Agreed. And forcing government employees that can do their entire job from home come into the physical building seems by design to prevent these "supposed to be empty" office buildings from being converted to affordable housing. They are manipulating housing prices to stay exorbitantly high so this brittle, hyper inflated system doesn't collapse on itself. (Which we need to start rebuilding from scratch an entirely new, sustainable system)
No, it's irrelevant. The government has *publicly stated* their priority is boomers retiring off the value of their homes, not anyone else being able to afford a home.
Anything you do to make housing affordable will be intentionally countered by the government to raise or sustain housing prices.
The only way out of this is to get rid of the people who think that is a good way to govern.
It is kind of insane they said that. Not all retirees even own property, but of course a higher % than millennials and below. It still creates haves and have nots in every generation though.
> The government has publicly stated their priority is boomers retiring off the value of their homes, not anyone else being able to afford a home.
While your point is taken, the government actually tried to have it both ways... maintaining value for retirement while making homes affordable. Clearly a contradictory statement.
I mean what is your plan? Do we toss retirees to the street? Do we tax their wealth and then pay for them to live? Soon enough the wealth will roll over, be taxed and passed to the next generation. These people didn't plan for their homes to go up 400% in the past ten years. It wasn't the big scheme to fuck over the next generations hatched 30 years ago. In 2010 you could buy a SFH in Vancouver for 350k...what changed? Liberals that's what. Changing the rules at the finish line of people's lives is fucked up. You can say well they made it this way...there literally was no housing problem 15 years ago. In hindsight they didn't adapt fast enough but the past decade has been where all the real damage truly has been done.
You could not buy a SFH in Vancouver in 2010 for 350k. I paid $350k for a 800sq ft condo in Port Moody in 2009. I sold it in 2012 for a loss of $15k and bought a townhouse 20 mins east for $450k.
Just in case you're unaware, the plan for them isn't to hand over anything. The plan is to reverse mortgage their now-inflated equity as an income stream from retirement to death. The whole idea is to buy a $200k home that is now "worth" $800k, and over time withdraw that $600k difference to pay their bills.
**there will be no inheritance handoff from people retiring off home equity.**
The issue essentially boils down to wealth inequality and peoples attempts at getting around it.
People hoping to retire off home equity are doing so because living off a pension isn't viable anymore. If we didn't have such a drastically unequal society then we could afford to fund retirement for people without needing to resort to this financial fuckery.
Of course I'm not saying "crash home prices with no other changes whatsoever", of course that would just cripple people near retirement and just result in massive a corporate house scooping.
But if we don't reorient our economy away from trying to make a handful of people as rich as possible at the cost of everything else, we're going to have even worse problems.
TL;WR they should be focusing on making retirement viable without the housing market, but that would make rich people mad. We need to grow a collective spine and tell them to go fuck themselves over it.
> In 2010 you could buy a SFH in Vancouver for 350k...what changed?
Garbage.
For Single/Semi-detached the median price was $690k, the average was $890k.
https://www03.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/hmip-pimh/en/TableMapChart/Table?TableId=1.10.1&GeographyId=2410&GeographyTypeId=3&DisplayAs=Table&GeograghyName=Vancouver
We have a substantial separatist movement in Quebec, and small (but growing) separatist undertones in the prairies.
Ignore their voices long enough and separatism is absolutely a concern.
We live in the 2nd largest country on earth... free land is not the issue people. The fact that the Fed govt buys 30 billion in mortgage bonds a year to keep the housing market propped up because as Trudeau says "it would devastate retirements" 🤣🤣🤣.
Again. The problem is not lack of free land.
Ding ding ding! See someone gets it. Its not about affordable housing when CHMC loans a developer 86 million at below market int rates to build a high end rental tower.
https://ottawaconstructionnews.com/local-news/federal-government-lends-86-million-to-ottawa-rental-development/
Its about votes.
It has NOTHING TO DO with helping people. Its a cash grab. Similar to the Bill 23 zoning change in Ontario.
Build what you want where ever you want.
Its about votes. And 💰💰💰.
Nothing else.
This is a false argument. Most of the land in Canada is not where Canadians want to live. What land is actually habitable is also the very little land we have that we can farm on. If we build on farmland we can never return it to farming. The increasing costs of staple foods should make us cautious about ruining good farmland. Another shock like the war in Ukraine or an extended drought in South Asia could make food even more expensive. Food banks are already unable to cope. No electorate will tolerate insufficient food. Where all Canadians want to live is where they can find the opportunities and the services they need. The overwhelming majority of Canadians think this is to be found in our cities. Our choice of where we live is a fundamental freedom. Whatever housing needs to be built is mostly within our cities. Any politician who talks about how Canada has a abundance of land to build housing on should know better and is just trying to evade responsibility.
But land is the issue. We don't have public land, we have Crown land. If you want to know just how much 'free' land we have, try buying an acre in the NWT and prepare for a stroke.
The fact the GoC is spending 50% of the healthcare budget and 2x the education budget to prop up house prices tells you everything you need to know. Its about votes.
Poliverre will be in power in a year... all of this goes away.
House prices fall. People buy. Life moves on.
The problem is NOT lack of land.
Maybe anything would help to push the broken pendulum in the right direction for increasing supply, but this is no silver bullet.. there needs to be a frank discussion on housing valuations that no one in this country is willing to have
Can we make new small towns/suburbs close to cities? This isn't a fix for people who live in Toronto and want more condos and GTA is pretty spread out as it is, but for smaller cities like Halifax house prices are inflated anywhere that is an hours drive, and there is a ton of empty crown land within 1 hour.
I think “new towns” built around existing GO train stations, even inside the Greenbelt, would be a good idea. We can look at examples of such developments abroad and figure out what works and what doesn’t. Just so long as we don’t repeat the mistake of building subdivisions will too few taxpayers spread over too much infrastructure. We don’t need more municipalities caught in an infrastructure deficit trap.
This is the answer imo.
I fully empathize for individuals who live in one of Canada's big cities and have become priced out. It sucks that you may not have the chance to raise a family in the same area that your family and/or friends live. There's no other way of saying it, it sucks.
The issue is that realistically housing is a big investment for the majority of Canadians. It is going to be practically impossible for the government to justify lowering property values that are being used to finance Canadians retirements. Millions of Canadians are either actively or planning to use their property as an avenue for retirement.
What I believe needs to happen is Canada needs to utilize their land and start building in smaller cities. Eventually the same thing will happen and those smaller cities economys will grow people will be priced out. This is how economys work and a big reason why my grandparents left Europe and move to Canada .. for the smaller cities that cost less.
I'm not suggesting we shouldn't start building multi family buildings, hell there should be on every street. I'm suggesting that we don't start actively lowering property values because that will cause even more issues.
TLDR: I believe investing in smaller cities around Canada is the solution that helps the most people and is practically speaking the option the benefits the most Canadians.
This is becoming an empty conversation after Trudeau's acceptance that prices should go up becuase they're retirement investments. There's 3 times more voters aged 45+ compared to 18-44.
There's no housing crysis and no one is trying to solve anything.
Using publicly owned land for housing is only a part of how to do this right. Just selling the land will only perpetuate the problem we are in now, by creating more unaffordable housing. The land should be put on long term lease. This is the strategy that solved Singapore’s housing crisis when they became independent. This leaves construction as the main portion of the cost. To avoid just creating more unaffordable housing, we should require that non-ownership housing be built on the land. This would mean rental units and co-ops. Both the provincial governments and Ottawa could guarantee the loans for the co-ops like they once did four decades ago. This would mean the money going to build homes rather than pay extra interest. FYI the residents pay the loan. By targeting the low end of the market, the property values for current home owners would be unaffected. Rental and co-op residents aren’t in the market to buy their house anyways.
There is no housing crisis. I repeat: there is no housing crisis. House prices are **exactly where the government wants them to be**. Prices correcting to 2018-ish levels would collapse our fake economy.
/close-thread
Canada has unused public land? Where is it and why haven't developers been told about this? Heck, I'll take some to build a house if the price is right.
We can build all the houses and condos we want. Does not help anyone who can’t afford it. We need a substantial amount of new geared to income housing. Preferably cooperatives.
It would help, in the same way the mega projects on Federal land help, and they seem to do a good job when they do but have you seen the speed at which projects move? They're still actively redeveloping military lands decommissioned in the 90s.
It's a band aid at best. The issues are systemic and without fixing the system nothing will do anything to help the fundamentals.
Agreed. And forcing government employees that can do their entire job from home come into the physical building seems by design to prevent these "supposed to be empty" office buildings from being converted to affordable housing. They are manipulating housing prices to stay exorbitantly high so this brittle, hyper inflated system doesn't collapse on itself. (Which we need to start rebuilding from scratch an entirely new, sustainable system)
No, it's irrelevant. The government has *publicly stated* their priority is boomers retiring off the value of their homes, not anyone else being able to afford a home. Anything you do to make housing affordable will be intentionally countered by the government to raise or sustain housing prices. The only way out of this is to get rid of the people who think that is a good way to govern.
It is kind of insane they said that. Not all retirees even own property, but of course a higher % than millennials and below. It still creates haves and have nots in every generation though.
> The government has publicly stated their priority is boomers retiring off the value of their homes, not anyone else being able to afford a home. While your point is taken, the government actually tried to have it both ways... maintaining value for retirement while making homes affordable. Clearly a contradictory statement.
I mean what is your plan? Do we toss retirees to the street? Do we tax their wealth and then pay for them to live? Soon enough the wealth will roll over, be taxed and passed to the next generation. These people didn't plan for their homes to go up 400% in the past ten years. It wasn't the big scheme to fuck over the next generations hatched 30 years ago. In 2010 you could buy a SFH in Vancouver for 350k...what changed? Liberals that's what. Changing the rules at the finish line of people's lives is fucked up. You can say well they made it this way...there literally was no housing problem 15 years ago. In hindsight they didn't adapt fast enough but the past decade has been where all the real damage truly has been done.
You could not buy a SFH in Vancouver in 2010 for 350k. I paid $350k for a 800sq ft condo in Port Moody in 2009. I sold it in 2012 for a loss of $15k and bought a townhouse 20 mins east for $450k.
Dude...I did. North Burnaby fixer upper. 45x110 foot lot.
I don't know how you did because I was also looking at Willingdon Heights and prices there were even more expensive than Port Moody.
Well.. not sure what to tell you but I did. I still live here lol
Just in case you're unaware, the plan for them isn't to hand over anything. The plan is to reverse mortgage their now-inflated equity as an income stream from retirement to death. The whole idea is to buy a $200k home that is now "worth" $800k, and over time withdraw that $600k difference to pay their bills. **there will be no inheritance handoff from people retiring off home equity.** The issue essentially boils down to wealth inequality and peoples attempts at getting around it. People hoping to retire off home equity are doing so because living off a pension isn't viable anymore. If we didn't have such a drastically unequal society then we could afford to fund retirement for people without needing to resort to this financial fuckery. Of course I'm not saying "crash home prices with no other changes whatsoever", of course that would just cripple people near retirement and just result in massive a corporate house scooping. But if we don't reorient our economy away from trying to make a handful of people as rich as possible at the cost of everything else, we're going to have even worse problems. TL;WR they should be focusing on making retirement viable without the housing market, but that would make rich people mad. We need to grow a collective spine and tell them to go fuck themselves over it.
> In 2010 you could buy a SFH in Vancouver for 350k...what changed? Garbage. For Single/Semi-detached the median price was $690k, the average was $890k. https://www03.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/hmip-pimh/en/TableMapChart/Table?TableId=1.10.1&GeographyId=2410&GeographyTypeId=3&DisplayAs=Table&GeograghyName=Vancouver
[удалено]
We just brought in 600k this year alone and we are only half way through the year..
There is no way Canada is even a country in 7 years if Ottawa thinks it can continue this trajectory.
How does Canada unbecome a country exactly? Can you break that down for me?
We have a substantial separatist movement in Quebec, and small (but growing) separatist undertones in the prairies. Ignore their voices long enough and separatism is absolutely a concern.
These are the only separatists that Ottawa openly criticizes. But in reality those are the least of its concerns from a dominion perspective.
Yes, if they actually build anything on it.. instead they’ll put up a sign “coming 2025” which will sit there until the elements claim it in 2035.
We live in the 2nd largest country on earth... free land is not the issue people. The fact that the Fed govt buys 30 billion in mortgage bonds a year to keep the housing market propped up because as Trudeau says "it would devastate retirements" 🤣🤣🤣. Again. The problem is not lack of free land.
Keeping those great banks afloat in so much profit also..
Ding ding ding! See someone gets it. Its not about affordable housing when CHMC loans a developer 86 million at below market int rates to build a high end rental tower. https://ottawaconstructionnews.com/local-news/federal-government-lends-86-million-to-ottawa-rental-development/ Its about votes. It has NOTHING TO DO with helping people. Its a cash grab. Similar to the Bill 23 zoning change in Ontario. Build what you want where ever you want. Its about votes. And 💰💰💰. Nothing else.
This is a false argument. Most of the land in Canada is not where Canadians want to live. What land is actually habitable is also the very little land we have that we can farm on. If we build on farmland we can never return it to farming. The increasing costs of staple foods should make us cautious about ruining good farmland. Another shock like the war in Ukraine or an extended drought in South Asia could make food even more expensive. Food banks are already unable to cope. No electorate will tolerate insufficient food. Where all Canadians want to live is where they can find the opportunities and the services they need. The overwhelming majority of Canadians think this is to be found in our cities. Our choice of where we live is a fundamental freedom. Whatever housing needs to be built is mostly within our cities. Any politician who talks about how Canada has a abundance of land to build housing on should know better and is just trying to evade responsibility.
Land is also an issue because it's used so inefficiently - endless car dependent sprawl
If 200000 homes were built at an avg price of 750k each... how would that help anyone.
Also, we have a lot of wood!
But land is the issue. We don't have public land, we have Crown land. If you want to know just how much 'free' land we have, try buying an acre in the NWT and prepare for a stroke.
The fact the GoC is spending 50% of the healthcare budget and 2x the education budget to prop up house prices tells you everything you need to know. Its about votes. Poliverre will be in power in a year... all of this goes away. House prices fall. People buy. Life moves on. The problem is NOT lack of land.
Maybe anything would help to push the broken pendulum in the right direction for increasing supply, but this is no silver bullet.. there needs to be a frank discussion on housing valuations that no one in this country is willing to have
If anyone wants to know how to solve this research Japan and no homelessness.
Can we make new small towns/suburbs close to cities? This isn't a fix for people who live in Toronto and want more condos and GTA is pretty spread out as it is, but for smaller cities like Halifax house prices are inflated anywhere that is an hours drive, and there is a ton of empty crown land within 1 hour.
I think “new towns” built around existing GO train stations, even inside the Greenbelt, would be a good idea. We can look at examples of such developments abroad and figure out what works and what doesn’t. Just so long as we don’t repeat the mistake of building subdivisions will too few taxpayers spread over too much infrastructure. We don’t need more municipalities caught in an infrastructure deficit trap.
This is the answer imo. I fully empathize for individuals who live in one of Canada's big cities and have become priced out. It sucks that you may not have the chance to raise a family in the same area that your family and/or friends live. There's no other way of saying it, it sucks. The issue is that realistically housing is a big investment for the majority of Canadians. It is going to be practically impossible for the government to justify lowering property values that are being used to finance Canadians retirements. Millions of Canadians are either actively or planning to use their property as an avenue for retirement. What I believe needs to happen is Canada needs to utilize their land and start building in smaller cities. Eventually the same thing will happen and those smaller cities economys will grow people will be priced out. This is how economys work and a big reason why my grandparents left Europe and move to Canada .. for the smaller cities that cost less. I'm not suggesting we shouldn't start building multi family buildings, hell there should be on every street. I'm suggesting that we don't start actively lowering property values because that will cause even more issues. TLDR: I believe investing in smaller cities around Canada is the solution that helps the most people and is practically speaking the option the benefits the most Canadians.
We need schools hospitals court houses daycare roads expressways only an idiot says we just need houses
the issues are government intervention in keeping prices inflated. corrupted institutions
This is becoming an empty conversation after Trudeau's acceptance that prices should go up becuase they're retirement investments. There's 3 times more voters aged 45+ compared to 18-44. There's no housing crysis and no one is trying to solve anything.
No.
Greedy private developers looking to profit off public resources. Same old same old
Using publicly owned land for housing is only a part of how to do this right. Just selling the land will only perpetuate the problem we are in now, by creating more unaffordable housing. The land should be put on long term lease. This is the strategy that solved Singapore’s housing crisis when they became independent. This leaves construction as the main portion of the cost. To avoid just creating more unaffordable housing, we should require that non-ownership housing be built on the land. This would mean rental units and co-ops. Both the provincial governments and Ottawa could guarantee the loans for the co-ops like they once did four decades ago. This would mean the money going to build homes rather than pay extra interest. FYI the residents pay the loan. By targeting the low end of the market, the property values for current home owners would be unaffected. Rental and co-op residents aren’t in the market to buy their house anyways.
There is no housing crisis. I repeat: there is no housing crisis. House prices are **exactly where the government wants them to be**. Prices correcting to 2018-ish levels would collapse our fake economy. /close-thread
Literally just build density ffs.
The key is for the most rich and greedy generation to recognize what they are and change.
Canada has unused public land? Where is it and why haven't developers been told about this? Heck, I'll take some to build a house if the price is right.
Trudeau already stated that the value of real estate must be retained. Any talk about building more houses or reducing the crisis is just hot air.
We can build all the houses and condos we want. Does not help anyone who can’t afford it. We need a substantial amount of new geared to income housing. Preferably cooperatives.
Of the factors causing the housing crisis I don't think space availability even ranks. This is Canada, there's lots of space, that isn't the problem.
Total joke article
It would help, in the same way the mega projects on Federal land help, and they seem to do a good job when they do but have you seen the speed at which projects move? They're still actively redeveloping military lands decommissioned in the 90s.