Duh they’ll have to save and pay their mortgage. No one said all housing should be free (although I’m not opposed to that either). But let’s start at everyone should be able to buy a home.
You said owning a home should be as inalienable a right as healthcare, (which is provided free to all residents no matter what).
That is really, really different than saying owning a home should be attainable for the average working class people.
I agree with #2 but not #1. A supply response would make #2 possible, #1 would require the government to buy housing and give it to everyone, which I think is a really bad idea.
The Following 3 Users Say Thank You to bizaro86 For This Useful Post:
I guess I’ll be “that guy” and ask about what affordable really means. You can buy houses in Calgary today for say $290k. Are they in the most desirable community? No (maybe by Avenue standards they rate higher, but let’s not delve into this!). That means a 20% down payment of ~$60k, and there are insured mortgages that require far less down. I think the mortgage payment on something like that is about $1500-$2000/month. This is where I begin to wonder where we’re going with this topic.
If we’re saying there are no affordable options to buy, that’s pretty different than saying “I like the houses in the higher end neighborhoods, and they should drop in price so they’re more affordable”. I’m not entirely sure which path we’re looking at here, though?
I guess I’ll be “that guy” and ask about what affordable really means. You can buy houses in Calgary today for say $290k. Are they in the most desirable community? No (maybe by Avenue standards they rate higher, but let’s not delve into this!). That means a 20% down payment of ~$60k, and there are insured mortgages that require far less down. I think the mortgage payment on something like that is about $1500-$2000/month. This is where I begin to wonder where we’re going with this topic.
If we’re saying there are no affordable options to buy, that’s pretty different than saying “I like the houses in the higher end neighborhoods, and they should drop in price so they’re more affordable”. I’m not entirely sure which path we’re looking at here, though?
Can you get a house in Calgary for 290k? Even a cheap one? I checked MLS and found 0 listed.
Well you’d be looking at half duplexes in Dover, so maybe that’s not entirely fair? But then again, that’s kind of my point. If we’re saying that we should have affordable housing policy, are we saying that’s a 1500 foot bungalow for everyone who wants one?
Can you get a house in Calgary for 290k? Even a cheap one? I checked MLS and found 0 listed.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Slava
Well you’d be looking at half duplexes in Dover, so maybe that’s not entirely fair? But then again, that’s kind of my point. If we’re saying that we should have affordable housing policy, are we saying that’s a 1500 foot bungalow for everyone who wants one?
There appears to be plenty of homes under $300k in Calgary if you include row and townhomes. These are available in all quadrants across a wide variety of communities.
The Following User Says Thank You to calgarygeologist For This Useful Post:
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
Last edited by CorsiHockeyLeague; 06-12-2022 at 05:50 PM.
But then saying everyone should own a freehold house is ridiculous and not possible or desirable.
That leads us down the path of excessive urban sprawl, unsustainable tax burden necessary to provide emergency services and infrastructure and higher demand for energy due to longer commuting. There is no way to win.
The only way to fix it is to massively increase supply to drive speculation out of the markets. But that is mostly a municipal (zoning) and provincial (green zone/agricultural zone) policies. Higher interest rates will help somewhat but to fix the problem there needs to be a supply response.
While I agree that supply increases would help the situation (in particular, high-density housing), I'm not convinced that it alone would solve the problem. China has tried to solve its problems by massively increasing housing supply via developers taking on huge debts... doing so has not driven speculators out of the market, but instead has created problems such as ghost cities and a massive housing bubble. I'm not saying the same thing would necessarily happen here, but I also don't think getting speculators out of the market is as simple as rapidly increasing supply.
Then of course, there's another big problem... shortages of building materials...
Speaking of freehold, In Toronto townhouses can be freehold with no condo fees etc, an old friend of mine payed $93k for one in 1988, I thought she was nuts at the time but a couple of months ago she sold it for $925k and moved back to Nova Scotia where she grew up.
The prospect of faster-than-expected monetary tightening has rattled Wall Street, and dragged the S&P 500 deeper into bear territory Tuesday. Investors expect an increase of 0.75 percentage point Wednesday, which would be the largest since 1994.
Edit: Fed approves the .75 percentage point increase
New projections showed all 18 officials who participated in the meeting expect the Fed to raise rates to at least 3% this year, with at least half of all officials indicating the fed-funds rate might need to rise to around 3.375% this year.
Someone more knowledgeable on this please correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the BOC typically lead the Fed by about .5 of a percentage point? That'd put our BOC rate at 3.5% to 3.8% by year-end, and Prime rate at about 5.5% to 6.0%.
These Prime+1% HELOCs may very well be paying 6-7% interest by end of 2022.
Someone more knowledgeable on this please correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the BOC typically lead the Fed by about .5 of a percentage point? That'd put our BOC rate at 3.5% to 3.8% by year-end, and Prime rate at about 5.5% to 6.0%.
These Prime+1% HELOCs may very well be paying 6-7% interest by end of 2022.
That's just a rule of thumb. But the BOC is independent, and will administer it's interest rate policy as domestic needs warrant. Having said that, as the old saying goes, when the US sneezes, Canada catches a cold.
The Following User Says Thank You to Enoch Root For This Useful Post:
Someone more knowledgeable on this please correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the BOC typically lead the Fed by about .5 of a percentage point? That'd put our BOC rate at 3.5% to 3.8% by year-end, and Prime rate at about 5.5% to 6.0%.
These Prime+1% HELOCs may very well be paying 6-7% interest by end of 2022.
With the expectations of hotter inflation, come predictions of higher rates from the Bank of Canada.
Wednesday’s numbers make a 75-basis-point hike from the Bank of Canada in July a “near certainty,” said CIBC’s Grantham, a view shared by most on the Street. But they also suggest that the peak in interest rates could be “higher than the 2.75% we had previously predicted.”
BofA expects the Bank will go even higher with the three-quarter point hike in July to be followed by a 50 bp hike in September. Their strategists now see the overnight rate ending 2022 at 3.5%, and reaching 4% by the end of 2023.
JPMorgan went so far as to say the possibility of a full-percentage point rate hike is now on the table after Wednesday’s data, reports BNN Bloomberg.
Analysts believe we see another 2 percentage point increase by the end of 2022, for an overnight rate of 3.5%. That'd be it's highest point since 2008.
Puts the overnight @ 2.50%, highest level since 2008. Expect this to put Prime @ around 4.7%, and consequently HELOC interest rates at roughly 5.7-6.7%.
Going to be a lot of people feeling the pinch on their variable rate loans.
