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Housing will never be affordable as long as it's treated like an investment.
The government could solve the housing crisis, and then they'd have to deal with the crisis of elderly citizens who were counting on selling their homes for 2 million dollars to fund their lifestyle in retirement.
They're going to pay a lot of lip service towards building housing these next 20 years without actually doing anything, because doing something would negatively impact property values.
It literally was affordable just fine when it was treated as an investment before, back in the '90s. It's always been treated as an investment. What happened is we stopped building enough of it.
If you stop making enough food, people starve.
If you stop making enough housing, people go homeless.
Population growth of adults has gone up, while housing production of bedrooms has gone down.
I don't get why this is complicated.
I thought the pandemic gave everybody a very harsh lesson about what happens to prices when we stop making stuff (two words: chip shortage) but I guess lessons are hard.
The only way it makes sense as a financial investment is if population continues to grow and homes values continue to rise above inflation - it's inherently unsustainable.
Seriously, a simple though would show how bad of an idea financializing a basic human need is.
Homes are infrastructure.
No, this is revisionist history. The 90s were part of a nearly 15 year period when house prices were flat in Canada. For quite a few years your return would have been negative. People in the 90s were not thinking of their house as their retirement account.
We did stop making enough housing, but it’s precisely that artificial scarcity that is making people treat it as an “investment”. If we make enough, it will not be treated primarily as an investment anymore, which is how it should be.
The 90s followed the extremely high interest rates, which were why housing was flat. People couldn't easily buy in, so demand was reduced.
But that just further corroborates the point: when housing was at its most affordable it was not considered a good investment.
It’s also important to note that housing remained flat even when interest rates went down, partially because of a healthy stock of non-market and market housing.
It literally was affordable just fine when it was treated as an investment before, back in the '90s.
Yes, that's how investments work. They are less money at the beginning and then grow over time. If you want apple stock to be affordable like it was in the 90s you'd need to harm the investments of everyone who has already bought it. If you want housing to be affordable you need to hurt the property values of everyone who already has a house.
Not necessarily. They also can give income, so a taxi company can invest in a taxi even though cars depreciate, because they get returns on it that way.
I don't know why we don't have enough houses, but it's not because you can't make money as a landlord.
We have been huffing capitalist poppers while banging economic steroids for decades in order to sustain the conceit that Socialism Bad Rich People Know Best
Stop huffing the poppers and stop voting for the steroids. Vote NDP.
If you truly think the NDP is going to change things that drastically or that fast you're equally deluded.
I'm saying this as someone squarely on the left of the spectrum that hasn't even sniffed voting PC since Harper left office having voted NDP or Green the majority of the times Federally and Provincially and vehemently against Ford and PP.
All that aside though, politics are politics. Rest assured the NDP will still bend a knee if they made it in. Would love to be proven wrong, but I'm pragmatic.
Let's get them in just once and see. In the meantime, they are a black box as far as how they would govern, and yet, everyone keeps choosing the turd sandwich or the giant douche.
Aw come on man. Quit that bullshit.
Who else are you going to vote for then??? Liberals or conservatives??? Are you going to give away you vote to some other minor little party or individual while those two get the majority?
Nah man. Fuck it. NDP is the only viable option at this point that can gather enough views to beat the libs or the cons. If only people would rally behind them, they'd win.
Provincially it's Green party or bust. Federally it was Green until they imploded until they get their shit together it's a toss between NDP and Liberal depends on who best represents me.
Cons may align fiscally or geopolitically I'm some ways but they've regressed far too hard socially to even begin to entertain.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It depends on who you ask, but for many housing experts, affordability advocates and municipal officials, the answer lies in part with a policy shift consecutive federal governments joined decades ago.
Canada had long provided subsidized housing for people who couldn't afford to pay market value: for workers and returning veterans after the Second World War, for example, and in the 1970s and early 80s as pressure mounted for Ottawa to intervene during a series of recessions.
We now have a 30 year deficit in non-market housing, said Andy Yan, director of the city program at Simon Fraser University.
Over a number of years in the late 90s and early 2000s, the Conservative government in Ontario, under Mike Harris, passed the file to municipalities to manage.
"Devolving responsibility in itself is not a problem," said Murtaza Haider, professor of data science and real estate management at Toronto Metropolitan University.
In the absence of government leadership, it's clear who has taken charge, says Leilani Farha, global director with the human rights organization, The Shift.
The original article contains 940 words, the summary contains 167 words. Saved 82%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!