I’m liking the answers here.
Remember, the government directly and indirectly created this mess. To fix it, will basically be political suicide because the fix will destroy a lot of people. The party who is in power during an attempted fix will be in the line of fire from the electorate for generations.
To build our way out of this will take years, if not, decades.
Yeah, way things are going we can’t build homes fast enough for the amount of people we are letting in. Seems like you put it well. Most likely political suicide. 50% of people would be if it from a collapse where the other 50% would get railed
I wish we could elect a proper Leader that isn’t the choices we have now. Someone who knows how to lead a people and bring our country together instead of dividing us for cheap political grifting. Stand up to China, make some European privacy law reform (they are always ahead of north america in progressiveness) and finally, if they want to let people come to Canada make sure they can work toward an actual proper life with a home on the horizon.
I don’t know the real reasons for the housing crisis, not enough homes = housing crisis, is what I know. It’s not an immigrant problem it’s a Canadian immigration law problem too. I don’t like people who take out their grievances with people who came to Canada to have a better life, that is the most Canadian thing to attribute to any of us, I was born here and they have as much a right as I do like my ancestors before me. It’s just, for whatever reason, the Government has increased the amount of immigrants per year and that’s shocking to me because we’re simply not able to offer anything other than high rent and high costs of living with no end in sight.
You nailed it. We need detailed plans that are actually put into place in real life. Talk is cheap and sadly that is what we have got from a lot of politicians and other "leaders" as the housing crisis has continued to get worse and worse throughout the nation.
It is an incredibly complex issue.
David Eby from the BCNDP is doing a great job in British Columbia but he has in some places unfavorable city councils/mayors to work with.
To really "solve" the housing crisis we have to get city councils/mayors, provincial parties/premiers, and federal government parties/PMO-Cabinet working together.
We've seen some good things come out of pressuring the Federal Liberal Party of Canada: Reduction of Temporary Residents, GST Removal, Loan Programs for developers and Incentives for municipalities to build the right type of housing, etc.
1. We need to address zoning in a big way. In particular we need to get density approved when and how we need it without delay. That means medium and high density builds.
2. There is a place for micro units. Economically vulnerable seniors, students, low income workers, etc. It provides affordable and accessible housing that people can build up from and fall back on. There are people and families being forced into the social system that could support themselves in a humble way if the market was reasonable.
3. Short term rentals need to be addressed. We need that supply on the long term rental/ownership market.
4. Vacant housing needs to be addressed. Housing is to be lived in. Simple as that.
5. Co-op and other not for profit models can help not just with affordability and accessibility but in regards to helping create a larger support system. This can help with the loneliness epidemic and other realities. It's a win win.
6. City planning and regulations need to be modernized to prize affordability and accessibility as #1 priorities.
There are some actually really great solutions out there:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX_-UcC14xw
It takes addressing NIMBYism, bad actors that are profiting from problems, and those in government who have absolutely no business being there.
There is lots of work to be done but we can't allow something as fundamental and foundational as housing to continue to get worse and worse.
I agree with you but the amount of foreign born citizens and PR holders makes that moot. You’d have to do a serious crackdown on immigration and deport a lot of illegals and bullshit students, but too many Canadians don’t have the stomach for real solutions.
To me the problem boils down to:
- People want to live and work in our cities and towns.
- Other people want to build housing for them.
- In places like Vancouver and Toronto, the problem is that we don't let them. We regulate new multifamily housing like it's a nuclear power plant, and we tax it like it's a gold mine.
- When Covid hit, and we suddenly had a lot of people working from home, needing more space, and willing to move in search of cheaper housing, it's like housing scarcity [spilled over](https://morehousing.ca/spillover) from Vancouver and Toronto, spreading misery everywhere.
> David Eby from the BCNDP is doing a great job in British Columbia but he has in some places unfavorable city councils/mayors to work with.
Agree on Eby. [Summary of BC's policies](https://morehousing.ca/bc-summary). What I really like about Eby is that he's impatient (whereas a lot of politicians tend to be defeatist on housing). There's a great quote from [an interview](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/vancouver/article-bc-housing-minister-eager-to-spur-supply/) a while back, responding to an academic arguing for more study:
> To that Mr. Eby responded: “Well, I’ll be sure to mention that to all the people sleeping in their cars, and lining up to find rental units; that we are going to study the problem more.”
Municipal governments are created by provincial legislation. One of the very first things Eby did after being sworn in as premier was bring in [legislation allowing the province to set housing targets for municipalities](https://morehousing.ca/targets), and override their decisions if they fail to meet those targets.
Doug Ford could be doing exactly the same thing in Ontario ([task force recommendations](https://morehousing.ca/ontario-task-force) from February 2022), but he seems to be [personally opposed](https://morehousing.ca/doug-ford-nimby) to allowing even modest density. [Sean Fraser's stepped into the vacuum](https://morehousing.ca/accelerator-update-week-23), using federal Housing Accelerator funding and infrastructure funding as a combined carrot and stick to convince municipalities to allow four-plexes and transit-oriented development (similar to what BC is doing).
Russil man!
No mention at all of mass immigration?
Were going to be hundreds of thousands of houses short this year dude, and you don't mention it at all.
None of what you mentioned is going to bring us from 200k houses per year, one of the highest rates in the world, to the needed 500k.
The only way to fix the housing crisis is to slash migration into Canada by like 90%.
Every change you suggest could happen, and the housing crisis will get worse because we will still be left with less houses per capita.
And your fairly lengthy post doesn't mention this fact at all, even though I know you know it bro.
Already mentioned by the previous poster:
> To really "solve" the housing crisis we have to get city councils/mayors, provincial parties/premiers, and federal government parties/PMO-Cabinet working together.
>
> We've seen some good things come out of pressuring the Federal Liberal Party of Canada: **Reduction of Temporary Residents**, GST Removal, Loan Programs for developers and Incentives for municipalities to build the right type of housing, etc.
[Previous thread](https://old.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/1d753g8/which_way_canada_make_housing_cheaper_or_protect/l6y4xfk/).
All of these things need to be done to help supply. But as importantly, we *must* address outsized demand from investors and immigration.
Our taxation and regulatory regime incentivizes people accumulating housing portfolios, using equity to daisy chain more houses. Equifax reported a never-before-seen spike in people with mortgages on 4+ properties stating in late 2020.
What that does in turn, is drive up the number of renters, as housing investors directly displace first-time home buyers.
More people stuck renting, which increases rental demand and prices. When you add in high immigration to that already stressed rental demand, you get the huge rental increases we saw starting in 2022. An affordable rental market has the healthy relief valve of renters transitioning to buyers.
To make things worse, when first-time home buyers buy, they live in the property. But when investors buy, they may leave the property vacant or use it as an Airbnb. Which means fewer units of long-term housing available when you have more investor ownership.
There are many easy tax and regulatory fixes to curtail the financialization of housing that have been used successfully in other countries. But you need to have governments who genuinely prioritize affordable housing and willing to do what needs to be done .
David Eby in BC has done an amazing job. He has passed laws stopping STR. He has made it illegal for dodos to stop owners from renting. He has done so many things that are impactful. Within a year from now bc will be better off in housing than most other provinces.
I would say one other thing. We fund CMHC so they can go back to their original mandate of building low cost homes. Build tall, small footprint homes to increase overall density. The big problem these days is that it costs developers only slightly more to build large, expensive houses vs economical ones and the big ones are far more profitable. This is why we need CMHC.
Felt like with your detailed message you’re the right one to ask, can’t exactly google this answer.
How much of the housing market is currently owned by overseas investors from China? Last time I discussed this I read (non confirmed) in BC alone it’s like 8%
We need politicians to co-operate more! We need micro units! We need to address the Nimby's! Change city planning! It's short term rentals that are ruining everything!
I don't disagree with anything you are saying, and all of that is definitely needed in every society but let's be honest.... These are still beating around the bush when it comes to tackling the actual issues.
Real solutions that would actually make an impact:
We need to reduce immigration by a massive margin. 50 to 75 percent versus current intake to see any meaningful change.
We need to ban foreign ownership of homes. Full stop. Homes should be for people living in this country, not some foreign entity that uses homes in Canada as a spot to dump their cash, which drives up prices.
Home ownership should be limited to 2 or 3 maximum. Numbered corporations who own 100 plus rental units have no need to exist.
Foreign student intake should be tied to the amount of housing made available by the schools themselves. That college in a strip mall that just opened 3 years ago and has 99% foreign students can't provide housing? Too bad.... Their scam shouldn't exist in the first place.
Long story short... We know what the problem is.
My gut tells me, when there are sometimes 25 students living in a basement suite ( https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-rental-market) ..all of the above wouldn't be even close to enough.
You could do ever single change that he suggested, and were still going to be short homes.
We build per capita 200k per year. One of the highest rates in the world. We would need 500k per year for this growth.
1 bedrooms in YVR/YYZ are what? 700,000k for ~<600 square feet? Microhomes would end up being $600,000 for <400.
It's time to spread out of 3 or 4 cities.
In my area they have a plan to hit 1 million population in 2050. If we use the latest population growth numbers we will hit 1 million people by about 2035. We *might* have been ready for this number in 2050 but we won't even be close to ready in 2035. So...the answer is we are not going to solve the housing crisis without serious government intervention.
The Martin government got out of social housing in 1993 under the erroneous belief that "the private sector can do it better" bullshit.
Another massive historical failure of the capitalist system.....
Martin
[https://thetyee.ca/News/2004/05/03/How\_We\_Razed\_the\_Affordable\_House/](https://thetyee.ca/News/2004/05/03/How_We_Razed_the_Affordable_House/)
I am sorry, that's a BS take. Public housing was always a small portion of net housing being built. What has changed is Canadian voters are steadfast in their opposition to new housing.
You will countless such accounts from all across Canada.
https://www.reddit.com/r/vancouver/comments/c8h0em/owners_of_controversial_site_in_shaughnessy_to/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Yours is a BS take. It may have been small, but its role was to scuttle the kind of speculation that is driving house prices into the stratosphere.
I'll fire this right back at you to show you where your post is total bunk:
[https://breachmedia.ca/the-global-money-pool-that-soaked-canadas-hope-of-affordable-housing/](https://breachmedia.ca/the-global-money-pool-that-soaked-canadas-hope-of-affordable-housing/)
I HIGHLY doubt that voters are in opposition to housing--unless you've been living under a rock for the past few years, housing affordability is a burning issue.
That's a rather silly statement to make on a thread discussing a housing affordability crisis.
> I HIGHLY doubt that voters are in opposition to housing--unless you've been living under a rock for the past few years, housing affordability is a burning issue.
Yeah if you ask voters the general question "Should housing be affordable" or "Should we build more homes", the answer is going to be a resounding yes. But, when you ask them if a 20 storey apartment building should be built on the empty parcel of land 2 blocks from their home, they balk, show up at planning meetings and shout down the proposal. In my town, voters organized and killed an affordable housing project that would have been great for the families who lived there - it was on a bus route, near amenities and schools.
You replied with an opinion piece, and I showed you an example of how everyday Canadians come together to oppose the construction of new homes.
Seems to me that yours is an opinion piece. Its just nothing more than NIMBYs politicizing their opposition. Ask voters? You mean ask the propertied boomers who are being pitted against those who are starting out in life making roughly 20% less than the previous generation and will be unable to save up to make a down payment and will be forever renting. I on the other hand, put forth a cogent analysis of the historical origins and source of the developing affordability crisis. And the source is the capitalist system, as I originally argued.
Sometimes one needs to resort to satire to make one's point:
[https://www.thebeaverton.com/2023/08/corporations-hoarding-homes-thank-canadians-for-enthusiastically-blaming-immigration/](https://www.thebeaverton.com/2023/08/corporations-hoarding-homes-thank-canadians-for-enthusiastically-blaming-immigration/)
Population growth is pretty astonishing in places. In Alberta Danielle Smith aims to hit 10 million people in 2050, and the population growth is pretty noticeable when your electricity grid and water are compromised. Population growth seems to be a cheap way to keep the economy rolling in otherwise mediocre times but it really screws most of us over the way its being done.
Stimulating *real* economic activity would be a good start. Kind of hard to expect real estate to improve when it's somehow one of our largest economic sectors. In many countries it wouldn't even count.
Funny how rarely this gets brought up, but id say nothing gets better until this gets fixed. Massively overweight real estate in our GDP, but not a productive asset.
I don't, personally, see a good solution.
One thing that would *help* is to limit the number of "investment" properties individuals and (especially) corporations can own. Unless you do that, those same owners will just keep buying up newly built properties, because they have more ability to purchase than the rest of us.
Am I wrong in thinking there's more than a correlation between Airbnb type rentals and the rise in housing prices? Certainly the rise has been going on for decades but I can't but think the increased investment opportunity with the rise of such options as daily rentals must have some impact.
It's certainly a facette, but wholesale corporate landlords have been a larger trend picking up in the past few years.
It's guaranteed a prelude to it though.
When corporations control a majority of a regions markets there is a question of collusion among each other over prices.
With desirable regions to live in having artificially higher price increases.
Oh yeah, that for sure.
Plus I think non-corps shouldn't be able to rent any property with a mortgage on it, unless it's their primary residence.
And/or a cap on the number of rental priorities that can be owned.
Yep, I agree. Also rental companies. I live in a rental that is owned (in name) by a person I have never met but is managed by a rental company. So I pay rent to the rental company, who takes a cut and then pays the owner who I presume also wants to make a profit. So my rent is paying for a middle man AND a landlord’s profit. But if I tried to buy this house, I would not be approved for a mortgage. It’s outrageous and makes me really angry when I think about it.
No.
And cheering for a devastating recession as though that’s going to somehow slide by you and allow you to buy a house is like being a resentful waiter on the Titanic and cheering for the iceberg.
It’s mainly a supply problem, but also nobody needs to own more than 2 properties, and corporation’s DEFINITELY don’t need to own residential real estate at all.
Government could also be a direct lender to help responsible citizens accumulate down payments with matching contributions and favourable financing.
Home ownership remains the best way for us muggles to accumulate paper wealth, and keeps people from being entirely reliant on social services in times of need or old age. It’s in government’s interest to have people own their homes, as they’re more invested in their communities. Build more, enforce laws to curb foreign and corporate investor landlords and for fucks sale help people. That’s what govt is supposed to do.
Why not both? I think to start we should severely limit corporate ownership to mostly only apartment buildings. And make buying every additional property for small time landlords less and less financially attractive. Small time landlords are a scourge on society, the worst landlords I’ve had. There’s too many of them for the government to deal with as evidenced by the LTB wait times in every province. Wipe em out I say.
See, you're approaching this from the wrong angle. It's not a crisis, it's a business opportunity.
You just need to find a ghost investor with some deep pockets for seed money, incorporate yourself and become a land developer. It's not a crisis from that viewpoint, it's a boom baby!
I don't know, there seems to be very little appetite among Canadian voters to even implement the easy solutions to problem. Oakville, for instance, would rather refuse free money than allow 4-plexes. Canadian voters are making it known to municipal politicians that they do not want more homes built. It would take almost all provinces bringing in reforms like BC did, and allowing those reforms a couple of decades to play out before affordability improves.
I think Ontario getting on board would help a lot (since Ontario's got a third of the population). Doug Ford could be doing [everything the BC government is doing](https://morehousing.ca/bc-summary) - he's had [recommendations from his own housing task force](https://morehousing.ca/ontario-task-force) sitting on his desk since February 2022, like requiring municipalities to allow four storeys and four units everywhere, and he's done very little.
The other thing that Doug Ford did was [expand post-Covid international student numbers](https://morehousing.ca/blame), especially at Ontario colleges in the GTA - there's a [lot of money](https://morehousing.ca/low-taxes) in international-student tuition. (Alex Usher describes it as "putting out a fire with gasoline.") The federal government is now [cutting that way back](https://morehousing.ca/student-caps).
Really good example of how non-conservatives are forced into fixing things that were created by conservatives and then getting punished by voters by voting conservative.
Our governments are a reflection of who we are. Anyone complaining about the status quo deserves to be pressed on how they’ve voted over the years and what responsibility they bear for their misery.
That’s simply it. To solve it, it means crashing the housing market which means crashing the economy as a whole. No politician will do that because it would be a recovery period longer than their term.
Yes it will solve itself in about 10-20 years and will actually flip on itself and houses will be sitting empty instead of being full.
Our problem at the current moment is we have to many people and not enough housing. But the Boomer generation and Gen X have over 50% of the population. In the next 10-20 years we are going to have a massive death wave as over half the population climbs into the 70-100 year old range.
>Yes it will solve itself in about 10-20 years and will actually flip on itself and houses will be sitting empty instead of being full.
Didn't they say that 20 years ago? Yea they did. And they said it 20 years before that too. Hmm.
>Our problem at the current moment is we have to many people and not enough housing. But the Boomer generation and Gen X have over 50% of the population. In the next 10-20 years we are going to have a massive death wave as over half the population climbs into the 70-100 year old range.
Millenials were the biggest demographic buying during the last spike. There's more of them than Gen Xers for sure. Millions and millions more. More zoomers than gen x'ers too. In fact there's more zoomers and millenials than boomers and gen x combined. Awesome assessment based on facts/logic man.
Cuz population growth isn't exponential at all. When you have the largest population ever thoes people don't spawn more people who spawn more people. Lets all celebrate population decline. Mabye it will come when inflation reverses itself too!
My biggest fear, is that private equity is going to purchase these homes because Canadians are so far in debt. Then we'll have private companies as landlords.
We're going to need some serious legislation to prevent corporations from basically owning all the housing stock in 10 to 20 years.
Look at REIT's in malls currently. The prices are dropping and private equity are pulling out fast. Once the supply/demand curve flattens goes negative, They will be pulling out of residential as well. If there are more houses than people looking for places, housing princes fall dramatically. Not the market private equity wants to be in.
Boomers are 1946-64. We are already seeing this generation die off. However this isn’t the only factor when it comes to supply and demand of housing. That generation dying off means nothing with globalization (for any country). The only thing any country needs to do is increase immigration to keep demand for products and services alive.
We need a Federal government that takes a page from Premier Eby’s book. For those of you thinking PP will do that, you’re sadly mistaken. Things are definitely changing here. The market is flooded with condos and houses in my neighborhood that were selling in hours a few years ago are taking weeks. This will start bringing housing prices down. The other thing we are seeing now is a lot of the BC Housing developments getting completed. It is amazing what an NDP government can accomplish if they don’t have to spend their whole time fighting the corporately owned right.
If nothing changes, houses will fall further and further into corporate ownership and the majority of people will be renters.
If there's a revolution followed by a new economic system, then it's hard to predict what that might look like.
Probably depends on how you define “resolved”. Housing is always going to be expensive in giant urban areas like Toronto or Vancouver. That said, the pace of price growth vs. wages and the economy overall is out of whack.
New supply needs to catch up to (and surpass) population growth for an extended period of time. There is no silver bullet solution to accomplish that, so it will require a lot of cooperation and coordination amongst the various levels of government and also private industry. It will also require increasing public buy-in (or at the very least tolerance) of things like increased densification and increased focus on transit instead of car infrastructure.
The only way our housing market gets fixed is if we dismantle the idea housing as a market investment.
Japan has a fundementally different way of viewing the housing market, by not really having a market. Housing always depreciates in value, so investment bankers don't see housing as a worthwhile investment to pour money into. Prices stay low, and for-profit interests typically stay away.
We could also have a socialist revolution where we dismantle the very concept of capital, but that's still at least a decade away.
Prices, much like taxes, don’t usually ever go down, at least not significantly. The opposite of wages, which never go up significantly. The gap just keep growing.
There is a saying in service that applies to the complex issue of the housing crisis. If the customer says that there is a problem they are 100% right. However if they offer a solution, they are almost always wrong.
We all know there is a problem but speculating on a solution isn’t going to solve it.
Why don't you just go to a good school, get a 200k a year job right out of graduation, and marry an equally rich bitch so buying a house is easy? Lazy millennials and their video games.
Serious action on Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) would be a good start.
They have private equity capital behind them and don't have to worry about mortgage rates, so can outbid ordinary people who just want to buy a home. There's a definite correlation between the percentage of housing owned by REITs and expensive housing.
>Private equity firms, pension funds, and real estate investment trusts (REITs) are increasingly acquiring, operating, and developing housing as an investment strategy, with the aim of maximizing returns for shareholders.
>This phenomenon, known as the financialization of housing, is not only driving house prices out of reach for middle-class families – it is also denying members of disadvantaged groups their fundamental human rights.
>Financialization is contributing to unaffordable rent increases, worsening conditions, and a rise in evictions – often due to renovations or rebuilding with the goal of charging higher rents. There is also a well-documented connection between financialization and increased morbidity and mortality in long-term care facilities.
[https://www.housingchrc.ca/en/corporate-investment-in-housing-linked-to-unaffordable-rents-evictions-and-long-term-care-deaths-study](https://www.housingchrc.ca/en/corporate-investment-in-housing-linked-to-unaffordable-rents-evictions-and-long-term-care-deaths-study)
The reports (linked on that page) make for interesting reading.
The single biggest predictor of the Covid death rate in a Long Term Care home was whether it was run for a profit or not. For-profit meant at least double the death rate of a non-profit home, even when the for-profit home was spending more per patient. If you remember, the provincial government's solution to *that* problem was to change the laws governing LTCs so a plaintiff had to prove gross negligence rather than just negligence in a lawsuit (raising the legal bar far enough that very few can afford to sue them with any chance of winning their costs back). It is probably totally a coincidence that Harris and other prominent conservatives invested heavily in LTCs, because Ford is a simple man of the people and wouldn't pass laws to make his rich buddies even richer. Oh, wait…
Sarcasm aside, we know how to solve the problem because other countries have done it. Finland, for example. Treating housing as a place to live rather than a source of maximized financial profit would be a good place to start.
There's a solution here but nobody is going to like it:
Make housing such an unattractive investment that it clears out all the investors from the housing market, the people who are stuck, tough shit, they will have to deal with it. Let the housing market collapse and recover from there.
It's a three pronged problem:
1) Real Estate has a lot of usefulness as it provides people with a space to live.
2) Real Estate as an investment provides very little benefit to the economy as it produces relatively little commercial activity. Take something like a bakery. In order to run a bakery, you invest in equipment, transportation for that equipment, marketing for your bakery, buying supplies to make your inventory, paying people to help you make your bakery. Almost everything you do generates commercial activity and it's repeatable and that money flows through the economy. With real estate, you buy something and then sell it when the big number goes up. If it's empty land or the property needs fixing up, you might buy materials and pay for contractors but that's a one time thing. Very little commercial activity is generated relative to the bakery and that money is basically just parked in a house. If you happen to rent it out, it increases slightly but it's nothing compared to an actual business that produces tangible goods and services.
3) Real estate however is likely more profitable than running a bakery so given the choice, most people will opt to buy real estate.
So there is a gap in utility to society and utility to personal fortunes. So for the good of society, we should enact policies that discourage real estate investment and part of that involves tanking the current market.
Nothing will happen because our MPs all own property. Until housing loses value, how can it become affordable? This is the problem and why housing should never have become an investment.
The housing crisis will most likely end when the global population is widdled down to 500 000 000, and all the poor, homeless, ill, elderly, have been slowly genocided by the elite, and the working class have automated, then genocided out of existence.
It may be a grim answer, but it's a true answer. The housing crisis is BY DESIGN.
Cue being called paranoid, downvoted into into infinity, then banned.
Not any time soon.
Housing has become a commodity, which means no one builds unless a lot of $$$ is involved.
CMHC needs to start building affordable housing again.
Since it took decades to create, it'll create decades to heal.
But a good way to fix it is to cap rent to a lower amount depending on the place, redo some zoning and the amount of houses owned by one person or family needs to be addressed
No. It’s how the entire country is set up. The government wants to keep homeowners rich. Landlords extract capital from the non homeowners at rates that exceed what is reasonable and there are few limitations to this. Home ownership as an investment vehicle is one of the only ways to retire in this county. Our whole society relies on this now. Read “The Tenant Class” by Ricardo Tranjan. He is a Canadian researcher who basically lays this all out with facts and hundreds of peer reviewed papers.
The free market is not part of the capitalist system. The free market pre-existed the capitalist system and worked fine. The problem is that the current capitalist system is allowed to run amok and manipulate the free market to their advantage, harming consumers.
"The free market is not part of the capitalist system." That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Moreover, you totally contradicted yourself. If its not part of the economic system, why did you say "manipulate the free market to their advantage"?
Sucking and blowing at the same time does not make for a satisfactory answer.
They are separate things but that doesn't mean both can't be acting at the same time and affect each other. The free market existed before capitalism existed. It would also be possible to have capitalism without a free market.
Eliminating 80% of the TFWs would be a good start and would free up quite a number housing units. TFWs are preventing upward pressure on wages. Without TFWs, employers would have to offer more money to convince Canadians to take their crappy jobs. If an employer can't make a profit while paying a living wage, their business model is unsustainable and their business should close.
No.
There are plenty of things that could be done to lead to a resolution but our government will never entertain those potential solutions, of which many would have to be enacted all at once to have any effect.
Of course it will. The housing emergency directly feeds into the productivity crisis, neither of which are sustainable.
There will come a point where the unpopularity governments will get from addressing the issue will be worth it.
well, the price of material to build a house will never decrease, and thats alot of the cost plus greed and a general lack of men willing to build them. I build houses for a living and I'll tell you I couldn't afford any of them.
I can probably count the number of problems the government has solved in my lifetime on 1 hand. Truthfully I’m struggling to name one. You’d be a fool to think there is a fix coming.
Not moving to the big cities…
Which is an unrealistic goal. It is less particularly “Canadian housing problem” and more “global major city housing problem”. Vancouverite could be moving to Moose Jaw, SK or Fort McMurray, AB and find much better housing pricings, but barely anyone would because living in the city got more jobs, more services, more convenience, more potential social scene, more opportunities, etc. It is attracting people for its good reasons.
The better places always get more demand, either we push the supply to meet the demand or we make the high demand areas less appealing. Vancouver and Toronto are doing both.
No. And I don't understand why people think it's going to be fixed, ever.
Look at every 1st world county experiencing the same problems, Canada is just slightly farther along.
Australia is not much better, usa is not far behind despite there powerhouse economy. Like wtf makes you think canada is going to be the one to solve the global issue? What makes you think the Canadian government wants to solve it?
Should the housing bubble ever burst, retirement savings for 3/4 of the country would disintegrate. No elected politician can take steps to correct that challenge. There is no resolution in sight. Fixing it now would doom an entire generation who are too old to learn to code.
It is not technically difficult. We know how to solve housing crises. It's financially very beneficial. It's possible from engineering and safety points of view.
The problem is political. The crisis will not be resolved until we want to resolve it. Currently, some 60% of Canadians are homeowners and have a financial interest in the crisis continuing. For them, it's no crisis, it's an opportunity.
Housing is no where near crisis in my area of Canada, I wish more people would move here
Lots of jobs and plenty of affordable housing (under 300k for full size houses)
However to answer your questions, I don't think our major cities are going to be able to resolve their issues for a long time
More people are entering and trying to live In the same few cities than they can support and housing scalpers are negatively affecting the limited supply
Unless the cities move on to Hong Kong style super apartments and the idea of single detached homes are abolished in the cities.. I don't think it can be improved
Well imho I believe if we stopped sending Billion$ of dollars to the Ukraine…the money would be far better spent on affordable housing in every province
We'd need a whole party's worth of mp's elected specifically for that one issue, knowing they probably won't get re-elected, and have them follow through on the promise
Or
We take a card from the french playbook and start chopping heads
Unlikely. This country is massive but 98% of people only want to live on certain slivers of it near a few major metros, so housing in those places will never be affordable for average to below income earners due to the demand.
MPAC is a government tool to tax you as much as they want. Since that tax is dependent on perceived 'value' of the house, it is in 'their' interest to keep prices high. The only way to do that is to have more people chasing fewer houses, I know of no other way....
The problem is that we need a politician with the courage to require corporations to divest from single family homes and possibly risk the economy in the process as it's one of the shaky pillars our economy is, sadly, based on.
I don't think it will.
Let's pretend for a moment that there exists both legislative power and willingness to stamp out investors who buy up large numbers of homes expecting future profits from their increasing values entirely - every homeowner only owns one home, plus maybe a vacation home in a quaint small town somewhere that costs peanuts. You still have to account for the fact that even when people only own one home, they are still invested in it as an asset, and expect it's value to continually increase over time. The "nest egg" that so many people work so hard for so much of their lives to secure, often out of a sincere and good-natured desire to secure their retirement and give their children a house, or at least a significant asset.
Well Canada is still a country where 66% of people are homeowners, last time I checked Statistics Canada. Most of those people (not necessarily all) have a vested interest in their property values going up. It makes their asset increasingly valuable, and when they pass it onto their children, they too will be that much wealthier. Add onto that group the aspiring homeowners who would really like prices to go down, but when they manage to get a home are then interested in their property values going up - and you have a scenario where the majority of the country is invested in their property values - and thus home prices - to *keep going up*. Even if we pretend that our political system acts in the interests of the people, and that home investors holding tons of vacant homes to profit off of rising prices don't exist, we still have a scenario where the majority of people (and Canada aspires to be a democratic society, so naturally this group, the majority, has lots of collective power and influence) have a vested interest in property values going up, thus making homes less and less affordable.
It's a hard pill to swallow to think that common people acting in good faith to protect their properties and assets and retain them for future generations is an essential component of what causes the affordability crisis. Your average homeowner, when asked, will for sure respond that they want affordable housing in their community - just not in *their* neighbourhood, where the poor and the desperate will be attracted to should affordable housing be built, and where property values will fall if the housing supply dramatically increases, simple supply-and-demand. Of course, almost *every* homeowner in *every* neighbourhood will say something to this effect, so where can affordable housing actually ever be built? The woods? Mars?
Manufactured goods and services are things that you can always make *more* of given the right skills, technology, and investment. You can't just *make* more good land for housing in highly productive urban areas. I personally would suggest land value taxation (which is not to be confused with property taxes) to solve this issue by incentivizing landowners to utilize lands in ways that produce the money need to pay off the tax, such as starting businesses or densifying so that they can collect rent from many more people than would fit into a single-family home. It's been endorsed by all sorts of notable economic thinkers from all sorts of ideological banners - Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, and so on. Problem is, land value taxation in a democratic country where most people own homes is political suicide, pure and simple.
I don't think there's any incentive for people in power, nor investors, nor even the average person, for housing prices to go anywhere but up - thus worsening the housing crisis. The negative consequences of the housing crisis - rising homelessness, economic inequality, wealth transfer through sky-high rents - will simply continue to intensify until society can no longer bear them. And at that point, it is impossible to forsee how things could play out for Canada, but I don't think it will end well.
The problem is the lack of starter homes. Everything being built has three bathrooms - wtf? New home owners are both financially overstretched and yet technically overhoused. The economic logic is what happened to older housing stock starting in the 1930s - these places start to get used as rooming houses or cut up into apartments. Carrying a $5000/mo mortgage is not sustainable, but cutting a house into five apartments (legally or otherwise) creates a lot of housing stock at a comparative bargain ($1000/mo).
Speaking of economic logic, it baffles me that in this day and age people aren't moving to the fringes where land can still be bought for a song. My grandfather moved to a small village out past Sudbury without blinking and bought his first house for like $3000. With the internet you'd have much greater job prospects in remote areas and all the space you'd ever want along with the lumber to build it, and yet no one seems to want to be a pioneer anymore.
In the end, if people value city life higher than their financial independence I suppose they are doomed forever to be the slaves of landlords and banks.
Moving to the country and getting away would be great but I work as a geo structural engineer. My bread and butter is large infrastructure and high rise. You don’t see much of that away from the big cities
Are you a successful geo structural engineer who owns your own home outright? Or are you a debt-slave geo structural engineer who is bitter about housing prospects and a life-time of servitude for no discernible payoff?
I'm not trying to be mean, but someone in your profession clearly has (or could easily acquire) the skill set to build your own home. With marginal land costs and your own labour, you could build a modest home for well less than $100K (and that's not even milling your own lumber). Even if you were earning minimum wage doing gig work on Fiverr you could afford that mortgage, and a person with your education could probably do much better than that online.
The Town of Cochrane Ontario is selling fully serviced building lots for $10 to attract residents. If I was facing the prospect of a seventy year mortgage at $5K/mo I'd be seriously considering moving North regardless of the local job prospects.
Are homeowners willing to take a massive hit to their houses’ values so others can enter the market? No.
Only thing that will make this any “better” is a market crash. Which will negatively affect all other areas of the economy, too.
People are naive if they think the magic bullet is lowering immigration.
>Is the housing crisis ever going to be resolved
Where there is a housing crisis already in full bloom. No. Not ever.
Metaphorically, we're going to try and throw a teacup of water onto an inferno that has been burning for 15 years. And we're going to drop the teacup on our foot.
There is something happening. And if the govt stays out of it we will get an appropriate correction. Banks are over extended and defaults could exceed the margin of cash flow compared to interest and debt buyers of current loans will dry up. There is a battle going on
All he does is same shit the orange clown does . Talks shit . Talks about things he knows nothing about and gives us a running report what the guy that lives rent free in his head is up to / should be up to - why does he spend so much money representing cans on travel , mother stays and foot . One guess - it’s protocol he has 1 choice what he order for dinner . If it’s available so me one example of anything being done different while representing Canada on Official Business.
*"Is the housing crisis ever going to be resolved in Canada?"*
Not anytime soon, and possibly not ever in this lifetime.
It would be easier to leave the country and buy far more reasonably priced properties abroad for the foreseeable future.
The blunt truth is that Canada's political, cultural, and economic systems all collectively function more like shackles and handcuffs, rather than being mechanisms that can help the country and its citizenry tackle and solve problems in a constructive and timely fashion.
Canada has effectively painted itself into a corner, with far too much of the national economy tied up in unproductive real estate ownership, with high monthly mortgages and cost-of-living dynamics, and there is nowhere near enough infrastructure to adequately support its population of 41 million.
Ergo, expect to see a very long period of "stagflation" with no end in sight, and the Canadian dollar continue to decline relative to the US dollar.
Watch for it.
Next.
Why would it?
Ask 'if wages will ever come back up to meet or surpass COL'.
Same answer, why would they?
Rich assholes hoard wealth and property. Rich assholes bribe politcians to keep wages low and labour in a huge surplus. They get little oversight and all sorts of tax loopholes/general loopholes.
Rich assholes would have to want the crisis resolved. Rich assholes are the only ones who matter in North America.
Just like wages regularly falling below annual COL/general greed, housing wont be any different.
Housing is seen as the best ROI. Incredibly safe as well. You have average people who need a place to live which drives the prices/rent up. Then you have people who want to own where they live which drives the prices up.
You have an annual population increase that far exceeds the builds per year.
Its a very controlled market at this point where regular people cant afford to even get into it. So its easy for the top % to control the market.
The only way housing would come down is via a crash. People would have to dump their golden geese in a panic for any meaningful decrease to happen. You would also have to prevent hoarding of multiple homes. You would need to produce a ton of high density affordable housing to catch up to existing demand, let alone rapidly growing demand.
Most new builds seem to be 'higher end' housing. Because why wouldnt they? Without laws companies would pay people far below minimum wage. We would go back to company stores if we had no laws to protect workers. Unfettered capitalism just runs off the rails eventually. You'll get regular people owning nothing while a handful of oligopolies literally control everything.
Go look at the US and the federal reserve shows that half the population only own 2.5% of wealth. Thats fucking disgusting.
Housing won't be fixed and general QoL will decrease rapidly each year until people snap.
Each year you hear people getting paid minimum fucking wage or near minimum wage being blamed for inflation. Meanwhile companies will use any excuse to jack up their prices. Then their prices have a habit of never going back down when that excuse is no longer valid.
We have a uniparty weather people are willing to accept that reality or not idk. But liberals conservatives and ndp put on political theatre and were dumb enough to think by voting a certain party we’re doing our selfs a favour but it’s same party no matter who we vote.
Not in the near future. Housing prices are being driven by a number of factors that aren't going away quickly, such as high demand and restricted supply. The PM has stated that it's not the government's goal to bring down housing prices. As brutal as that is for people that don't already own, I think the objective is to protect the banking system. Otherwise lots of people would be suddenly underwater in their mortgages. Assuming prices stagnate, it will take a decade or two for incomes to catch up. In the meantime, home ownership won't be an option for an entire generation of people.
Housing problem is an oxymoron for a great country like Canada
Land we have, money we have, skills we still have, resources like lumber yes we have
So what do we don't have?
Planning, design, zoning, green belt clarity, and a non political approach to a simple problem
I was shocked to hear someone say that we don't have "enough land" to build enough houses
And people not wanting to work hard and save money for a down payment
In my province, the 20s and 30s year olds say they want minimum wage raised so they can afford a house and new car
Resolving the housing crisis would require wiping out at least 50% of every Canadian homeowner's accumulated investments (for every 50% housing price decrease is equivalent to every Canadian homeowner becoming less wealthy by 50% than the original inflated housing price value).
Here's the thing, you can solve the housing crisis in a couple months.
Step 1: Ban owning more than 1 house (Anyone who currently owns more than one house, must sell that house within 3 months. Any houses beyond your primary residence after 3 months will be seized and auctioned off)
Step 2: Any company that holds multiple residential properties must be non-profit
Step 3: No person employed by a non-profit may make more than three times the median average income.
Step 4: Should the above three steps not result in an end of the housing crisis, the government will allocate 1% of the GDP towards the creation of a Government housing department, that will build houses at speed, and sell them at cost. That money will then be reinvested in building houses, until the housing crisis is over. Afterwards the remaining money can go back into the budget.
Done. Housing crisis over.
It's just the majority of people who are in government are landlords, and therefor have a direct financial incentive to Never end the housing crisis.
That’s fucking stupid. Also done would be innovation, and the vast majority of smart people would move out of Canada (we already have a brain drain problem, and lack of capital for that innovation). This is why most socialist communist countries are facist and make it illegal to leave and/or use massive corruption to persuade innovation.
There are some for low income. But nowhere near enough for the poor as it is. And none to house those who just think prices are too high so someone else should buy an apartment for me to live in cheaply.
Yes, since the government continues to demonstrate its clear understanding of housing (or any) economics we can trust it to successfully build houses for all who need them after destroying the ability of others to step in and …do exactly that, but without spending taxpayer dollars
In reality, separate from demand driven by overseas investment or spikes in immigration, Canada’s productivity per capita has been declining for decades relative to G7. Enormous divergence between Canada and other OECD countries in terms of real investment in productive assets vs passive (like residential real estate). Andrew Coyne articulates this well. You can’t tax and reallocate wealth indefinitely without growing the pie.
No.
The pricing crisis would be solved if there was a massive collapse in current values. That’s the only way things would be more affordable.
I think a big driver in increasing prices has been house flippers. The last 20 years has seen this profit driven industry boom.
A massive drop in prices wouldn’t make things more affordable, because one of the only things that could do that is a wide spread recession or depression, which would mean more people out of work and less people able to afford houses. And the ones likely mostly affected would be those who currently can’t afford houses, or are already struggling.
Home ownership does not have to define who you are as an adult. You can be successful and happy while renting, and probably better off financially. imo the “crisis” is people’s obsession with mortgage ownership.
I think if start building more and more houses , I mean expand at a lightning rate . You might see affordable housing in atleast out of MetroVancouver and GTA. I mean Calgary , Edmonton, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Regina and some other capital cities still have some reasonable pricing apartments/ condos. However we need to build build build. Regarding GTA and Metrovancouver you will see detach homes completely disappear like London or New York. Things of similar nature start to happen in Vancouver atleast. Keep in mind with every year passing definition of affordable housing also change with inflation. One day 400K condo will be considered a affordable house . Only way to get this crisis in control is by aggressively building. Lowering Immigration would help eventually with rental prices.
I think it will. Too much voter rage to not address it.
Now, do we address it by building more homes or cutting off health care for the elderly until they clear out? That I’m less sure about.
There is a good chance this and basically ALL our problems will be "resolved" by nuclear war. When that happens nobody will care about not being able to live where you want or use weird pronouns.
I’m liking the answers here. Remember, the government directly and indirectly created this mess. To fix it, will basically be political suicide because the fix will destroy a lot of people. The party who is in power during an attempted fix will be in the line of fire from the electorate for generations. To build our way out of this will take years, if not, decades.
Yeah, way things are going we can’t build homes fast enough for the amount of people we are letting in. Seems like you put it well. Most likely political suicide. 50% of people would be if it from a collapse where the other 50% would get railed
I wish we could elect a proper Leader that isn’t the choices we have now. Someone who knows how to lead a people and bring our country together instead of dividing us for cheap political grifting. Stand up to China, make some European privacy law reform (they are always ahead of north america in progressiveness) and finally, if they want to let people come to Canada make sure they can work toward an actual proper life with a home on the horizon. I don’t know the real reasons for the housing crisis, not enough homes = housing crisis, is what I know. It’s not an immigrant problem it’s a Canadian immigration law problem too. I don’t like people who take out their grievances with people who came to Canada to have a better life, that is the most Canadian thing to attribute to any of us, I was born here and they have as much a right as I do like my ancestors before me. It’s just, for whatever reason, the Government has increased the amount of immigrants per year and that’s shocking to me because we’re simply not able to offer anything other than high rent and high costs of living with no end in sight.
Not until we elect our great lord and saviour Mr. Brylcream who will do... precisely nothing.
You nailed it. We need detailed plans that are actually put into place in real life. Talk is cheap and sadly that is what we have got from a lot of politicians and other "leaders" as the housing crisis has continued to get worse and worse throughout the nation. It is an incredibly complex issue. David Eby from the BCNDP is doing a great job in British Columbia but he has in some places unfavorable city councils/mayors to work with. To really "solve" the housing crisis we have to get city councils/mayors, provincial parties/premiers, and federal government parties/PMO-Cabinet working together. We've seen some good things come out of pressuring the Federal Liberal Party of Canada: Reduction of Temporary Residents, GST Removal, Loan Programs for developers and Incentives for municipalities to build the right type of housing, etc. 1. We need to address zoning in a big way. In particular we need to get density approved when and how we need it without delay. That means medium and high density builds. 2. There is a place for micro units. Economically vulnerable seniors, students, low income workers, etc. It provides affordable and accessible housing that people can build up from and fall back on. There are people and families being forced into the social system that could support themselves in a humble way if the market was reasonable. 3. Short term rentals need to be addressed. We need that supply on the long term rental/ownership market. 4. Vacant housing needs to be addressed. Housing is to be lived in. Simple as that. 5. Co-op and other not for profit models can help not just with affordability and accessibility but in regards to helping create a larger support system. This can help with the loneliness epidemic and other realities. It's a win win. 6. City planning and regulations need to be modernized to prize affordability and accessibility as #1 priorities. There are some actually really great solutions out there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX_-UcC14xw It takes addressing NIMBYism, bad actors that are profiting from problems, and those in government who have absolutely no business being there. There is lots of work to be done but we can't allow something as fundamental and foundational as housing to continue to get worse and worse.
Please add foreign ownership to that list too please, and remove all the loop holes. Canadians should only own Canadian property.
I agree with you but the amount of foreign born citizens and PR holders makes that moot. You’d have to do a serious crackdown on immigration and deport a lot of illegals and bullshit students, but too many Canadians don’t have the stomach for real solutions.
To me the problem boils down to: - People want to live and work in our cities and towns. - Other people want to build housing for them. - In places like Vancouver and Toronto, the problem is that we don't let them. We regulate new multifamily housing like it's a nuclear power plant, and we tax it like it's a gold mine. - When Covid hit, and we suddenly had a lot of people working from home, needing more space, and willing to move in search of cheaper housing, it's like housing scarcity [spilled over](https://morehousing.ca/spillover) from Vancouver and Toronto, spreading misery everywhere. > David Eby from the BCNDP is doing a great job in British Columbia but he has in some places unfavorable city councils/mayors to work with. Agree on Eby. [Summary of BC's policies](https://morehousing.ca/bc-summary). What I really like about Eby is that he's impatient (whereas a lot of politicians tend to be defeatist on housing). There's a great quote from [an interview](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/vancouver/article-bc-housing-minister-eager-to-spur-supply/) a while back, responding to an academic arguing for more study: > To that Mr. Eby responded: “Well, I’ll be sure to mention that to all the people sleeping in their cars, and lining up to find rental units; that we are going to study the problem more.” Municipal governments are created by provincial legislation. One of the very first things Eby did after being sworn in as premier was bring in [legislation allowing the province to set housing targets for municipalities](https://morehousing.ca/targets), and override their decisions if they fail to meet those targets. Doug Ford could be doing exactly the same thing in Ontario ([task force recommendations](https://morehousing.ca/ontario-task-force) from February 2022), but he seems to be [personally opposed](https://morehousing.ca/doug-ford-nimby) to allowing even modest density. [Sean Fraser's stepped into the vacuum](https://morehousing.ca/accelerator-update-week-23), using federal Housing Accelerator funding and infrastructure funding as a combined carrot and stick to convince municipalities to allow four-plexes and transit-oriented development (similar to what BC is doing).
Russil man! No mention at all of mass immigration? Were going to be hundreds of thousands of houses short this year dude, and you don't mention it at all. None of what you mentioned is going to bring us from 200k houses per year, one of the highest rates in the world, to the needed 500k. The only way to fix the housing crisis is to slash migration into Canada by like 90%. Every change you suggest could happen, and the housing crisis will get worse because we will still be left with less houses per capita. And your fairly lengthy post doesn't mention this fact at all, even though I know you know it bro.
Already mentioned by the previous poster: > To really "solve" the housing crisis we have to get city councils/mayors, provincial parties/premiers, and federal government parties/PMO-Cabinet working together. > > We've seen some good things come out of pressuring the Federal Liberal Party of Canada: **Reduction of Temporary Residents**, GST Removal, Loan Programs for developers and Incentives for municipalities to build the right type of housing, etc. [Previous thread](https://old.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/1d753g8/which_way_canada_make_housing_cheaper_or_protect/l6y4xfk/).
All of these things need to be done to help supply. But as importantly, we *must* address outsized demand from investors and immigration. Our taxation and regulatory regime incentivizes people accumulating housing portfolios, using equity to daisy chain more houses. Equifax reported a never-before-seen spike in people with mortgages on 4+ properties stating in late 2020. What that does in turn, is drive up the number of renters, as housing investors directly displace first-time home buyers. More people stuck renting, which increases rental demand and prices. When you add in high immigration to that already stressed rental demand, you get the huge rental increases we saw starting in 2022. An affordable rental market has the healthy relief valve of renters transitioning to buyers. To make things worse, when first-time home buyers buy, they live in the property. But when investors buy, they may leave the property vacant or use it as an Airbnb. Which means fewer units of long-term housing available when you have more investor ownership. There are many easy tax and regulatory fixes to curtail the financialization of housing that have been used successfully in other countries. But you need to have governments who genuinely prioritize affordable housing and willing to do what needs to be done .
David Eby in BC has done an amazing job. He has passed laws stopping STR. He has made it illegal for dodos to stop owners from renting. He has done so many things that are impactful. Within a year from now bc will be better off in housing than most other provinces.
Our landlord politicians see no crisis.
I would say one other thing. We fund CMHC so they can go back to their original mandate of building low cost homes. Build tall, small footprint homes to increase overall density. The big problem these days is that it costs developers only slightly more to build large, expensive houses vs economical ones and the big ones are far more profitable. This is why we need CMHC.
Felt like with your detailed message you’re the right one to ask, can’t exactly google this answer. How much of the housing market is currently owned by overseas investors from China? Last time I discussed this I read (non confirmed) in BC alone it’s like 8%
We need politicians to co-operate more! We need micro units! We need to address the Nimby's! Change city planning! It's short term rentals that are ruining everything! I don't disagree with anything you are saying, and all of that is definitely needed in every society but let's be honest.... These are still beating around the bush when it comes to tackling the actual issues. Real solutions that would actually make an impact: We need to reduce immigration by a massive margin. 50 to 75 percent versus current intake to see any meaningful change. We need to ban foreign ownership of homes. Full stop. Homes should be for people living in this country, not some foreign entity that uses homes in Canada as a spot to dump their cash, which drives up prices. Home ownership should be limited to 2 or 3 maximum. Numbered corporations who own 100 plus rental units have no need to exist. Foreign student intake should be tied to the amount of housing made available by the schools themselves. That college in a strip mall that just opened 3 years ago and has 99% foreign students can't provide housing? Too bad.... Their scam shouldn't exist in the first place. Long story short... We know what the problem is.
My gut tells me, when there are sometimes 25 students living in a basement suite ( https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-rental-market) ..all of the above wouldn't be even close to enough.
You could do ever single change that he suggested, and were still going to be short homes. We build per capita 200k per year. One of the highest rates in the world. We would need 500k per year for this growth.
1 bedrooms in YVR/YYZ are what? 700,000k for ~<600 square feet? Microhomes would end up being $600,000 for <400. It's time to spread out of 3 or 4 cities.
Where can I vote for you?
But it's all Trudeau's fault. The Most Holy Pierre will make everything better, but won't tell us how besides AXE THE TAX.
His plan is by Dr. Seuss.
Mad max is the way
Don't forget "spike the hike"
Come on man give teh small PP credit. He'll be so much more impactful. He's def going to make it worse.
He is def going to make it worse.
Canadian conservatives talking about the horrors of real estate and affordability is like Republicans talking about the horrors of gun crime.
Just more deflection from the market economy that he and the capitalist class and their useful idiots champion.....
In my area they have a plan to hit 1 million population in 2050. If we use the latest population growth numbers we will hit 1 million people by about 2035. We *might* have been ready for this number in 2050 but we won't even be close to ready in 2035. So...the answer is we are not going to solve the housing crisis without serious government intervention.
The Martin government got out of social housing in 1993 under the erroneous belief that "the private sector can do it better" bullshit. Another massive historical failure of the capitalist system.....
Martin or Mulroney?
Martin [https://thetyee.ca/News/2004/05/03/How\_We\_Razed\_the\_Affordable\_House/](https://thetyee.ca/News/2004/05/03/How_We_Razed_the_Affordable_House/)
Well, the article states both. I am more aware of what Mulroney did.
I am sorry, that's a BS take. Public housing was always a small portion of net housing being built. What has changed is Canadian voters are steadfast in their opposition to new housing. You will countless such accounts from all across Canada. https://www.reddit.com/r/vancouver/comments/c8h0em/owners_of_controversial_site_in_shaughnessy_to/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Yours is a BS take. It may have been small, but its role was to scuttle the kind of speculation that is driving house prices into the stratosphere. I'll fire this right back at you to show you where your post is total bunk: [https://breachmedia.ca/the-global-money-pool-that-soaked-canadas-hope-of-affordable-housing/](https://breachmedia.ca/the-global-money-pool-that-soaked-canadas-hope-of-affordable-housing/) I HIGHLY doubt that voters are in opposition to housing--unless you've been living under a rock for the past few years, housing affordability is a burning issue. That's a rather silly statement to make on a thread discussing a housing affordability crisis.
> I HIGHLY doubt that voters are in opposition to housing--unless you've been living under a rock for the past few years, housing affordability is a burning issue. Yeah if you ask voters the general question "Should housing be affordable" or "Should we build more homes", the answer is going to be a resounding yes. But, when you ask them if a 20 storey apartment building should be built on the empty parcel of land 2 blocks from their home, they balk, show up at planning meetings and shout down the proposal. In my town, voters organized and killed an affordable housing project that would have been great for the families who lived there - it was on a bus route, near amenities and schools. You replied with an opinion piece, and I showed you an example of how everyday Canadians come together to oppose the construction of new homes.
Seems to me that yours is an opinion piece. Its just nothing more than NIMBYs politicizing their opposition. Ask voters? You mean ask the propertied boomers who are being pitted against those who are starting out in life making roughly 20% less than the previous generation and will be unable to save up to make a down payment and will be forever renting. I on the other hand, put forth a cogent analysis of the historical origins and source of the developing affordability crisis. And the source is the capitalist system, as I originally argued. Sometimes one needs to resort to satire to make one's point: [https://www.thebeaverton.com/2023/08/corporations-hoarding-homes-thank-canadians-for-enthusiastically-blaming-immigration/](https://www.thebeaverton.com/2023/08/corporations-hoarding-homes-thank-canadians-for-enthusiastically-blaming-immigration/)
Population growth is pretty astonishing in places. In Alberta Danielle Smith aims to hit 10 million people in 2050, and the population growth is pretty noticeable when your electricity grid and water are compromised. Population growth seems to be a cheap way to keep the economy rolling in otherwise mediocre times but it really screws most of us over the way its being done.
Stimulating *real* economic activity would be a good start. Kind of hard to expect real estate to improve when it's somehow one of our largest economic sectors. In many countries it wouldn't even count.
Funny how rarely this gets brought up, but id say nothing gets better until this gets fixed. Massively overweight real estate in our GDP, but not a productive asset.
Not for a couple decades, and that's only if we slow way down on immigration and focus on building a ton of new affordable rentals and homes.
I don't, personally, see a good solution. One thing that would *help* is to limit the number of "investment" properties individuals and (especially) corporations can own. Unless you do that, those same owners will just keep buying up newly built properties, because they have more ability to purchase than the rest of us.
Am I wrong in thinking there's more than a correlation between Airbnb type rentals and the rise in housing prices? Certainly the rise has been going on for decades but I can't but think the increased investment opportunity with the rise of such options as daily rentals must have some impact.
It's certainly a facette, but wholesale corporate landlords have been a larger trend picking up in the past few years. It's guaranteed a prelude to it though. When corporations control a majority of a regions markets there is a question of collusion among each other over prices. With desirable regions to live in having artificially higher price increases.
Corporations should not be allowed to own residential housing, fullstop.
While I don't disagree, but if we went that way full tilt, who's going to build and own those 30+ story apartment buildings if not a corp.?
I'm talking about single family homes
Oh yeah, that for sure. Plus I think non-corps shouldn't be able to rent any property with a mortgage on it, unless it's their primary residence. And/or a cap on the number of rental priorities that can be owned.
Yep, I agree. Also rental companies. I live in a rental that is owned (in name) by a person I have never met but is managed by a rental company. So I pay rent to the rental company, who takes a cut and then pays the owner who I presume also wants to make a profit. So my rent is paying for a middle man AND a landlord’s profit. But if I tried to buy this house, I would not be approved for a mortgage. It’s outrageous and makes me really angry when I think about it.
Saaaaame. I have paid 400k in rent in 20 years but can't qualify for a mortgage.
No. And cheering for a devastating recession as though that’s going to somehow slide by you and allow you to buy a house is like being a resentful waiter on the Titanic and cheering for the iceberg. It’s mainly a supply problem, but also nobody needs to own more than 2 properties, and corporation’s DEFINITELY don’t need to own residential real estate at all. Government could also be a direct lender to help responsible citizens accumulate down payments with matching contributions and favourable financing. Home ownership remains the best way for us muggles to accumulate paper wealth, and keeps people from being entirely reliant on social services in times of need or old age. It’s in government’s interest to have people own their homes, as they’re more invested in their communities. Build more, enforce laws to curb foreign and corporate investor landlords and for fucks sale help people. That’s what govt is supposed to do.
If we heavily reduced corporate ownership I’m sure we’d see dramatic effects
> reduced corporate ownership you mean domestic investors
Why not both? I think to start we should severely limit corporate ownership to mostly only apartment buildings. And make buying every additional property for small time landlords less and less financially attractive. Small time landlords are a scourge on society, the worst landlords I’ve had. There’s too many of them for the government to deal with as evidenced by the LTB wait times in every province. Wipe em out I say.
See, you're approaching this from the wrong angle. It's not a crisis, it's a business opportunity. You just need to find a ghost investor with some deep pockets for seed money, incorporate yourself and become a land developer. It's not a crisis from that viewpoint, it's a boom baby!
Oh man, never thought about it that way! Didint realize it was that east haha
I don't know, there seems to be very little appetite among Canadian voters to even implement the easy solutions to problem. Oakville, for instance, would rather refuse free money than allow 4-plexes. Canadian voters are making it known to municipal politicians that they do not want more homes built. It would take almost all provinces bringing in reforms like BC did, and allowing those reforms a couple of decades to play out before affordability improves.
I think Ontario getting on board would help a lot (since Ontario's got a third of the population). Doug Ford could be doing [everything the BC government is doing](https://morehousing.ca/bc-summary) - he's had [recommendations from his own housing task force](https://morehousing.ca/ontario-task-force) sitting on his desk since February 2022, like requiring municipalities to allow four storeys and four units everywhere, and he's done very little. The other thing that Doug Ford did was [expand post-Covid international student numbers](https://morehousing.ca/blame), especially at Ontario colleges in the GTA - there's a [lot of money](https://morehousing.ca/low-taxes) in international-student tuition. (Alex Usher describes it as "putting out a fire with gasoline.") The federal government is now [cutting that way back](https://morehousing.ca/student-caps).
Really good example of how non-conservatives are forced into fixing things that were created by conservatives and then getting punished by voters by voting conservative.
Our governments are a reflection of who we are. Anyone complaining about the status quo deserves to be pressed on how they’ve voted over the years and what responsibility they bear for their misery.
And that's even more true for local politics where partisan politics doesn't play as big a role as federal or provincial politics.
That’s simply it. To solve it, it means crashing the housing market which means crashing the economy as a whole. No politician will do that because it would be a recovery period longer than their term.
Yes it will solve itself in about 10-20 years and will actually flip on itself and houses will be sitting empty instead of being full. Our problem at the current moment is we have to many people and not enough housing. But the Boomer generation and Gen X have over 50% of the population. In the next 10-20 years we are going to have a massive death wave as over half the population climbs into the 70-100 year old range.
>Yes it will solve itself in about 10-20 years and will actually flip on itself and houses will be sitting empty instead of being full. Didn't they say that 20 years ago? Yea they did. And they said it 20 years before that too. Hmm. >Our problem at the current moment is we have to many people and not enough housing. But the Boomer generation and Gen X have over 50% of the population. In the next 10-20 years we are going to have a massive death wave as over half the population climbs into the 70-100 year old range. Millenials were the biggest demographic buying during the last spike. There's more of them than Gen Xers for sure. Millions and millions more. More zoomers than gen x'ers too. In fact there's more zoomers and millenials than boomers and gen x combined. Awesome assessment based on facts/logic man. Cuz population growth isn't exponential at all. When you have the largest population ever thoes people don't spawn more people who spawn more people. Lets all celebrate population decline. Mabye it will come when inflation reverses itself too!
My biggest fear, is that private equity is going to purchase these homes because Canadians are so far in debt. Then we'll have private companies as landlords. We're going to need some serious legislation to prevent corporations from basically owning all the housing stock in 10 to 20 years.
Id sooner believe poison tipped arrows could solve that than legislation.
Look at REIT's in malls currently. The prices are dropping and private equity are pulling out fast. Once the supply/demand curve flattens goes negative, They will be pulling out of residential as well. If there are more houses than people looking for places, housing princes fall dramatically. Not the market private equity wants to be in.
Boomers are 1946-64. We are already seeing this generation die off. However this isn’t the only factor when it comes to supply and demand of housing. That generation dying off means nothing with globalization (for any country). The only thing any country needs to do is increase immigration to keep demand for products and services alive.
new houses will never sit empty. we have more humans comming into canada than ever, and they all need homes.
Good thing there are plenty of retirement/nursing homes they can move into...
We need a Federal government that takes a page from Premier Eby’s book. For those of you thinking PP will do that, you’re sadly mistaken. Things are definitely changing here. The market is flooded with condos and houses in my neighborhood that were selling in hours a few years ago are taking weeks. This will start bringing housing prices down. The other thing we are seeing now is a lot of the BC Housing developments getting completed. It is amazing what an NDP government can accomplish if they don’t have to spend their whole time fighting the corporately owned right.
If nothing changes, houses will fall further and further into corporate ownership and the majority of people will be renters. If there's a revolution followed by a new economic system, then it's hard to predict what that might look like.
No, too many people treat housing as a stock investment, and everyone knows it's the safest investment out there.
I have no faith that any of the government parties want to make Canada a place for Canadians to live any more.
Probably depends on how you define “resolved”. Housing is always going to be expensive in giant urban areas like Toronto or Vancouver. That said, the pace of price growth vs. wages and the economy overall is out of whack. New supply needs to catch up to (and surpass) population growth for an extended period of time. There is no silver bullet solution to accomplish that, so it will require a lot of cooperation and coordination amongst the various levels of government and also private industry. It will also require increasing public buy-in (or at the very least tolerance) of things like increased densification and increased focus on transit instead of car infrastructure.
The only way our housing market gets fixed is if we dismantle the idea housing as a market investment. Japan has a fundementally different way of viewing the housing market, by not really having a market. Housing always depreciates in value, so investment bankers don't see housing as a worthwhile investment to pour money into. Prices stay low, and for-profit interests typically stay away. We could also have a socialist revolution where we dismantle the very concept of capital, but that's still at least a decade away.
No.
Not any time soon
No. The divide between rich and poor roll deepen and middle and upper classes will erode downward with each generation.
Prices, much like taxes, don’t usually ever go down, at least not significantly. The opposite of wages, which never go up significantly. The gap just keep growing.
There is a saying in service that applies to the complex issue of the housing crisis. If the customer says that there is a problem they are 100% right. However if they offer a solution, they are almost always wrong. We all know there is a problem but speculating on a solution isn’t going to solve it.
Why don't you just go to a good school, get a 200k a year job right out of graduation, and marry an equally rich bitch so buying a house is easy? Lazy millennials and their video games.
until housing ceases to be an investment vehicle to park cash or flip. No.
Serious action on Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) would be a good start. They have private equity capital behind them and don't have to worry about mortgage rates, so can outbid ordinary people who just want to buy a home. There's a definite correlation between the percentage of housing owned by REITs and expensive housing. >Private equity firms, pension funds, and real estate investment trusts (REITs) are increasingly acquiring, operating, and developing housing as an investment strategy, with the aim of maximizing returns for shareholders. >This phenomenon, known as the financialization of housing, is not only driving house prices out of reach for middle-class families – it is also denying members of disadvantaged groups their fundamental human rights. >Financialization is contributing to unaffordable rent increases, worsening conditions, and a rise in evictions – often due to renovations or rebuilding with the goal of charging higher rents. There is also a well-documented connection between financialization and increased morbidity and mortality in long-term care facilities. [https://www.housingchrc.ca/en/corporate-investment-in-housing-linked-to-unaffordable-rents-evictions-and-long-term-care-deaths-study](https://www.housingchrc.ca/en/corporate-investment-in-housing-linked-to-unaffordable-rents-evictions-and-long-term-care-deaths-study) The reports (linked on that page) make for interesting reading. The single biggest predictor of the Covid death rate in a Long Term Care home was whether it was run for a profit or not. For-profit meant at least double the death rate of a non-profit home, even when the for-profit home was spending more per patient. If you remember, the provincial government's solution to *that* problem was to change the laws governing LTCs so a plaintiff had to prove gross negligence rather than just negligence in a lawsuit (raising the legal bar far enough that very few can afford to sue them with any chance of winning their costs back). It is probably totally a coincidence that Harris and other prominent conservatives invested heavily in LTCs, because Ford is a simple man of the people and wouldn't pass laws to make his rich buddies even richer. Oh, wait… Sarcasm aside, we know how to solve the problem because other countries have done it. Finland, for example. Treating housing as a place to live rather than a source of maximized financial profit would be a good place to start.
There's a solution here but nobody is going to like it: Make housing such an unattractive investment that it clears out all the investors from the housing market, the people who are stuck, tough shit, they will have to deal with it. Let the housing market collapse and recover from there. It's a three pronged problem: 1) Real Estate has a lot of usefulness as it provides people with a space to live. 2) Real Estate as an investment provides very little benefit to the economy as it produces relatively little commercial activity. Take something like a bakery. In order to run a bakery, you invest in equipment, transportation for that equipment, marketing for your bakery, buying supplies to make your inventory, paying people to help you make your bakery. Almost everything you do generates commercial activity and it's repeatable and that money flows through the economy. With real estate, you buy something and then sell it when the big number goes up. If it's empty land or the property needs fixing up, you might buy materials and pay for contractors but that's a one time thing. Very little commercial activity is generated relative to the bakery and that money is basically just parked in a house. If you happen to rent it out, it increases slightly but it's nothing compared to an actual business that produces tangible goods and services. 3) Real estate however is likely more profitable than running a bakery so given the choice, most people will opt to buy real estate. So there is a gap in utility to society and utility to personal fortunes. So for the good of society, we should enact policies that discourage real estate investment and part of that involves tanking the current market.
Nothing will happen because our MPs all own property. Until housing loses value, how can it become affordable? This is the problem and why housing should never have become an investment.
I don’t see how it’s possible with our current rate of population growth.
lol, no
The housing crisis will most likely end when the global population is widdled down to 500 000 000, and all the poor, homeless, ill, elderly, have been slowly genocided by the elite, and the working class have automated, then genocided out of existence. It may be a grim answer, but it's a true answer. The housing crisis is BY DESIGN. Cue being called paranoid, downvoted into into infinity, then banned.
Not any time soon. Housing has become a commodity, which means no one builds unless a lot of $$$ is involved. CMHC needs to start building affordable housing again.
Since it took decades to create, it'll create decades to heal. But a good way to fix it is to cap rent to a lower amount depending on the place, redo some zoning and the amount of houses owned by one person or family needs to be addressed
No. It’s how the entire country is set up. The government wants to keep homeowners rich. Landlords extract capital from the non homeowners at rates that exceed what is reasonable and there are few limitations to this. Home ownership as an investment vehicle is one of the only ways to retire in this county. Our whole society relies on this now. Read “The Tenant Class” by Ricardo Tranjan. He is a Canadian researcher who basically lays this all out with facts and hundreds of peer reviewed papers.
Thanks for the recommendation!
A massive failure of the much vaunted "market forces" to provide the basic human necessities. Yay capitalism!!!
The free market is not part of the capitalist system. The free market pre-existed the capitalist system and worked fine. The problem is that the current capitalist system is allowed to run amok and manipulate the free market to their advantage, harming consumers.
"The free market is not part of the capitalist system." That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Moreover, you totally contradicted yourself. If its not part of the economic system, why did you say "manipulate the free market to their advantage"? Sucking and blowing at the same time does not make for a satisfactory answer.
They are separate things but that doesn't mean both can't be acting at the same time and affect each other. The free market existed before capitalism existed. It would also be possible to have capitalism without a free market.
Eliminating 80% of the TFWs would be a good start and would free up quite a number housing units. TFWs are preventing upward pressure on wages. Without TFWs, employers would have to offer more money to convince Canadians to take their crappy jobs. If an employer can't make a profit while paying a living wage, their business model is unsustainable and their business should close.
No. There are plenty of things that could be done to lead to a resolution but our government will never entertain those potential solutions, of which many would have to be enacted all at once to have any effect.
Yes - some day. Nothing is permanent. But practically, I don't see it changing any time soon.
This is nothing new. They have been talking about thus for decades. Talk abd do nothing.
No. I suggest investing in a tent.
Honestly, no
I doubt it. Maybe in 30 years lol
Not in our lifetime.
Nope.
Housing crisis will in time. Home ownership won’t.
Nope, how? Only going to get worse.
Of course it will. The housing emergency directly feeds into the productivity crisis, neither of which are sustainable. There will come a point where the unpopularity governments will get from addressing the issue will be worth it.
well, the price of material to build a house will never decrease, and thats alot of the cost plus greed and a general lack of men willing to build them. I build houses for a living and I'll tell you I couldn't afford any of them.
No.
No. There really is no incentive. The amount of tax generated plus the powerful lobby group CREA.
When landlords don't exist maybe.
I can probably count the number of problems the government has solved in my lifetime on 1 hand. Truthfully I’m struggling to name one. You’d be a fool to think there is a fix coming.
No lol this has been a generation in a making it will be just as long to fix, if we get competent leaders asap
Not moving to the big cities… Which is an unrealistic goal. It is less particularly “Canadian housing problem” and more “global major city housing problem”. Vancouverite could be moving to Moose Jaw, SK or Fort McMurray, AB and find much better housing pricings, but barely anyone would because living in the city got more jobs, more services, more convenience, more potential social scene, more opportunities, etc. It is attracting people for its good reasons. The better places always get more demand, either we push the supply to meet the demand or we make the high demand areas less appealing. Vancouver and Toronto are doing both.
No. And I don't understand why people think it's going to be fixed, ever. Look at every 1st world county experiencing the same problems, Canada is just slightly farther along. Australia is not much better, usa is not far behind despite there powerhouse economy. Like wtf makes you think canada is going to be the one to solve the global issue? What makes you think the Canadian government wants to solve it?
Should the housing bubble ever burst, retirement savings for 3/4 of the country would disintegrate. No elected politician can take steps to correct that challenge. There is no resolution in sight. Fixing it now would doom an entire generation who are too old to learn to code.
Not until we get a real leader for the people of Canada. Don't bet on the next round cause Trudeau, Pollieve and Singh are all fucking losers
It is not technically difficult. We know how to solve housing crises. It's financially very beneficial. It's possible from engineering and safety points of view. The problem is political. The crisis will not be resolved until we want to resolve it. Currently, some 60% of Canadians are homeowners and have a financial interest in the crisis continuing. For them, it's no crisis, it's an opportunity.
Move North. As far as you have to go to find the house you want, for the price you can afford.
Housing is no where near crisis in my area of Canada, I wish more people would move here Lots of jobs and plenty of affordable housing (under 300k for full size houses) However to answer your questions, I don't think our major cities are going to be able to resolve their issues for a long time More people are entering and trying to live In the same few cities than they can support and housing scalpers are negatively affecting the limited supply Unless the cities move on to Hong Kong style super apartments and the idea of single detached homes are abolished in the cities.. I don't think it can be improved
Where are you from? I am working as a geo-structural engineer. I rely on high rise and large infrastructure to work. Are you near any big cities?
I'm not near any city, closest to me is Grande Prairie Alberta, but it's still a ways away
The day that we allow year round trailer parks will be the day we give people a chance at owning a home.
Well imho I believe if we stopped sending Billion$ of dollars to the Ukraine…the money would be far better spent on affordable housing in every province
Wishfull thinking but not sending money to Ukraine would not fix anything at all
Pretty sure it is not more expensive in Europe
We'd need a whole party's worth of mp's elected specifically for that one issue, knowing they probably won't get re-elected, and have them follow through on the promise Or We take a card from the french playbook and start chopping heads
Unlikely. This country is massive but 98% of people only want to live on certain slivers of it near a few major metros, so housing in those places will never be affordable for average to below income earners due to the demand.
MPAC is a government tool to tax you as much as they want. Since that tax is dependent on perceived 'value' of the house, it is in 'their' interest to keep prices high. The only way to do that is to have more people chasing fewer houses, I know of no other way....
If none of the leaders up for election / reelection want to fix it, then no.
The problem is that we need a politician with the courage to require corporations to divest from single family homes and possibly risk the economy in the process as it's one of the shaky pillars our economy is, sadly, based on.
I don't think it will. Let's pretend for a moment that there exists both legislative power and willingness to stamp out investors who buy up large numbers of homes expecting future profits from their increasing values entirely - every homeowner only owns one home, plus maybe a vacation home in a quaint small town somewhere that costs peanuts. You still have to account for the fact that even when people only own one home, they are still invested in it as an asset, and expect it's value to continually increase over time. The "nest egg" that so many people work so hard for so much of their lives to secure, often out of a sincere and good-natured desire to secure their retirement and give their children a house, or at least a significant asset. Well Canada is still a country where 66% of people are homeowners, last time I checked Statistics Canada. Most of those people (not necessarily all) have a vested interest in their property values going up. It makes their asset increasingly valuable, and when they pass it onto their children, they too will be that much wealthier. Add onto that group the aspiring homeowners who would really like prices to go down, but when they manage to get a home are then interested in their property values going up - and you have a scenario where the majority of the country is invested in their property values - and thus home prices - to *keep going up*. Even if we pretend that our political system acts in the interests of the people, and that home investors holding tons of vacant homes to profit off of rising prices don't exist, we still have a scenario where the majority of people (and Canada aspires to be a democratic society, so naturally this group, the majority, has lots of collective power and influence) have a vested interest in property values going up, thus making homes less and less affordable. It's a hard pill to swallow to think that common people acting in good faith to protect their properties and assets and retain them for future generations is an essential component of what causes the affordability crisis. Your average homeowner, when asked, will for sure respond that they want affordable housing in their community - just not in *their* neighbourhood, where the poor and the desperate will be attracted to should affordable housing be built, and where property values will fall if the housing supply dramatically increases, simple supply-and-demand. Of course, almost *every* homeowner in *every* neighbourhood will say something to this effect, so where can affordable housing actually ever be built? The woods? Mars? Manufactured goods and services are things that you can always make *more* of given the right skills, technology, and investment. You can't just *make* more good land for housing in highly productive urban areas. I personally would suggest land value taxation (which is not to be confused with property taxes) to solve this issue by incentivizing landowners to utilize lands in ways that produce the money need to pay off the tax, such as starting businesses or densifying so that they can collect rent from many more people than would fit into a single-family home. It's been endorsed by all sorts of notable economic thinkers from all sorts of ideological banners - Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, and so on. Problem is, land value taxation in a democratic country where most people own homes is political suicide, pure and simple. I don't think there's any incentive for people in power, nor investors, nor even the average person, for housing prices to go anywhere but up - thus worsening the housing crisis. The negative consequences of the housing crisis - rising homelessness, economic inequality, wealth transfer through sky-high rents - will simply continue to intensify until society can no longer bear them. And at that point, it is impossible to forsee how things could play out for Canada, but I don't think it will end well.
The problem is the lack of starter homes. Everything being built has three bathrooms - wtf? New home owners are both financially overstretched and yet technically overhoused. The economic logic is what happened to older housing stock starting in the 1930s - these places start to get used as rooming houses or cut up into apartments. Carrying a $5000/mo mortgage is not sustainable, but cutting a house into five apartments (legally or otherwise) creates a lot of housing stock at a comparative bargain ($1000/mo). Speaking of economic logic, it baffles me that in this day and age people aren't moving to the fringes where land can still be bought for a song. My grandfather moved to a small village out past Sudbury without blinking and bought his first house for like $3000. With the internet you'd have much greater job prospects in remote areas and all the space you'd ever want along with the lumber to build it, and yet no one seems to want to be a pioneer anymore. In the end, if people value city life higher than their financial independence I suppose they are doomed forever to be the slaves of landlords and banks.
Moving to the country and getting away would be great but I work as a geo structural engineer. My bread and butter is large infrastructure and high rise. You don’t see much of that away from the big cities
Are you a successful geo structural engineer who owns your own home outright? Or are you a debt-slave geo structural engineer who is bitter about housing prospects and a life-time of servitude for no discernible payoff? I'm not trying to be mean, but someone in your profession clearly has (or could easily acquire) the skill set to build your own home. With marginal land costs and your own labour, you could build a modest home for well less than $100K (and that's not even milling your own lumber). Even if you were earning minimum wage doing gig work on Fiverr you could afford that mortgage, and a person with your education could probably do much better than that online. The Town of Cochrane Ontario is selling fully serviced building lots for $10 to attract residents. If I was facing the prospect of a seventy year mortgage at $5K/mo I'd be seriously considering moving North regardless of the local job prospects.
Easy answer is NO. Possible that prices stagnate but they won't drop significantly. Too many negative economics in a long housing downturn.
Are homeowners willing to take a massive hit to their houses’ values so others can enter the market? No. Only thing that will make this any “better” is a market crash. Which will negatively affect all other areas of the economy, too. People are naive if they think the magic bullet is lowering immigration.
>Is the housing crisis ever going to be resolved Where there is a housing crisis already in full bloom. No. Not ever. Metaphorically, we're going to try and throw a teacup of water onto an inferno that has been burning for 15 years. And we're going to drop the teacup on our foot.
They need to make like 330,000 homes a year to keep up with population. So no it won’t
There is something happening. And if the govt stays out of it we will get an appropriate correction. Banks are over extended and defaults could exceed the margin of cash flow compared to interest and debt buyers of current loans will dry up. There is a battle going on
Not as long as the government keeps letting people come here and make money off the rich
All he does is same shit the orange clown does . Talks shit . Talks about things he knows nothing about and gives us a running report what the guy that lives rent free in his head is up to / should be up to - why does he spend so much money representing cans on travel , mother stays and foot . One guess - it’s protocol he has 1 choice what he order for dinner . If it’s available so me one example of anything being done different while representing Canada on Official Business.
*"Is the housing crisis ever going to be resolved in Canada?"* Not anytime soon, and possibly not ever in this lifetime. It would be easier to leave the country and buy far more reasonably priced properties abroad for the foreseeable future. The blunt truth is that Canada's political, cultural, and economic systems all collectively function more like shackles and handcuffs, rather than being mechanisms that can help the country and its citizenry tackle and solve problems in a constructive and timely fashion. Canada has effectively painted itself into a corner, with far too much of the national economy tied up in unproductive real estate ownership, with high monthly mortgages and cost-of-living dynamics, and there is nowhere near enough infrastructure to adequately support its population of 41 million. Ergo, expect to see a very long period of "stagflation" with no end in sight, and the Canadian dollar continue to decline relative to the US dollar. Watch for it. Next.
Why would it? Ask 'if wages will ever come back up to meet or surpass COL'. Same answer, why would they? Rich assholes hoard wealth and property. Rich assholes bribe politcians to keep wages low and labour in a huge surplus. They get little oversight and all sorts of tax loopholes/general loopholes. Rich assholes would have to want the crisis resolved. Rich assholes are the only ones who matter in North America. Just like wages regularly falling below annual COL/general greed, housing wont be any different. Housing is seen as the best ROI. Incredibly safe as well. You have average people who need a place to live which drives the prices/rent up. Then you have people who want to own where they live which drives the prices up. You have an annual population increase that far exceeds the builds per year. Its a very controlled market at this point where regular people cant afford to even get into it. So its easy for the top % to control the market. The only way housing would come down is via a crash. People would have to dump their golden geese in a panic for any meaningful decrease to happen. You would also have to prevent hoarding of multiple homes. You would need to produce a ton of high density affordable housing to catch up to existing demand, let alone rapidly growing demand. Most new builds seem to be 'higher end' housing. Because why wouldnt they? Without laws companies would pay people far below minimum wage. We would go back to company stores if we had no laws to protect workers. Unfettered capitalism just runs off the rails eventually. You'll get regular people owning nothing while a handful of oligopolies literally control everything. Go look at the US and the federal reserve shows that half the population only own 2.5% of wealth. Thats fucking disgusting. Housing won't be fixed and general QoL will decrease rapidly each year until people snap. Each year you hear people getting paid minimum fucking wage or near minimum wage being blamed for inflation. Meanwhile companies will use any excuse to jack up their prices. Then their prices have a habit of never going back down when that excuse is no longer valid.
Like everything else, the economy will move in cycles.
No.
When the rich start losing too much money
If every Canadian finds 2-4 hours a week to build houses we can solve this together!!
No
We have a uniparty weather people are willing to accept that reality or not idk. But liberals conservatives and ndp put on political theatre and were dumb enough to think by voting a certain party we’re doing our selfs a favour but it’s same party no matter who we vote.
In Holland, all mortgage interest is tax deductible, which helps the rich, but not the rest of us, struggling to meet rising payments...
Not for a while (won't last forever)
Is any politician going to crack down on foreign ownership or investment properties? No.
Not in the near future. Housing prices are being driven by a number of factors that aren't going away quickly, such as high demand and restricted supply. The PM has stated that it's not the government's goal to bring down housing prices. As brutal as that is for people that don't already own, I think the objective is to protect the banking system. Otherwise lots of people would be suddenly underwater in their mortgages. Assuming prices stagnate, it will take a decade or two for incomes to catch up. In the meantime, home ownership won't be an option for an entire generation of people.
Every bubble will eventually burst. When it does, I pity the people paying astronomical mortgages on houses suddenly worth 1/3 of the purchase price.
Housing problem is an oxymoron for a great country like Canada Land we have, money we have, skills we still have, resources like lumber yes we have So what do we don't have? Planning, design, zoning, green belt clarity, and a non political approach to a simple problem I was shocked to hear someone say that we don't have "enough land" to build enough houses
And people not wanting to work hard and save money for a down payment In my province, the 20s and 30s year olds say they want minimum wage raised so they can afford a house and new car
Make AirBnb illegal?
Yes. It's going to decimate the economy but yes.
If we’re talking in more people internationally then we are building homes then I think not unfortunately.
Resolving the housing crisis would require wiping out at least 50% of every Canadian homeowner's accumulated investments (for every 50% housing price decrease is equivalent to every Canadian homeowner becoming less wealthy by 50% than the original inflated housing price value).
Yes, as the baby boomers die off, it'll free up numerous homes that'll either go to their kids or get sold off.
Here's the thing, you can solve the housing crisis in a couple months. Step 1: Ban owning more than 1 house (Anyone who currently owns more than one house, must sell that house within 3 months. Any houses beyond your primary residence after 3 months will be seized and auctioned off) Step 2: Any company that holds multiple residential properties must be non-profit Step 3: No person employed by a non-profit may make more than three times the median average income. Step 4: Should the above three steps not result in an end of the housing crisis, the government will allocate 1% of the GDP towards the creation of a Government housing department, that will build houses at speed, and sell them at cost. That money will then be reinvested in building houses, until the housing crisis is over. Afterwards the remaining money can go back into the budget. Done. Housing crisis over. It's just the majority of people who are in government are landlords, and therefor have a direct financial incentive to Never end the housing crisis.
That’s fucking stupid. Also done would be innovation, and the vast majority of smart people would move out of Canada (we already have a brain drain problem, and lack of capital for that innovation). This is why most socialist communist countries are facist and make it illegal to leave and/or use massive corruption to persuade innovation.
Well he’s not wrong the housing crisis would be over because everyone would leave the country 😂
And no one will have property to rent to those who can’t buy. Fantasyland.
No reason a non profit corporation can't own an apartment building.
There are some for low income. But nowhere near enough for the poor as it is. And none to house those who just think prices are too high so someone else should buy an apartment for me to live in cheaply.
Yes, since the government continues to demonstrate its clear understanding of housing (or any) economics we can trust it to successfully build houses for all who need them after destroying the ability of others to step in and …do exactly that, but without spending taxpayer dollars In reality, separate from demand driven by overseas investment or spikes in immigration, Canada’s productivity per capita has been declining for decades relative to G7. Enormous divergence between Canada and other OECD countries in terms of real investment in productive assets vs passive (like residential real estate). Andrew Coyne articulates this well. You can’t tax and reallocate wealth indefinitely without growing the pie.
No. The pricing crisis would be solved if there was a massive collapse in current values. That’s the only way things would be more affordable. I think a big driver in increasing prices has been house flippers. The last 20 years has seen this profit driven industry boom.
A massive drop in prices wouldn’t make things more affordable, because one of the only things that could do that is a wide spread recession or depression, which would mean more people out of work and less people able to afford houses. And the ones likely mostly affected would be those who currently can’t afford houses, or are already struggling.
Home ownership does not have to define who you are as an adult. You can be successful and happy while renting, and probably better off financially. imo the “crisis” is people’s obsession with mortgage ownership.
Absolutely, as soon as climate change kills off enough people so there is no longer a shortage of housing.
I think if start building more and more houses , I mean expand at a lightning rate . You might see affordable housing in atleast out of MetroVancouver and GTA. I mean Calgary , Edmonton, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Regina and some other capital cities still have some reasonable pricing apartments/ condos. However we need to build build build. Regarding GTA and Metrovancouver you will see detach homes completely disappear like London or New York. Things of similar nature start to happen in Vancouver atleast. Keep in mind with every year passing definition of affordable housing also change with inflation. One day 400K condo will be considered a affordable house . Only way to get this crisis in control is by aggressively building. Lowering Immigration would help eventually with rental prices.
What crisis? Our housing prices are high by design and the government will do all they can to ensure they remain high.
Nope. Ww are 20 years behind housing in most areas of canada..unless ww lose several million Canada's . We will never be out of this.
I think it will. Too much voter rage to not address it. Now, do we address it by building more homes or cutting off health care for the elderly until they clear out? That I’m less sure about.
Not until the ol' fogies start dying...
There is a good chance this and basically ALL our problems will be "resolved" by nuclear war. When that happens nobody will care about not being able to live where you want or use weird pronouns.