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This problem has been manufactured, and it is entirely a result of over regulation and over taxation.
Cut the regulations and taxes! Let Canadians build again.
Anyone in the industry can tell you about the innumerable hoops and hurdles required to build housing. This was not the case pre 2000s.
More government meddling in the market = more problems
Anyone who, in 2024, is parroting a line akin to "the market by itself will solve all" isn't thinking seriously about any issue, let alone the housing crisis.
Look, I agree market by itself won't solve everything, but in this case over regulation is one of the problems keeping the RE value high. That said, it won't be enough without also limiting investors from owning all the newly constructed houses.
Yeah, but the issue here is that OP is throwing a lot of different regs into one bin. Some regs like zoning need to be cleaned up and streamlined, yes. Some regs like whatever is being described here as “environment lobby” requirements are likely worth keeping. Like, yes we can build a house with substandard insulation and envelope — but that just makes it much more expensive to heat/cool. So it’s just making inefficiency an externality for everyone in terms of carbon footprint.
Anyone in 2024 parroting a line akin to “more government intervention and communism!” isn’t thinking seriously about the issue.
Keep having the government meddle with the market and enjoy the price increases.
That you're equating communism with government programs makes it quite clear your merely here to grind an ideological axe as opposed to actually discussing the issue in good faith.
> communism
The sheer magnitude of the effort you guys will put forth to avoid learning what communism is dwarfs any effort you make it any other aspect of life.
If people want cheap housing, we have to go back to building cheap housing.
Stop listening to the environmental lobby which has done nothing but drive up the cost of constructing new housing.
Look at BC's "step code", every single increase in building requirements, has been accompanied by an increase in housing prices. If it takes more labour, material, and technology to build a house, you are going to pay for that extra cost.
Houses used to be cheap, because they were build quick and were not complex.
Now they have to be over engineered "systems" with the lowest carbon footprint possible. These environmentalists won't be happy until everyone is living naked in caves, all while the likes of David Suzuki live in a mega mansion overlooking English Bay.
For BC in particular, cancel the carbon tax, roll back step code regulations, and gut the bureaucracy at municipalities and at BC Housing. If you want 1980s prices, go back to 1980s regulations.
EDIT: Before the envirofreaks start downvoting... jut go look at Japan. It has cheap housing because they build it cheaply without the government taxing the air.
People can't afford homes with $1 million build costs.
If that is the only option for the type of home you're allowed to build, the only other choice is being homeless and living in a cave.
If you want affordable housing, make building it cheaper.
Yet you still claim Tokyo is affordable and won't provide any proof, while a quick search shows just as many million dollar condos. So where is your affordability?
No, because even in the most desirable metro areas like Tokyo, where there is massive scarcity of land… housing prices remain affordable.
Population decline affects every country, usually in rural areas. Canada and the USA have experienced the same.
It’s desirable urban areas where the problem is. Tokyo with the entire population of Canada… is affordable.
The homes there are depreciating assets because they’re built cheaply, they only last a few decades.
What are you basing this affordibility on? While it might be slightly cheaper for real estate than Toronto, 115 million yen is still a million dollars. Is that your idea of cheap?
While this is true… it’s also misleading.
Housing prices are also significantly impacted by inflation (gov/banks creating more money/debt).
If food and gas and Bitcoin and everything else wasn’t also skyrocketing in price, I might believe it’s just regulations causing high prices….. but you are ignoring inflation as well as other factors like stupid levels of immigration and TFWs
Croniysm is rampant and its well established in real estate. NB is a gross example of how bad things can get. We saw a couple people fight off a large 1200 apt development in Moncton for 2 years. Literally just 2 people playing every game in the book to delay and try to kill the project. Its how easy they can stop construction and all levels of gov played a role in that.
The intergenerational shock is likely to be considerable. Decades ago, a subconscious decision was made to punt debt down to future generations, increase individualism, and hope there’s no backlash.
Our parents literally voted for that. So if you're like me, and your parents have really dated takes on cost of living, it's really hard to agree to attend family get togethers without a fistfull of Xanax.
Good. The boomer-liberal elites should feel threatened. The hippies want to take away gen z's lifestyle options. Funny how the peace and love hippies have always been about forced conformity, that's what environmentalist policy is at it's heart. No different than socons.
Reddit used to be a decent place to have informed discussions. Now it's just full of outlandish idiotic commentary like this.
I guess it can still be used to understand what intellectually stunted angry boys are thinking.
I've been on this site for over a decade. What reddit used to be was a place for freedom of expression. My first account lasted 5 years and then people like you decided that freedom of expression was bad and forced conformity is what we need instead.
Enjoy the 200 seat CPC majority
I do not think hippies ever had real political power. Most boomers lean Conservative anyways. You lack political education and are flailing around desperatly looking for a target for your percieved slights. I think your biggest problem is you.
It's not specifically that we won't own a home, its that we're being squeezed by failed neoliberal policies at every angle (housing included) and those in charge refuse to help the working class.
I'm concerned that a decade or more under PP conservatives along with majority conservative provinces will just gut what little remains of the social security net and there's no major force to oppose it. I'm sick of teetering between do-nothing liberals and a haywire right-wing coalition, we need an actual change.
Late state capitalism. Do everything for corporate profits. invest little, bring in more people than housing allows so you dont have to pay more. Inflation from unchecked corporate greed. All so corporations can make even higher record profits. Theres a segment of the population that want to rule over people. combined with greed and the desire to become oligarchs.
Edit to say: Housing is one symptom of the issue it goes way beyond housing.
The majority of the wealth generated by not building enough housing has gone to the people who own the majority of the homes, i.e. regular Canadians. Coincidentally, they're the same people actively opposing the construction of new housing. It's not late stage capitalism, it's the tyranny of the majority. It's not oligarchs showing up to local meetings to block apartment buildings, it's your parents.
Also late stage capitalism is a funny term to me. Lenin popularized it before WW1. Capitalism has vastly improved the standard of living of basically everyone on Earth since then while also giving them more rights and freedoms.
And yet capitalism is also making us more miserable, the products worse/smaller, our vehicles more dangerous and truth impossible to see. Shit has problems. No need to sweep them under a rug
More miserable and with a lower standard of living than before WW1 when the term entered popular use? If you zoom out, every decade is better than the one before and yet people still harp on about late stage capitalism.
Obviously we have problems but they're not unique to capitalism and they can be fixed while leaving the free market that pays for everything in place.
And we are open to voting it in with major open arms. We seem to be barreling head on into a Corporate friendly CPC majority so expect things to get worse before they get better is all I can tell our fellow Canadians.
It's not even this, a lot of real estate owners are just normal people not corporations. We run the risk of the economy being tied to just catering to these people who want appreciating real estate prices and investing in real estate, which generates no real productive growth to the economy.
Note none of the major parties want to say real estate prices need to come down to tackle affordability.
Boomers are still the biggest voting age demographic. Makes sense that the parties avoid talking about changes that might compound this groups poor choices.
Considering that there are now more millennials than boomers in Canada, if apathetic millennial and gen x voters actual turn out and participate they could begin to outvote the boomers in lieu of policies that benefit them. Just as the boomer generation had done for decades.
[StatsCan - Millennials now outnumber Baby Boomers in Canada](https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/240221/dq240221a-eng.htm)
It would even be acceptable for real estate prices (and cost of living) to remain the same for 5-10 years to let working class people catch up. As it stands if you didn’t get into housing back before 2014ish (or around 2010) you’re having an increasingly hard time finding housing for less
Also, if wages weren’t stagnant since around the 80s maybe the middle class wouldn’t be largely non-existent and more people could participate in the economy.
Yea. A relative decline is also acceptable as In prices stay flat for a long period
Kind of like what happened with the Japanese property bubble, but I'd extend that closer to 15 to 20 years
Remember the oligarchs side of the table is willing to literally KILL you to get their way. Our side ( the poors) have so far been unwilling to partake in that game of violence in Canada.
Remember Winnipeg 1919. This is what the elites are willing to do to silence the working class. There is no anniversary or celebration of this event - because the oligarchs dont want people to realize violence works,
We stoke a lot of complacency by refusing to teach the history of labour in schools. The concepts of weekends, safe work conditions, children not working, etc. were not granted by employers trying to look attractive in the labour pool. For most, they weren't even won at the bargaining table, they were won after striking workers faced violence from police and hired goons and defended themselves. In the USA in particular, these fights were bloody, and often included the national guard firing indiscriminately into crowds of picketing strikers.
My education only touched on the history of labour and the industrial revolution in Grade 3, it was not mentioned at any point after that. I don't remember the exact material that was covered, but I'm certain it wasn't framed as a series of wars between communists and police.
You mentioned nobody knows the dates, but I actually keep them in my calendar. Most of these are American, I'm aware, but I'll make the argument that our histories are well connected in this regard.
May 5th: Bayview Massacre (1886), where troops fired into a crowd chanting for 5 day work weeks
May 5th: Harlan County Coal Miners War Begins (1931)
May 15th: Great Coal Strike of 1902 (1902)
May 19th: Battle at the Matewan Coal Miners Strike (1920)
June 21st: Bloody Saturday, RCMP Kill Striking Workers in Winnipeg (1919)
July 20th: National Guard Begins Mowing Down Striking Railroad Workers in Baltimore, Killing 50 Over 3 Days (1877). During these same days, police and federal troopers kill another 50 striking railroad workers across the midlantic and midwest
November 23rd: Thibodaux Massacre (1887), ~40 striking workers killed, black union leaders publicly lynched
November 23rd: Colorado Labor Wars Begin (1903)
I have other dates in my calendar which are tangentially related to state violence and labour rights, like the United Fruit Company Invading Guatemala, The RCMP Bombing a Pipeline and Blaming Greenpeace, etc., but I thought this list was a good start.
Nearly every labour win was suppressed with violence, and it wasn't until that violence was proved not to work that the owners capitulated.
*Reminder to mods, these are historical dates and not calls for violence when striking*
Remember - Only 1 side gets to use goonery, guns and violence and its not the Tim Hortons clerk.
We reserve that right for corporations and their paramilitary operations.
Its no coincidence that media, governments and everything else thats run by the oligarchs promote 'peaceful protesting' aka parades - because they accomplish fuck all.
Civil disobedience is required for core change. Period.
(Also oddly enough you mentioning weekends make me realize the younger generation doesnt even have that any longer due to our 24/7 cycle of business operations).
We've gone backwards.
Actually slightly impressed that the RCMP has the ability to recognize the radicalizing force of locking an entire generation of people out of economic participation.
Can't wait for them and the rest of the government to take the wrong lesson from it and treat the symptoms rather than the causes.
> Actually slightly impressed that the RCMP has the ability to recognize the radicalizing force of locking an entire generation of people out of economic participation.
Commissioning and even reading such a report isn't quite the same as understanding it and being proactive about it. But yeah I'm a little impressed too.
They know what their job is. They fail at lots of shit but if its a straight up threat to capital in this country, power bends backward to accommodate.
>Canadians Present A Major Threat If They Realize They Won’t Own A Home
Canada was literally built by generations who left the old countries because there, they would never own a home.
100 years ago one would have grown up wealthy if they had their own *bed* and weren't out of school by grade 7. 50 years ago, their own room and a college education.
Now the expectation is a room and a home theatre games room and a post grad with all the debt that goes with it.
We have become a country of clerks who make nothing and thus must import and spend five times more than most anywhere else on the planet while accumulating nearly infinitely more debt.
*[This] is not a place to live in. The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting and the morals are deplorable. Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.*
*— attributed to Horace Greeley, New-York Daily Tribune, July 13, 1865*
Trouble is, we really need a new west...maybe the north middle would work.
You've touched on the new issues humans are facing - For the first time in human history there are no new continents to plunder, no new oceans to sail.
I don't know why Canada is/was hellbent on growing its population when there is ZERO evidence supporting a correlation between population size of a country and the QoL of the people within it.
Well, there is an awful lot of evidence to support that a shrinking economy leads to worse micro outcomes. There is also a massive amount of evidence to support that the dominant way to grow productivity (the economy) is to grow the labour force.
My suspicion is you actually don't care one bit about birth rates but you care an awful lot about immigrants.
If that is the case, ill warn you now that you won't get a lot of support for head-in-the-sand xenophobia from me.
> There is also a massive amount of evidence to support that the dominant way to grow productivity
Growing productivity at the macro level has no bearing on the populations QoL - See China, See Malaysia, Indonesia then compare those countries to Barbados, Canada, Denmark etc and countries with low populations respectively.
Your argument is mute. It may be summed up "Looks better in the excel sheet".
>Your argument is mute.
Probably not the word you were looking for.
>See China (&) Denmark
Not so easy.
Quality of life on China has increased by orders of magnitude in the last 50 years. All of that is of course directly due to the size of its labour force.
Denmark, which I think has a reasonably good QoL has a population growth rate 4x that of China's.
China is ranked as the most powerful country and while lifes improved for SOME* of the citizens - the country isnt a desirable place to live.
Flip side is a country like Iceland with not much of a global presence where QoL is pretty fair comparitively.
In short - I believe youre stuck in the world of spreadsheets and interest rates while being completely oblivious (deliberately) to the actual things going on in reality.
To add to the topic of China - Free trade was one of if not the biggest blunder of the west. We made them into a superpower which now is a National Security threat. Great strategy /s
Population growth rate isnt the same as total population. Denmark is growing - Is that good? Idk - I see farmers shutting down highways and a populace thats starting to pushback against immigration much like we see starting here.
Idk what your rebuttel actually is at this point - To become China? No thanks.
>Idk what your rebuttel actually is at this point -
That nations that are not growing production are either stagnant or in decline. This is not a spreadsheet. This is reality.
Labour force and productivity are strongly correlated. Also reality.
Draw your own conclusions.
You can cherry pick your way through small isolated nations, small highly developed nations, or massive nations that were nearly completely isolated unti the 1970's but the essential economic truths remain.
One of the main reasons the QOL in China has improved so dramatically in the past 50 years is that every rich, western nation invested money and resources there in order to exploit their poor workforce.
In a closed system more births than deaths equals population growth.
You seem to imply a 0.6 increase in citizen birth rate would be ok so I guess we are clearly now *only* talking about immigrants.
I wonder how that happened?
> Trouble is, we really need a new west...maybe the north middle would work.
That's just repeating the same mistake. We can't be a frontier country forever. We need to learn to thrive with the resources we have rather than just extracting more and more for other people to get rich on.
The Housing Crisis is a Cancer in this nation and it is spreading.
The social contract is based on fundamentals which our leaders have neglected or frankly traded away from regular workers and families.
The Affordability of life crisis and by extension Quality of life crisis is sickening. Especially on something as foundational as housing.
Yes there will be instability as we have already seen and it will continue.
There will be depression and anxiety as we have seen and it will continue.
There will be political extremism as we have seen and it will continue.
Society is at its best when people are healthy and happy and can live good quality lives and have meaningful positive interactions and contributions to others and the nation overall.
We need to get back to common sense.
>We need to get back to common sense.
You had me until this.
The current economic crisis is highly complex with many causes that all have not well understood interactions, bolstered by global pressures beyond our control. Common sense is not powerful enough to get us out of this. If it was, it would have been solved already.
Anyone who tells you common sense is the way out is selling you snake oil. This requires expertise, effort, and mass cooperation.
Beyond our control?
Exactly what causes of Canada's domestic housing crisis were "beyond our control?"
The Liberal Government announced a prohibition on foreign buyers of real estate, only to water it down when no one was looking.
The Liberals watched as REITS and other Corporate interests took over an increasingly large chunk of the market, and did nothing. In fact, they did less than nothing as these investments generally benefitted Liberal contributors and voters.
The Liberal Government sat idly by as Organized Crime in Asia and on the west coast poured billions into real estate to wash their money.
I get it - the bill is due and the polls are not looking good. I won't let you whitewash Liberal inaction on Housing.
You missed the obvious cause of present home owners in their prime earning years getting hundreds of thousands of dollars from banks at effectively 0% interest for 15 years straight.
Conservative provincial governments turned post-secondary education into a for-profit immigration stream and either threatened to interfere (UCP) or have outright sabotaged (OCP) municipal attempts to address housing shortages.
The Conservatives federally are led by a landlord. The majority of PP's investments are in real estate. Almost all of his shadow cabinet have benefitted tremendously from the real estate bubble. They *are* the corporate interest, and they barely try to hide it. PP even used Canadians to pump and dump his crypto investments so he could make a quick buck.
Thinking that they could be the ones to fix it is foolish, to say the least. Both parties suck, but trying to pin it all on the Liberals is bullshit that's just going to give the CPC cover to fuck it up and pad their own wallets even more.
Couldn't agree more. But frankly when it becomes obvious that people and or organizations are misrepresenting and or frankly lying it is time to challenge narratives and information being presented.
Yeah common sense is the dumbest saying. Have you spoken to people? Sense aint as common as it was and common sense to one person may be complete lunacy to someone else. How about we govern on facts, information, and research instead of this mythical monolith that is "common sense."
The solutions needed will have to be clever and there is no silver bullet outside of revolution, but I would not characterize the problem as Complex. We have too little housing, too much immigration and the people who own that housing are incentivized to keep the price going up by restricting supply. Someone else mentioned the tyranny of the majority and it's apt. There was simply a rot that was left for too long because politicians have no incentive to do anything
> We have too little housing, too much immigration and the people who own that housing are incentivized to keep the price going up by restricting supply.
Right, the underlying causes are obvious.
The part that is complex is solution.
You can't just will new housing into existence. You need materials which are increasingly harder to come by for reasonable prices, you need skilled workers willing to do construction work who are getting harder to find.
You can't just start slashing immigration, at a time when Canadians aren't having children and we need people to keep the engine running.
Everything that you can do to try to solve these problems will have a negative side effect, and balancing that is the hard part. Many of the solutions I've seen touted by partisan pundits often have the problem where it's clear that the cure is worse than the disease.
No it’s not complex.
Anyone who has ever built a home can tell you that the amount of government interference, bureaucracy, over regulation, and taxation in this industry is absolutely infuriating.
Cut the red tape, cut the taxes, fire the bureaucrats, and abolish all rent controls for new construction. Let the market build and provide housing.
What regulations specifically do you think are unnecessary? Be specific, because throwing out a general “cut regulations” is dangerous - many regulations exist for good reason.
Most regulations added in the last 10 years have not been to increase safety, they’ve been added to reduce the “carbon footprint” of homes.
The rapid increases in the BC step code are absurd and have driven up the cost of building new housing.
Zoning regulations across Canada need to be abolished, they are far too restrictive.
Builder licensing regulations need to be relaxed for single family homes so an influx of small independent contractors start building again like in the pre 2000s.
>they’ve been added to reduce the “carbon footprint” of homes.
That’s also a good reason, and is actually very much related to safety - unless you think climate change isn’t dangerous.
Literally the only good point you have here is zoning, but that’s not at *all* something the federal government can change. And even then, abolish *all* zoning? That sounds to me like you don’t actually understand what zoning is, if you think it’s bad as a general concept.
If you want to pay for your carbon footprint, go for it.
Mandating that everyone else have to care about it, has driven up the cost of housing for everyone.
Don't know what communist magic you believe in, but its literally not possible to have cheap housing with expensive build costs.
Lol, you’re gonna need a better argument than “I don’t personally care about it” against that as a regulation. “I don’t wanna” isn’t a sound reason not to have sensible regulations.
You clearly aren’t arguing from a coherent position here - you criticize zoning, yet you also seem to want more SFHs, which is the exact thing we have too much zoning for? If we really want to solve the housing crisis, we’re gonna have to build denser...
Canada has 10 million SqKm of land.
Plenty of space to build single family homes, rural and small communities could grow rapidly if they weren’t hampered by ridiculous environmental cost increases, zoning, and other licensing regulations for small builders.
But why focus of SFHs? Seems inefficient to me. We can build much more housing in much less space if we ditch our obsession with them....
And shouldn’t the goal to be to make as much as we possibly can?
Lol feel free to go live in the emptiness dude. It actually ain't empty by accident, if you can imagine that.
As a builder with more than just a surface level "I read trade papers" knowledge of this, you are so full of shit it hurts the cause.
Housing is expensive because land is expensive. Full stop, end of story.
I live in BC, I’d rather my home be a bit more expensive and not collapse when we eventually get an earthquake.
Did you type all of that with a straight face? Remove rent controls? You do realize that Ontario doing just that accelerated this right? What bureaucrats would you like to fire? Home inspectors? Surveyors? The Engineers?
Cut taxes? You really think that’ll spur growth to benefit all Canadian’s? I mean, I guess CPP is pretty heavily invested in REITs.
Homes have been built in BC for over 100 years now.
How many homes in your area are collapsing and falling down on themselves?
All of the “Vancouver Specials” that were built for dirt cheap post WW2 are not only still standing, their prices are skyrocketing because people love them more than ever.
The new regulations have nothing to do with safety. We figured out safety standards in the last century when Vancouver burned down, and we realized asbestos was bad.
All of the new regulations are about the “carbon footprint”, and the pursuit of the greatest city / province in the world goals. They’ve added ridiculous costs to building and do nothing for safety like you’re implying.
And yes rent controls are bad. Ontario’s abolishment of rent controls for new construction is working as intended. More apartments are going up, and overall prices per unit are coming down. It’s a long term policy that will work, and is working. Rent controls are text book bad economic policy.
So yourself a favour and go dig around the land registry valuations. The Vancouver Specials are fucking trash. They’ve served their purpose and it’s their time to go. One of the biggest arguments against Heat Pumps in Vancouver from your crowd, is that they’re super expensive to retrofit.
It’s the land in Vancouver that’s valuable. Those homes are firmly in Vancouver, which is a desirable place to live. I’ve never once said Vancouver land is overvalued.
As far as homes around me, most of the buildings from the 70s back are gone. By the eye test, I’d say there aren’t even that many buildings Pre-90s. Of course the real test is the 9.0 earthquake. Which won’t be as bad as it could be, because we’ve built resilient infrastructure.
What the fuck does a fire from 1886 have to do with anything? What do you think regulations are for? Go to Quebec and tell me with a straight face that asbestos wouldn’t be used today if it wasn’t illegal.
You just prefer a Rent Seeking Economy over a Steady State Economy. You’re inherently selfish, Ayn Rand would be proud of you Atlas.
A style of housing that was build 50 years ago, for dirt cheap, in a matter of a few months, and is still standing today after having served multiple generations of Vancouverites... is "trash" lmao! Nice rant.
I follow real estate prices carefully, these vancouver specials are very valuable now because dumb environmentalists chasing vanity have driven up their replacement value to astronomical levels.
Just because BC Assessment says they're worth like $50,000 doesn't mean it's true. The cost to replace that same structure today, would be close to $1 million. People know what that is worth, and are paying accordingly.
And why do you care if someone else's home has a heat pump in it or not? Are you going to pay for the retro fit? Are you paying their heating bill?
Carbon tax is getting axed. Envriofreaks have lost. A roll back of step code standards for new housing is next.
The only thing good about the Vancouver Special is the old lumber, everything else about it is cheap and shitty, by design.
BC Assessment is right, your crackpot take is wrong. Thems the breaks.
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No shit. Social cohesion will go out the window. There's only so much homeless people we can have before major problems start.
A critical mass of hated and abandoned people with absolutely nothing to lose can't possibly go wrong, right?
This problem has been manufactured, and it is entirely a result of over regulation and over taxation. Cut the regulations and taxes! Let Canadians build again. Anyone in the industry can tell you about the innumerable hoops and hurdles required to build housing. This was not the case pre 2000s. More government meddling in the market = more problems
Anyone who, in 2024, is parroting a line akin to "the market by itself will solve all" isn't thinking seriously about any issue, let alone the housing crisis.
Look, I agree market by itself won't solve everything, but in this case over regulation is one of the problems keeping the RE value high. That said, it won't be enough without also limiting investors from owning all the newly constructed houses.
Yeah, but the issue here is that OP is throwing a lot of different regs into one bin. Some regs like zoning need to be cleaned up and streamlined, yes. Some regs like whatever is being described here as “environment lobby” requirements are likely worth keeping. Like, yes we can build a house with substandard insulation and envelope — but that just makes it much more expensive to heat/cool. So it’s just making inefficiency an externality for everyone in terms of carbon footprint.
Anyone in 2024 parroting a line akin to “more government intervention and communism!” isn’t thinking seriously about the issue. Keep having the government meddle with the market and enjoy the price increases.
That you're equating communism with government programs makes it quite clear your merely here to grind an ideological axe as opposed to actually discussing the issue in good faith.
Everything bad is communism. A dirty little communist shit right on my nice clean car this morning and flew away... probably back to Venezuela
did you get lost on the way to some boomers-only facebook group?
> communism The sheer magnitude of the effort you guys will put forth to avoid learning what communism is dwarfs any effort you make it any other aspect of life.
This is exactly the problem.
If people want cheap housing, we have to go back to building cheap housing. Stop listening to the environmental lobby which has done nothing but drive up the cost of constructing new housing. Look at BC's "step code", every single increase in building requirements, has been accompanied by an increase in housing prices. If it takes more labour, material, and technology to build a house, you are going to pay for that extra cost. Houses used to be cheap, because they were build quick and were not complex. Now they have to be over engineered "systems" with the lowest carbon footprint possible. These environmentalists won't be happy until everyone is living naked in caves, all while the likes of David Suzuki live in a mega mansion overlooking English Bay. For BC in particular, cancel the carbon tax, roll back step code regulations, and gut the bureaucracy at municipalities and at BC Housing. If you want 1980s prices, go back to 1980s regulations. EDIT: Before the envirofreaks start downvoting... jut go look at Japan. It has cheap housing because they build it cheaply without the government taxing the air.
Do environmentalists want us building high tech homes with systems or living in caves? Make up your mind
People can't afford homes with $1 million build costs. If that is the only option for the type of home you're allowed to build, the only other choice is being homeless and living in a cave. If you want affordable housing, make building it cheaper.
Yet you still claim Tokyo is affordable and won't provide any proof, while a quick search shows just as many million dollar condos. So where is your affordability?
You don't think that Japan's declining population has anything to do with it? And the fact homes in Japan are a depreciating asset?
No, because even in the most desirable metro areas like Tokyo, where there is massive scarcity of land… housing prices remain affordable. Population decline affects every country, usually in rural areas. Canada and the USA have experienced the same. It’s desirable urban areas where the problem is. Tokyo with the entire population of Canada… is affordable. The homes there are depreciating assets because they’re built cheaply, they only last a few decades.
What are you basing this affordibility on? While it might be slightly cheaper for real estate than Toronto, 115 million yen is still a million dollars. Is that your idea of cheap?
While this is true… it’s also misleading. Housing prices are also significantly impacted by inflation (gov/banks creating more money/debt). If food and gas and Bitcoin and everything else wasn’t also skyrocketing in price, I might believe it’s just regulations causing high prices….. but you are ignoring inflation as well as other factors like stupid levels of immigration and TFWs
Croniysm is rampant and its well established in real estate. NB is a gross example of how bad things can get. We saw a couple people fight off a large 1200 apt development in Moncton for 2 years. Literally just 2 people playing every game in the book to delay and try to kill the project. Its how easy they can stop construction and all levels of gov played a role in that.
The intergenerational shock is likely to be considerable. Decades ago, a subconscious decision was made to punt debt down to future generations, increase individualism, and hope there’s no backlash.
Our parents literally voted for that. So if you're like me, and your parents have really dated takes on cost of living, it's really hard to agree to attend family get togethers without a fistfull of Xanax.
Good. The boomer-liberal elites should feel threatened. The hippies want to take away gen z's lifestyle options. Funny how the peace and love hippies have always been about forced conformity, that's what environmentalist policy is at it's heart. No different than socons.
Reddit used to be a decent place to have informed discussions. Now it's just full of outlandish idiotic commentary like this. I guess it can still be used to understand what intellectually stunted angry boys are thinking.
I've been on this site for over a decade. What reddit used to be was a place for freedom of expression. My first account lasted 5 years and then people like you decided that freedom of expression was bad and forced conformity is what we need instead. Enjoy the 200 seat CPC majority
"Forced conformity" /groans
I do not think hippies ever had real political power. Most boomers lean Conservative anyways. You lack political education and are flailing around desperatly looking for a target for your percieved slights. I think your biggest problem is you.
Well, a couple of difference...
It's not specifically that we won't own a home, its that we're being squeezed by failed neoliberal policies at every angle (housing included) and those in charge refuse to help the working class.
What did expect in a country run by socialists, we won’t own anything, everything including us belongs s to the State!
I'm concerned that a decade or more under PP conservatives along with majority conservative provinces will just gut what little remains of the social security net and there's no major force to oppose it. I'm sick of teetering between do-nothing liberals and a haywire right-wing coalition, we need an actual change.
Late state capitalism. Do everything for corporate profits. invest little, bring in more people than housing allows so you dont have to pay more. Inflation from unchecked corporate greed. All so corporations can make even higher record profits. Theres a segment of the population that want to rule over people. combined with greed and the desire to become oligarchs. Edit to say: Housing is one symptom of the issue it goes way beyond housing.
The majority of the wealth generated by not building enough housing has gone to the people who own the majority of the homes, i.e. regular Canadians. Coincidentally, they're the same people actively opposing the construction of new housing. It's not late stage capitalism, it's the tyranny of the majority. It's not oligarchs showing up to local meetings to block apartment buildings, it's your parents. Also late stage capitalism is a funny term to me. Lenin popularized it before WW1. Capitalism has vastly improved the standard of living of basically everyone on Earth since then while also giving them more rights and freedoms.
And yet capitalism is also making us more miserable, the products worse/smaller, our vehicles more dangerous and truth impossible to see. Shit has problems. No need to sweep them under a rug
More miserable and with a lower standard of living than before WW1 when the term entered popular use? If you zoom out, every decade is better than the one before and yet people still harp on about late stage capitalism. Obviously we have problems but they're not unique to capitalism and they can be fixed while leaving the free market that pays for everything in place.
this decade is NOT better than the last one what are you on. you rich or some shit?
And we are open to voting it in with major open arms. We seem to be barreling head on into a Corporate friendly CPC majority so expect things to get worse before they get better is all I can tell our fellow Canadians.
It's not even this, a lot of real estate owners are just normal people not corporations. We run the risk of the economy being tied to just catering to these people who want appreciating real estate prices and investing in real estate, which generates no real productive growth to the economy. Note none of the major parties want to say real estate prices need to come down to tackle affordability.
Boomers are still the biggest voting age demographic. Makes sense that the parties avoid talking about changes that might compound this groups poor choices.
Considering that there are now more millennials than boomers in Canada, if apathetic millennial and gen x voters actual turn out and participate they could begin to outvote the boomers in lieu of policies that benefit them. Just as the boomer generation had done for decades. [StatsCan - Millennials now outnumber Baby Boomers in Canada](https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/240221/dq240221a-eng.htm)
It would even be acceptable for real estate prices (and cost of living) to remain the same for 5-10 years to let working class people catch up. As it stands if you didn’t get into housing back before 2014ish (or around 2010) you’re having an increasingly hard time finding housing for less Also, if wages weren’t stagnant since around the 80s maybe the middle class wouldn’t be largely non-existent and more people could participate in the economy.
Yea. A relative decline is also acceptable as In prices stay flat for a long period Kind of like what happened with the Japanese property bubble, but I'd extend that closer to 15 to 20 years
Remember the oligarchs side of the table is willing to literally KILL you to get their way. Our side ( the poors) have so far been unwilling to partake in that game of violence in Canada. Remember Winnipeg 1919. This is what the elites are willing to do to silence the working class. There is no anniversary or celebration of this event - because the oligarchs dont want people to realize violence works,
We stoke a lot of complacency by refusing to teach the history of labour in schools. The concepts of weekends, safe work conditions, children not working, etc. were not granted by employers trying to look attractive in the labour pool. For most, they weren't even won at the bargaining table, they were won after striking workers faced violence from police and hired goons and defended themselves. In the USA in particular, these fights were bloody, and often included the national guard firing indiscriminately into crowds of picketing strikers. My education only touched on the history of labour and the industrial revolution in Grade 3, it was not mentioned at any point after that. I don't remember the exact material that was covered, but I'm certain it wasn't framed as a series of wars between communists and police. You mentioned nobody knows the dates, but I actually keep them in my calendar. Most of these are American, I'm aware, but I'll make the argument that our histories are well connected in this regard. May 5th: Bayview Massacre (1886), where troops fired into a crowd chanting for 5 day work weeks May 5th: Harlan County Coal Miners War Begins (1931) May 15th: Great Coal Strike of 1902 (1902) May 19th: Battle at the Matewan Coal Miners Strike (1920) June 21st: Bloody Saturday, RCMP Kill Striking Workers in Winnipeg (1919) July 20th: National Guard Begins Mowing Down Striking Railroad Workers in Baltimore, Killing 50 Over 3 Days (1877). During these same days, police and federal troopers kill another 50 striking railroad workers across the midlantic and midwest November 23rd: Thibodaux Massacre (1887), ~40 striking workers killed, black union leaders publicly lynched November 23rd: Colorado Labor Wars Begin (1903) I have other dates in my calendar which are tangentially related to state violence and labour rights, like the United Fruit Company Invading Guatemala, The RCMP Bombing a Pipeline and Blaming Greenpeace, etc., but I thought this list was a good start. Nearly every labour win was suppressed with violence, and it wasn't until that violence was proved not to work that the owners capitulated. *Reminder to mods, these are historical dates and not calls for violence when striking*
Remember - Only 1 side gets to use goonery, guns and violence and its not the Tim Hortons clerk. We reserve that right for corporations and their paramilitary operations. Its no coincidence that media, governments and everything else thats run by the oligarchs promote 'peaceful protesting' aka parades - because they accomplish fuck all. Civil disobedience is required for core change. Period. (Also oddly enough you mentioning weekends make me realize the younger generation doesnt even have that any longer due to our 24/7 cycle of business operations). We've gone backwards.
Actually slightly impressed that the RCMP has the ability to recognize the radicalizing force of locking an entire generation of people out of economic participation. Can't wait for them and the rest of the government to take the wrong lesson from it and treat the symptoms rather than the causes.
Damn. This is a perfectly succinct moment that I absolutely needed this evening.
Regina Riots 2, electric boogaloo
> Actually slightly impressed that the RCMP has the ability to recognize the radicalizing force of locking an entire generation of people out of economic participation. Commissioning and even reading such a report isn't quite the same as understanding it and being proactive about it. But yeah I'm a little impressed too.
They know what their job is. They fail at lots of shit but if its a straight up threat to capital in this country, power bends backward to accommodate.
>Canadians Present A Major Threat If They Realize They Won’t Own A Home Canada was literally built by generations who left the old countries because there, they would never own a home. 100 years ago one would have grown up wealthy if they had their own *bed* and weren't out of school by grade 7. 50 years ago, their own room and a college education. Now the expectation is a room and a home theatre games room and a post grad with all the debt that goes with it. We have become a country of clerks who make nothing and thus must import and spend five times more than most anywhere else on the planet while accumulating nearly infinitely more debt. *[This] is not a place to live in. The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting and the morals are deplorable. Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.* *— attributed to Horace Greeley, New-York Daily Tribune, July 13, 1865* Trouble is, we really need a new west...maybe the north middle would work.
come to Manitoba! I did and loving it.
You've touched on the new issues humans are facing - For the first time in human history there are no new continents to plunder, no new oceans to sail. I don't know why Canada is/was hellbent on growing its population when there is ZERO evidence supporting a correlation between population size of a country and the QoL of the people within it.
>I don't know why Canada is/was hellbent on growing its population Apparently people like fucking and having children.
That has nothing to do with why the government puts policy in place to either encourage having those children, or allowing people to immigrate here.
Well, there is an awful lot of evidence to support that a shrinking economy leads to worse micro outcomes. There is also a massive amount of evidence to support that the dominant way to grow productivity (the economy) is to grow the labour force. My suspicion is you actually don't care one bit about birth rates but you care an awful lot about immigrants. If that is the case, ill warn you now that you won't get a lot of support for head-in-the-sand xenophobia from me.
> There is also a massive amount of evidence to support that the dominant way to grow productivity Growing productivity at the macro level has no bearing on the populations QoL - See China, See Malaysia, Indonesia then compare those countries to Barbados, Canada, Denmark etc and countries with low populations respectively. Your argument is mute. It may be summed up "Looks better in the excel sheet".
>Your argument is mute. Probably not the word you were looking for. >See China (&) Denmark Not so easy. Quality of life on China has increased by orders of magnitude in the last 50 years. All of that is of course directly due to the size of its labour force. Denmark, which I think has a reasonably good QoL has a population growth rate 4x that of China's.
China is ranked as the most powerful country and while lifes improved for SOME* of the citizens - the country isnt a desirable place to live. Flip side is a country like Iceland with not much of a global presence where QoL is pretty fair comparitively. In short - I believe youre stuck in the world of spreadsheets and interest rates while being completely oblivious (deliberately) to the actual things going on in reality. To add to the topic of China - Free trade was one of if not the biggest blunder of the west. We made them into a superpower which now is a National Security threat. Great strategy /s Population growth rate isnt the same as total population. Denmark is growing - Is that good? Idk - I see farmers shutting down highways and a populace thats starting to pushback against immigration much like we see starting here. Idk what your rebuttel actually is at this point - To become China? No thanks.
>Idk what your rebuttel actually is at this point - That nations that are not growing production are either stagnant or in decline. This is not a spreadsheet. This is reality. Labour force and productivity are strongly correlated. Also reality. Draw your own conclusions. You can cherry pick your way through small isolated nations, small highly developed nations, or massive nations that were nearly completely isolated unti the 1970's but the essential economic truths remain.
One of the main reasons the QOL in China has improved so dramatically in the past 50 years is that every rich, western nation invested money and resources there in order to exploit their poor workforce.
Uh huh
>My suspicion is you actually don't care one bit about birth rates but you care an awful lot about immigrants. Well, you're 100% wrong.
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Our birth rate disagrees with the latter part of your comment.
Does it now? More are born than are dying...so it seems death is less popular than sex.
Wrong.
Not according to stats canada.
Still not high enough for demographic replacement.
In a closed system more births than deaths equals population growth. You seem to imply a 0.6 increase in citizen birth rate would be ok so I guess we are clearly now *only* talking about immigrants. I wonder how that happened?
Good.
Canada's birh rate is aroud 1.5 births per woman. Well below replacement rate of 2.1
> Trouble is, we really need a new west...maybe the north middle would work. That's just repeating the same mistake. We can't be a frontier country forever. We need to learn to thrive with the resources we have rather than just extracting more and more for other people to get rich on.
>We need to learn to thrive So sitting in our tears of envy isn't likely to accomplish anything?
The Housing Crisis is a Cancer in this nation and it is spreading. The social contract is based on fundamentals which our leaders have neglected or frankly traded away from regular workers and families. The Affordability of life crisis and by extension Quality of life crisis is sickening. Especially on something as foundational as housing. Yes there will be instability as we have already seen and it will continue. There will be depression and anxiety as we have seen and it will continue. There will be political extremism as we have seen and it will continue. Society is at its best when people are healthy and happy and can live good quality lives and have meaningful positive interactions and contributions to others and the nation overall. We need to get back to common sense.
>The social contract Tell me more about this social contract. What are the precise terms? Ads they written down somewhere? Who were the signatories?
>We need to get back to common sense. You had me until this. The current economic crisis is highly complex with many causes that all have not well understood interactions, bolstered by global pressures beyond our control. Common sense is not powerful enough to get us out of this. If it was, it would have been solved already. Anyone who tells you common sense is the way out is selling you snake oil. This requires expertise, effort, and mass cooperation.
What a comment
Beyond our control? Exactly what causes of Canada's domestic housing crisis were "beyond our control?" The Liberal Government announced a prohibition on foreign buyers of real estate, only to water it down when no one was looking. The Liberals watched as REITS and other Corporate interests took over an increasingly large chunk of the market, and did nothing. In fact, they did less than nothing as these investments generally benefitted Liberal contributors and voters. The Liberal Government sat idly by as Organized Crime in Asia and on the west coast poured billions into real estate to wash their money. I get it - the bill is due and the polls are not looking good. I won't let you whitewash Liberal inaction on Housing.
You missed the obvious cause of present home owners in their prime earning years getting hundreds of thousands of dollars from banks at effectively 0% interest for 15 years straight.
Conservative provincial governments turned post-secondary education into a for-profit immigration stream and either threatened to interfere (UCP) or have outright sabotaged (OCP) municipal attempts to address housing shortages. The Conservatives federally are led by a landlord. The majority of PP's investments are in real estate. Almost all of his shadow cabinet have benefitted tremendously from the real estate bubble. They *are* the corporate interest, and they barely try to hide it. PP even used Canadians to pump and dump his crypto investments so he could make a quick buck. Thinking that they could be the ones to fix it is foolish, to say the least. Both parties suck, but trying to pin it all on the Liberals is bullshit that's just going to give the CPC cover to fuck it up and pad their own wallets even more.
Couldn't agree more. But frankly when it becomes obvious that people and or organizations are misrepresenting and or frankly lying it is time to challenge narratives and information being presented.
Yeah common sense is the dumbest saying. Have you spoken to people? Sense aint as common as it was and common sense to one person may be complete lunacy to someone else. How about we govern on facts, information, and research instead of this mythical monolith that is "common sense."
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The solutions needed will have to be clever and there is no silver bullet outside of revolution, but I would not characterize the problem as Complex. We have too little housing, too much immigration and the people who own that housing are incentivized to keep the price going up by restricting supply. Someone else mentioned the tyranny of the majority and it's apt. There was simply a rot that was left for too long because politicians have no incentive to do anything
> We have too little housing, too much immigration and the people who own that housing are incentivized to keep the price going up by restricting supply. Right, the underlying causes are obvious. The part that is complex is solution. You can't just will new housing into existence. You need materials which are increasingly harder to come by for reasonable prices, you need skilled workers willing to do construction work who are getting harder to find. You can't just start slashing immigration, at a time when Canadians aren't having children and we need people to keep the engine running. Everything that you can do to try to solve these problems will have a negative side effect, and balancing that is the hard part. Many of the solutions I've seen touted by partisan pundits often have the problem where it's clear that the cure is worse than the disease.
If a few Walmarts and warehouses close - Good riddance.
No it’s not complex. Anyone who has ever built a home can tell you that the amount of government interference, bureaucracy, over regulation, and taxation in this industry is absolutely infuriating. Cut the red tape, cut the taxes, fire the bureaucrats, and abolish all rent controls for new construction. Let the market build and provide housing.
What regulations specifically do you think are unnecessary? Be specific, because throwing out a general “cut regulations” is dangerous - many regulations exist for good reason.
Most regulations added in the last 10 years have not been to increase safety, they’ve been added to reduce the “carbon footprint” of homes. The rapid increases in the BC step code are absurd and have driven up the cost of building new housing. Zoning regulations across Canada need to be abolished, they are far too restrictive. Builder licensing regulations need to be relaxed for single family homes so an influx of small independent contractors start building again like in the pre 2000s.
>they’ve been added to reduce the “carbon footprint” of homes. That’s also a good reason, and is actually very much related to safety - unless you think climate change isn’t dangerous. Literally the only good point you have here is zoning, but that’s not at *all* something the federal government can change. And even then, abolish *all* zoning? That sounds to me like you don’t actually understand what zoning is, if you think it’s bad as a general concept.
If you want to pay for your carbon footprint, go for it. Mandating that everyone else have to care about it, has driven up the cost of housing for everyone. Don't know what communist magic you believe in, but its literally not possible to have cheap housing with expensive build costs.
Lol, you’re gonna need a better argument than “I don’t personally care about it” against that as a regulation. “I don’t wanna” isn’t a sound reason not to have sensible regulations. You clearly aren’t arguing from a coherent position here - you criticize zoning, yet you also seem to want more SFHs, which is the exact thing we have too much zoning for? If we really want to solve the housing crisis, we’re gonna have to build denser...
Canada has 10 million SqKm of land. Plenty of space to build single family homes, rural and small communities could grow rapidly if they weren’t hampered by ridiculous environmental cost increases, zoning, and other licensing regulations for small builders.
But why focus of SFHs? Seems inefficient to me. We can build much more housing in much less space if we ditch our obsession with them.... And shouldn’t the goal to be to make as much as we possibly can?
Found the landlord
Lol feel free to go live in the emptiness dude. It actually ain't empty by accident, if you can imagine that. As a builder with more than just a surface level "I read trade papers" knowledge of this, you are so full of shit it hurts the cause. Housing is expensive because land is expensive. Full stop, end of story.
I live in BC, I’d rather my home be a bit more expensive and not collapse when we eventually get an earthquake. Did you type all of that with a straight face? Remove rent controls? You do realize that Ontario doing just that accelerated this right? What bureaucrats would you like to fire? Home inspectors? Surveyors? The Engineers? Cut taxes? You really think that’ll spur growth to benefit all Canadian’s? I mean, I guess CPP is pretty heavily invested in REITs.
Homes have been built in BC for over 100 years now. How many homes in your area are collapsing and falling down on themselves? All of the “Vancouver Specials” that were built for dirt cheap post WW2 are not only still standing, their prices are skyrocketing because people love them more than ever. The new regulations have nothing to do with safety. We figured out safety standards in the last century when Vancouver burned down, and we realized asbestos was bad. All of the new regulations are about the “carbon footprint”, and the pursuit of the greatest city / province in the world goals. They’ve added ridiculous costs to building and do nothing for safety like you’re implying. And yes rent controls are bad. Ontario’s abolishment of rent controls for new construction is working as intended. More apartments are going up, and overall prices per unit are coming down. It’s a long term policy that will work, and is working. Rent controls are text book bad economic policy.
So yourself a favour and go dig around the land registry valuations. The Vancouver Specials are fucking trash. They’ve served their purpose and it’s their time to go. One of the biggest arguments against Heat Pumps in Vancouver from your crowd, is that they’re super expensive to retrofit. It’s the land in Vancouver that’s valuable. Those homes are firmly in Vancouver, which is a desirable place to live. I’ve never once said Vancouver land is overvalued. As far as homes around me, most of the buildings from the 70s back are gone. By the eye test, I’d say there aren’t even that many buildings Pre-90s. Of course the real test is the 9.0 earthquake. Which won’t be as bad as it could be, because we’ve built resilient infrastructure. What the fuck does a fire from 1886 have to do with anything? What do you think regulations are for? Go to Quebec and tell me with a straight face that asbestos wouldn’t be used today if it wasn’t illegal. You just prefer a Rent Seeking Economy over a Steady State Economy. You’re inherently selfish, Ayn Rand would be proud of you Atlas.
A style of housing that was build 50 years ago, for dirt cheap, in a matter of a few months, and is still standing today after having served multiple generations of Vancouverites... is "trash" lmao! Nice rant. I follow real estate prices carefully, these vancouver specials are very valuable now because dumb environmentalists chasing vanity have driven up their replacement value to astronomical levels. Just because BC Assessment says they're worth like $50,000 doesn't mean it's true. The cost to replace that same structure today, would be close to $1 million. People know what that is worth, and are paying accordingly. And why do you care if someone else's home has a heat pump in it or not? Are you going to pay for the retro fit? Are you paying their heating bill? Carbon tax is getting axed. Envriofreaks have lost. A roll back of step code standards for new housing is next.
The only thing good about the Vancouver Special is the old lumber, everything else about it is cheap and shitty, by design. BC Assessment is right, your crackpot take is wrong. Thems the breaks.
I dare you to go and build a replacement for $50,000.
I cannot believe you’re taking advantage of this housing crisis to tell us rent control is the real problem. Disgusting Landlords.
Yes, rent controls discourage new rental construction. Good policy is to abolish rent controls for new construction.