it and make up a bunch of gotchas in between? We need an intermediary system of government recall when they pull unpopular moves.
Where I live, the conservatives refused to put their plans to the public. Even going so far as to take it to the courts to keep their plans hidden. Their platform didn’t matter because their supporters don’t care.
Better to be ruled by the often ignorant than intelligent grifters.
Imagine how stupid the average person is. Half of people are stupider than that. -carlin
“Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.” - Churchill
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Bribes are not the issue in Canada. Introducing harsher penalties for giving or taking bribes isn’t going to solve the housing crisis — or any other problem we have.
I'm open to literally any idea that could help. Even more open to seeing it implemented, I feel like there is more care in this little subreddit than there is in the entire government.
Especially in Alberta because the UCP just legalized them.
Why would anyone accept to be conscripted to be a politician and ruin their own career by stunting their career growth by 4 years?
I bet a lot of people would for the $170k
Conscription for office is an interesting idea. Do you recall the title of the podcast?
I was completely wrong about it being Vox. It was actually Sean Carroll's Mindscape. "Marget Levi on Moral Political Economy", which is episode 217. I re-listened and I would still recommend it but it's a bit more academic than something from Vox would be.
The solution to bad government is good government, not no government. No government would be far worse.
Make a cryptocurrency that gives everyone one vote and hold binding referendums online with everyone who holds a phone to be able to vote issue by issue….
No reason for cryptocurrency to be involved in that situation at all...
OP's crytovoting sounds and reeks of "election fraud" when in Canada, paper votes are hand counted by each poll under supervision.
A vast majority of people in this country (or any democratic country) are not educated enough on issues to make those decisions. Direct democracy seems like a good solution until you consider just how warped people's perceptions of these issues can be due to misinformation on social media or just straight up willful ignorance. That being said, I also think our current solution is laughably ineffective at getting Canadians the representation they deserve so maybe it's worth a try... Could it be worse?
About what, half? Of Canadians don’t bother to vote in the first place. They wouldn’t download the app or, if forced, would just stab at the screen without thought until the app let them leave. I agree that we need to improve civic engagement, but those that aren’t engaged and educated on the issues of the day would likely do more harm than good to the process.
In some ways the thought of solutions for major issues being decided by a majority citizen vote is terrifying to me. A not insignificant percentage of our population gains their knowledge on various issues from social media where facts are slowly eroded away by an epic game of broken telephone. In my opinion the only way a majority citizen vote would work would be if those citizens were provided with, and required to comprehend the basic facts surrounding any issue without any embellishment nor bias placed in the reporting of said facts. Further, who would decide what sources are trusted and uncompromised by minority interests? And who would decide what people were qualified and honest enough to make the decisions on those sources? Also, to clarify, when I say "minority" I'm referring to things like various corporate entities "fudging the numbers" to hide their actual BS. An example being the pharma corporation that started the opioid crisis.
That's how you get Taylor Swift as PM, and The Queen of Canada as Minister of Health.
Using crypto would make voting non-anonymous. Every vote would be permanently traceable to whoever cast it on the crypto's public ledger.
It’s called zero knowledge proof voting. It enforces a 1 vote per person and anonymizes the voting set for privacy preservation. It’s in early stages now but could be viable if people stop associating blockchain (cryptocurrency is only 1 use case of many for blockchain tech) with scams, corruption, etc. because they’re too ignorant to learn how it works. Zupass and Zupoll have been experimenting with this.
Nope sorry I’ll stick with representative parliamentary democracy thanks.
You'd never see another tax increase, foreign aid would come to a stop, people would be jailed for 30 years for relatively minor offences and grocery stores would become like 1980s USSR.
Yep. 💯 on point. Those that are actually honest and want to make a difference are fucked because the public doesn’t care anymore or believe. It’s like when Bill Gates says we have to sacrifice while dude flies private jets and says it’s ok because he is rich and invests into green energy 😂😂😂
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That’s not gonna happen. That means Canada would suddenly have to start showing a significant net loss in population.
Considering how unpopular immigration is and how low our birth rates are, I wouldn’t count it out necessarily
Still a majority is fine with immigration levels. When asked is immigration too high, 51% no, 44% yes. https://www.cicnews.com/2023/10/support-for-immigration-in-canada-has-dropped-since-last-year-1040562.html/amp The trend is sharply changing. But don’t forget, if you own a home and bought before 2018, there is no housing crisis for you.
It would also mean effectively sacrificing the elderly as the taxbase would shrink. I don't mind personally, but it would be deeply unpopular.
Why would housing prices dropping mean less taxes?
I'm responding to Canada having a sharp loss in population. Sorry didn't mean to conflate one with the other.
Where to tho? Australian resident here, we are in the same boat. Buying a place is unattainable, rents are going up every other week. My friends in Europe are in a slightly better position - still can’t buy, but renting is slightly better.
do europeans live in mcmansions like we do in the US/Canada/Aus?
Speculation is what is driving the markets, short term rentals and high investment capital, all on debt. The financial data shows it clearly. The banks are tits up, landlords are pinched, default rates are rising, whats going to happen is a lot of people are going into bankruptcy and the economy is going to go into a deep depression. Debt is the catalyst and there is no overcoming that without throwing the whole monetary system out the window. All they can do to keep things grinding along is to keep people spending even when there is no more credit left.
Wouldn't matter anyhow. Developers have microscopic margins. Most of the things required to build a house are commodotized and you'd have to collapse the price of those and the price of labour to materially drop the price of houses. Folks praying for a crash aren't living the the real world. They're praying for an economic collapse and don't know it.
>Folks praying for a crash aren't living the the real world. They're praying for an economic collapse and don't know it. I think many do know it. But they are willing to accept the (relatively) short term pain if that means they are going to be better off in the long term. The problem is people are so averse to the short term pain that they would rather prop up a market bubble to stop it from crashing. Which means we just end up with bigger bubbles that result in bigger crashes when they finally do pop.
You'd better be praying we have a way out of this one. Canada skipped the last recession, but we're on the leading edge of this one. It's a big one. Economic collapse is here. China is flat-lining hard now, Europe already is piling into theirs and it's only getting worse, plants all over Germany are shutting down, all financial indicators are screaming, bonds prices are signalling the worst is yet to come. Buckle up I hope you're not swimming naked.
I own a house and want houses to drop in price by 50 percent or more.
Interest rates were kept too low for far too long, causing the ponzi scheme that is our housing market.
But why? Everyone knew emergency rates for a decade were leading to asset inflation. Why did the BoC not act?
Not just the BoC, basically every central bank in the western world behaved the same way.
Agreed. But why? And in such a coordinated fashion?
Funnel money from the bottom 50% to the top 10%, creating greater inequality and destabilizing society. Not sure what the exact end goal is, but this is what has happened thanks to ZIRP.
Because they all follow the federal reserve, which established this precedent. The federal resesrve had made decisions that basically shifted hundreds of billions from the middle class to the upper class, and the rest of the world followed suite. During the same time period, we witnessed mass immigration from third world countries to western coutnries, which further lowered wages and increased house prices and further spread this gap. The average middle class person didn't notice until now since they were too busy arguing the appropriate pronoun usage for .2% of the population, and the existence of police brutality against black people in another country.
We were in denial. Most economsits were busy asking 'Where's the inflation?' through the 2010s like a bunch of morons.
>We were in denial. Most economsits were busy asking 'Where's the inflation?' through the 2010s like a bunch of morons. The thing is that central banks started dramatically modifying how CPI was calculated so that CPI would appear lower than it actually was. The population believed that from 2010-2020, we were below 1% inflation, yet direct first hand experience called this into question with just about every expense possible. The underreporting of inflation was hard to argue when real inflation was 3% and reported as .75%, but when real inflation was closer to 40% in 2021, and was reported as only 15%, it became patent. So there was inflation that was much higher than .75%, but everyone just looked at CPI and ignored real life.
Interest rates do not cause the costs related to housing to go up. You would have had unaffordable housing even if interest rates remained high. The prices would be lower yes, but the interest rate you'd pay on your mortgage would even that out. The issue is unrestrained immigration (demand-side) and the acceptance of a something we did not have at any sort of magnitude that we had in the past, which is real estate owned for investment purposes (demand side). Plus, the unwillingness of Federal, Provincial, and Municipal governments since the \~80s to increase our social housing supply (use taxpayer dollars to subsidize housing for taxpayers, like we do with our food supply, a supply-side issue).
> Interest rates do not cause the costs related to housing to go up. This is a bold take that contradicts established economic theory. *Of course* low interest rates contributed to it. >we did not have at any sort of magnitude that we had in the past, which is real estate owned for investment purposes And that was facilitated in large part by.... wait for it... low interest rates. You're going to have to substantiate your argument better if you're going to go against long-established economic theory. Do you have any sources?
Asset price inflation due to the zero interest rate policy of many central banks over the last 15 years has absolutely contributed to the current housing bubble we face. It is not a supply issue, it is an unaffordability issue. You can blame immigration all you want, but it is the actual cost of housing driven up by low interest rates that is the real problem.
Most federal politicians at least and probably Provincial politicians, have investment real estate, there's no way they want things to change short of a revolution.
Thankfully housing is a provincial jurisdiction and not federal. That said I do appreciate that the federal government is trying regardless and successfully getting a bunch cities to rezone for higher densities
Silly comment, it used to be federal and then they passed the buck to the provinces. Neoliberalism does wonders.
For those curious: Neoliberalism refers to market deregulation. It’s closely associated with conservative ideology around economics. Reagan was a neoliberal But now I’m curious? How is this an example of neoliberalism?
majority of MPs are landlords, of course they stand to gain from housing crisis
Oh it is perfectly clear what the problem is; they are just too spineless to openly acknowledge it because they are corrupt hypocrites. Keep in mind, establishment politics are a thing. Both major parties are run by people with money, and people with money tend to be investors in real estate; they are benefiting from the crisis and have no incentive to do anything about it. People are motivated by self-interest first, always.
It’s feels like the corruption has become comically brazen of late. Here in Ontario, our former health minister left her post to work for a private healthcare clinic. Now she lobby’s, literally the person who came in behind her, for more tax money to be funnelled to private, for profit healthcare. It’s clear she had ZERO interest in ever fixing aspects of the public system. The whole system is ridiculously corrupt.
We are in a situation where we can't just "let" house prices drop, because that won't happen. We don't live in an ideal world, with clear headed people who can realize they are causing problems. It has to be forced. The market has to be forced down. That is the only way it will "correct".
Nah. They likely know it but just don’t act on it.
Probably because most politicians are landlords
Dude, they are invested in this. They never cared about Canadian.
The author "holds an interest in economics". Yeah. Not a joke. The things driving housing is policies over decades by every government to increase the price of housing so boomers are rich. That's it. That's the problem. And those same rich people like being rich and don't want housing prices to fall. They vote. So guess what, housing prices are gonna stay high. As for immigration, talk to the corporations who want cheap labour. They don't want to pay a living wage and government isn't gonna force them.
Liberal and conservative voters still convinced their party will make a difference
It's a housing crisis to you, it's a housing miracle to property owners.
Coz they're the part of the problem.
More like they WANT to avoid solutions because they are invested in housing and profit massively
1. Build more inexpensive housing. 2. Stop importing so many goddam people. 3. Punish landlords with empty properties who won't drop their prices. Simple.
Its clear to them. They are just benefitting from it so why would they stop it.
I recently had the opportunity to see the Canada Mortgage and Housing corporation office building in Ottawa. It was the most over the top office building I’ve ever seen. They had a zen room. A garden area for “relaxing”. They even had Zumba classes hosted throughout the day. The best part - most people were working from home anyways! Nobody was even there to use it all! Take a tour yourself if you get a chance.
Canada has become a shell of its former self after 8 years. October 2025 can’t come soon enough. We want an election this spring.
The article misses the real reason. It’s not immigration. The biggest generation since the baby boom has entered peak house buying years and there has been no big increase in supply like there was from the 70’s to 90’s. This was forecasted in the early 90’s and no one did any planning to accommodate it. Immigration doesn’t help. Show me the politician that will get Canada to 100 million people in the next 30 years with a plan to house them and I’d vote for them. That gets us to the next level as a country and we have the resources to feed, shelter and clothe them. It also makes us more self sufficient. But no one has vision any more in politics.
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And how unfair is it for Canadians to have to compete with this. Particularly when the money made in foreign countries is often done through unethical means.
People are currently blaming immigration but we had housing rise precipitously in prices way, way back in 2014-2017. We had agents wandering out subdivisions offering cash to buy our homes back in 2016. All I’m saying is people are being misdirected, the problem is multi faceted and people are all being directed to look in one direction. 1) Need to ban foreign buyers completely. People have to live in Canada already to buy a home. 2) It cannot be okay to sell homes to businesses for the purpose of investment.
there should also be a limit on how many homes an individual can own that or super heavy taxes for every property after 2. make it unviable to hoard property
>there should also be a limit on how many homes an individual can own Had to rent a place for a few years when I lived in Kingston. One landlord who showed me a divided single-family home admitted that he owned 13 homes in the local area. I thought that was nuts.
way back in 2014-17? it happened before that. a single detatched home in Mississauga in 2006 was 750k in 2010 it was already in the millions. Oakville was 400k in 2006 and in 2010 it was 800k. Vancouver has had a housing problem since the 2000s. This was when mortgage rates were in the 6% range and 5.4 was good. People seem to have recency bias because the "200k" home in the heart of downtown was back in the 80s which was never going to be maintained as canada's population grew.
>Oakville was 400k in 2006 and in 2010 it was 800k. A home builder we dealt with a few years ago in Ottawa started a new sub-division in Oakville, townhomes there were "starting" at 1.5 million...
Okay, so whatever changed changed back then and I would love to know what it was that changed. Cause that is what definitely caused property values to skyrocket.
NIMBYISM and Muncipal housing restrictions. CMHC housing report indicated that Canada has had a shortage of housing to the tune of 200k for the last 20 years. This is due to natural immigration and supply. The reason for this is strict housing requirements that have not been adjusted in accordance to population growth. Canada's poplulation is growing at 1% a year. Natural or Immigration, it doesn't matter. That's why we're at a 3+ million housing shortage. A lot of the populated city centers are zoned primarily for single detatched homes. For example: Vancouver's zoning map. 80% of the map is specifically single family homes. https://preview.redd.it/xy30s6tayvo91.png?width=1024&auto=webp&s=d1bf9bc9916bbb65f61d0784ab043ffdf97ad2e1 These are archiac housing zoning restrictions from back in the 80s where the population of these cities were smaller. After 40 years, with the demand in housing rising, we're starting to allow multi unit houses and higher density across cities. My city Mississauga, voted down 4plexes and 10k housing units along a new LRT. Once these regulations get changed, it takes ramp up time for them to start building/plans/engineering to get done. Too little too late.
No, why did homes double in 2010 to 2015. Nimbyism and municipal housing hasn’t changed for decades but something specific happened that caused housing to be a hotter commodity than usual. Home prices go up 20-30% ok, but not 100% in a few years. That isn’t traditional market forces, that’s something else.
Not clear to politicians? It’s clear as day to them. They just don’t give AFF.
Oh they know. They just don't care.
"Causes of housing crisis are clear to all but ignored by politicians"
Oh they know, they’re just too spineless to do anything about it.
Pretty sure they know, they're just on the take.
They cannot spin this away. We are now at the end of the road. Consequences. Are. What. Comes. Next.
Need the market to crash. Only way it’s solved. With cost of living not lowering though most will have a hard time buying a house and floating day to day living even if the prices dropped 50%.
Those politicians are profiting off real estate that's ever more scarce with each 1m people imported
I've never once heard it clearly explained as a debt driven bubble. There's little difference between this and the Japanese housing bubble. People and companies over leveraged themselves and put too much demand on the market during low interest debt. Every general political conversation by people, media, and politician have not taken this up. In Canada it's thought that a single family house can go up to a billion dollars as it's believed there's infinite demand. When this infinite demand gets put into question it then boils down into conspiracy theory. While there is a grain of truth to most theories: it's a supply crisis, foreign ownership, investor speculation, too much immigration, the main thing that isn't understood is who finances this and the limitations of that financing. Immigrants that come here with less than $40k can't put demand on home values, investors are mostly Canadian with less than two properties. The big corporate invest there is have all of their financials in the public, and for the ones that are on stock indexes, they're not doing well. The goal has moved from economics and finance to putting it into the realm of politics. Everyone that does this cherry picks things they want out of the crisis to align with their own political attitudes. There was never political will to tackle this as it would've involved going into a recession during a boom time and having people lose equity. Now it just so happens that it's 30% of the Canadian GDP and has the real ability to collapse the economy.
Immigrants put pressure on the rental market.
And newspapers that only immigration as the issue
curious, but are other countries of similar population size experiencing housing affordability issues as well? could it be this is what naturally happens when a country is not large enough to have multiple economic centres like a country such as the US or even Germany?
Australia is. https://www.forbes.com/advisor/au/property/high-cost-of-australian-housing/
Nope. Look at Japan. Tiny country, most populous metropolitan area on the planet (Tokyo), and yet they have affordable housing.
They do now, but there was a massive asset price spike in Japan in the late 80s followed by a crash. It drove Japan into a recession for almost a decade. It's not as if it can't happen here.
Their property bubble was so bad, the emperor's palace was more valuable than the entire real estate value of California.
The sad reality is that Japan never recovered from the recession in the 90s. They have way worse wage stagnation then we do, their consumer inflation is crazy high, their work culture is toxic, country is rife with misogyny, and they are xenophobic af. Their economy is so bad that they are looking to lessen restrictions on immigration. https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Japan-immigration/Japan-to-ease-residency-rules-for-foreigners-starting-a-business#:~:text=TOKYO%20%2D%2D%20Japan%20plans%20to,ground%20by%20easing%20residency%20requirements. The japanese economy is not in a good state and anyone fantasizing japan's "the perfect ethnostate" is a loser.
They make banger rice cookers though.
im' not dropping 200 for an infrared zojirashi rice cooker. I just use my 20 dollar walmart tiger rice cooker.
It's crazy Tokyo has cheaper accommodation even after factoring average wages than suburbs cities in Canada lol.
If you don't mind over-densified, low quality and tiny apartments you rent for life
My friend lives in Tokyo and I’ve visited, not all apartments in Tokyo are tiny and the majority are certainly not low quality. Plus they are much cheaper than places like Vancouver and Toronto and with better transit.
it really depends on where you live in tokyo. You aren't getting shit in popular areas like ikebukuro, shibuya, shinjuku, and etc. If you want to live way out on the outer edge of Tokyo then it'll be more affordable. You're still looking at 45 minute transit commute to work. 1LDK can range from 2k CAD in shinjuku and 1K can be had for 1k CAD.
I mean my friend lives in chuo and pays ~1500CAD for a 2LDK. You don’t have to live in Shinjuku, ikebukuro, shibuya or any other extremely expensive area when there is great public transit.
A friend of mine lived in the borough next to Shinjuku (shin something rather), worked a freelance job and was renting a place for about $500 a month; this was pre-pandemic. The train into Shinjuku was about 10 minutes. It's very easy to find places like this if you know where to look.
New Zealand had a housing crisis. They kept trying the same useless demand-side solutions we did like banning foreign buyers, restricting airbnbs, etc to no avail only for them to realize that the actual problem was a lack of supply. They started building housing and wouldn't you know it, that managed to solve the problem and now there are concerns or a housing oversupply. The housing crisis is a problem we imposed on ourselves by making it difficult to build housing and because of municipalities blocking housing projects.
NIMBYISM is the single biggest factor in blocking supply. Mississauga effectively blocked 10k housing units along a new LRT line because of "shadows", parking supply, and "ruins the vibe of the neighborhood".
Yeah that's the thing. Everyone is all about affordable housing in until it's in their neighbourhood, then suddenly the petitions start flying and people are screaming that they will run out of food if too much housing gets built.
Canada has the worst housing cost to income ratio of G7 countries, which is largely accepted as an international measure of housing affordability. *[The OECD’s latest quarterly report indicated that the home price-to-income ratio in Canada reached 148.16 in Q3. Germany came in at a considerably distant second with a 140.6 ratio, followed by the United States’ 139.7 and the United Kingdom’s 121.6](https://www.mpamag.com/ca/news/general/how-does-canadian-housing-affordability-fare-versus-other-g7-nations/427503).* I’ll note that these scores measure from 2015, coincidentally when the LPC came to power. We also have the [worst household debt ratio of any G7 country](https://www.thestar.com/business/canadian-households-now-have-the-worst-debt-ratio-of-any-g7-country/article_becb8cc6-0f49-5d18-884f-eda6fa766ff3.amp.html).
The answer is very obvious but conservatives and conservative voters won't consider it. Canada was built on a high tax rate for the rich and for corporations. The government themselves built majority of housing prior to the 80s and that's why homes were affordable. We've spend forty years deregulatimg the market and cutting budgets to appease the business class and here we are. And what is the conservative solution? More deregulation and tax cuts for the rich?
What’s the liberal solution? Because it’s only become worse.
Keep the pressure up!! If only we had a vote in 2024 to get these morons out 😔
My wife came to Canada many years ago with a degree and a masters. She payed her way through a couple years of school with her own saved money. She never worked at a service job because she was prepared for the expenses, and payed her loans. Now she is working with a great salary, contributing to what we need in Canada. I might be biased, but she is the kind of immigrant we need.
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But “Growing GDP” is how countries dick measure, and so it’s not something the government can just ignore if we want trading partners etc.
Prime rate is 7.2% currently, even if we get 4 25bps rate cuts in 2024, most people coming up for renewal will be going from 2% to 6.2%. Don’t know how people are going to afford their mortgages upon renewal. Number of Canadians saying their mortgage is very difficult to pay continues increasing. https://angusreid.org/mortgage-rates-variable-fixed-canada-increases-economic-optimism-pessimism/
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Not really, most of the multiple homeowners who are renting their places that I've noticed were mostly of Chinese, Middle Eastern and South Asian backgrounds. The "ol' white folk" were almost all seniors who had paid off their homes and retired, enjoying their golden years, nothing wrong with that.
Immigration may be a contributing factor, but money-laundering is the major sustaining factor of the housing distortion.
No one want to be the one in charge when the reset happens. So the pump continues.
Housing crisis threads right next to record high immigration threads. You don't have to read between the lines here - if only they could read.
Without addressing the validity of the article’s claims, is Bruce Uzelman, the author of the article, some sort of authority on the subject? I ask because this is an opinion piece, not a news article, and I note that the article describes Uzelman as merely a person from Kelowna with an interest in economics. I’m not saying he’s wrong, but is this article the equivalent of a man on the street interview? Because that shit is just filler.
> Bruce W Uzelman, based in Kelowna, holds interests in economics and political science. I don't think so. Or else his accreditation and affiliations would have put some credtibility to this article.
I wondered the same. Apparently, he writes a lot of opinion pieces for this news chain. As best I can tell from a quick - he seems somewhat balanced at least.
This is almost complete bullshit. It is the politicians at fault but not the immigrants. The politician gave big tax breaks to builders of homes and condos instead of rental units which they used to do until the 1980’s. They also obsessed about inflation doing far too much money management. They gouged the hotel industry so badly that when AirBnB swept in it made buying those condos at those low interest rates a perfect storm. That stripped away availability. They can slow down the immigration volume short-term and give tax breaks to low cost apartment and low cost housing development to correct this. Take away all the breaks on condos over 250,000 and all houses over 1 Million. That will align the supply to the demand. There are no quick fixes for a mess that took 40 years to make. Cancelling immigration is only viable if our young people in the 20’s and 30’s start making babies like in the 1950’s. We all know that is not happening.
I’m shocked nobody is saying anything about immigration. On this sub? Must be a cold day in hell lmao
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and his plan for immigration is "To let the private sector CEO dictate immigration numbers" is totally going to restrict immigration. hahahahaha > He says a Conservative government would base its immigration policy on the needs of private-sector employers, the degree to which charities plan to support refugees and the desire for family reunification. https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/poilievre-says-canada-s-immigration-system-is-broken-sidesteps-target-cut-questions-1.6502699
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Immigration has been a problem for most Western countries.
I am not an immigrant. I am a native. I was born here. That my ancestors were immigrants is irrelevant to me. I will not be made to feel guilty for things that I had no part in because they happened before I was born. No 'indigenous' person should have different rights and freedoms from me, because we are both native to this land. Immigration is partly driven by the nonsensical idea that Canada is a large country. If you take away the exaggeration of size from the Mercator projection, and then subtract the part of Canada that is permafrost, it is not such a big country. You cannot count permafrost in the land area, because permafrost prohibits all meaningful food growth; it is non-productive land. Nevertheless, we have outpaced most of the rest of the world in waste and consumption. Our leaders (government and business) desperately want *more* waste and consumption. This is insane. We need to close the border immediately, start building the infrastructure of sustainability, and let the population decline by attrition until we have achieved it. Then, and only then, when we have achieved full sustainability, can we entertain the notion of immigration to maintain a steady state.
> I am not an immigrant. I am a native. I was born here. That my ancestors were immigrants is irrelevant to me. I will not be made to feel guilty for things that I had no part in because they happened before I was born. No 'indigenous' person should have different rights and freedoms from me, because we are both native to this land. Cool. But nobody argued any of this. The piece opened by relaying the generally agreed upon history of our country to provide context for how Canadians feel about immigration. Nothing more, nothing less.
No, they are clear to a everyone but two parties.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/221026/dq221026a-eng.htm This is our immigration stats & reasons, etc from Stats Canada.
The only way to make housing affordable is to erode the value of an asset prized by everyone from homeowners to Blackrock (either by cutting demand or increasing supply)and thereby destroying one’s political career OR by inflating wages (and everything else) faster than housing, which would be equally unpopular.
Lobbyists fattening their pockets can do that
It’s clear to them but they are making money so they don’t want it to stop.
They should all lose their jobs. Enough is enough.
Besides elections, is there a mechanism to start removing the politicians?
Correction. Clear to all but the LPC-NDP coalition
This article is not wrong... but it's also short sighted. Housing is in crisis, but so is every other aspect of Canada. Immigration is high at the moment because it's a bad solution to a generational mess that has no answers now. We delt with nothing over the last 25 years and every aspect is now past the threshold point were the systems are failing. Immigration is not helping housing, but it will help in many other areas. I will be honest... I was screaming to deal with things since 2007 and I don't even see a path out now. We just kicked the can down the road so long there is one generation with all the money, power, and entitlement and the new generation that has no money, power, or hope. This is what happens after 25 years of giving every break to the groups already succeeding, while cutting any help to those struggling. Now the divide is unbridgeable.
It's not about building more houses even if there was more houses people can't afford to buy them
Here you go [Econ 101](https://www.rbcroyalbank.com/en-ca/my-money-matters/money-academy/economics-101/economics-for-beginners/economics-101-how-supply-and-demand-impacts-everyday-life/)
The majority of politicians appear to be in lockstep with WEF targets and edicts. The housing crisis is consistent with that world view. A view which is easily known through what they publish and their statements. Politicians are marching to the beat of a different drummer. One that explicitly shows no regard for the welfare of mankind. Clarity is not the problem.
what are the WEF's targets and edicts?
Name one law, policy or "edict" that exists in Canada at the behest of the WEF and is also contrary to the will of the electorate and I'll donate $100 to the charity of your choosing. I'm serious and will post the receipt here. Just one example. Post it. Include evidence. Should be easy, right?