Quote:
Originally Posted by opendoor
I think you're ignoring the generational divide though. Maybe a 40-50 year old who owns their house wouldn't want to trade places. But a 20 year old who has no realistic path of ever owning a house might feel differently.
My grandparents immigrated to Canada in the early '60s and within 3 years of working menial jobs, they were able to buy a house in Vancouver for about $9K ($88K in today's dollars). And within a few years after that they bought a brand new house for $15K (about $140K in today's dollars).
They sacrificed a lot to be able to do that; my grandmother worked in an era where a lot of women didn't, they lived with family the first couple of years in Canada, lived extremely modestly, and so on. But back then even low wage earners could scrimp and save to buy a house, which simply isn't the case now.
Nowadays, those exact houses, which are the same size they ever were and for the most part have the same quality finishes, are worth about $2M; 15-20x more expensive in real terms. To buy one of those houses now even with a minimum down payment would require saving up $100K and having a $350K household income to service the mortgage. So now you'd need to be in the top 1-2% of household income to buy the exact same house that a janitor could buy in the 1960s.
|
Housing affordability is worse, yes. But you’ve posted data here showing that it’s only in the last few years that housing affordability in Canada became worse than it was in the early 80s. Did I get that right, or am I misremembering?
The point I was making was that Canadians don’t want to pay for the level of public services we expect to enjoy. Again, you’ve pointed out yourself that Canadians are not highly taxed relative to our peers and that we don’t spend excessively on public health care. It sounds like we’re on the same page here.
So what’s your preferred policy solution to Canada’s health capacity crisis and demographic challenges?