Quote:
Originally Posted by timun
I think the Liberals' failure to address housing affordability in any measurable way is going to be what ultimately sinks Trudeau. It's insanely expensive to find a place to live in this country, and real estate itself is at this point a giant Ponzi scheme that sucks a preposterously disproportionate amount of capital from our economy. The underlying fundamentals make no sense whatsoever. It's a generational issue that started about 20 years ago, but the complete and utter failure to act now and at any time in the last eight years is just... bafflingly stupid.
My elderly neighbour's family recently moved her into a nursing home and put her house on the market for $650,000. It was gone in less than a month. The house three doors down from me went up on the market this week: they want about $750,000, for what is frankly very much a fixer-upper. Three years ago they would have been lucky to get $550,000 for them; eight years ago perhaps $450,000. It's nucking futs out there.
Canadian housing is a modern-day "tulip mania" that cannot possibly do anything but burst, hard.
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This is a national disaster that half the population ignores because they are making free money. It cannot be good that the best way to make money is to borrow enough from the bank to buy a house and then sit on it. Those who are already rich enough to get a housing loan make money off of each other and speculative investors while working people get further away from affording housing. A friend of mine saw someone buy four new-build townhouses with suitcases full of cash on behalf of an investor. Good luck competing with that by having a job and T4 income.
I don't think the government caused this directly and it's going to be very hard for the government to fix without upsetting every home owner. My guess is that the first step needs to be massive tax on capital gains in homes, even larger for non-primary residence. That policy would be suicide for any government, especially because young people don't vote. Millennials just bought into a high market and would be underwater on their houses in a crash and older people are relying on their home value to carry them into retirement