Tax domestic speculators. It's such an easy solution. It's going to be painful because it's been allowed to happen for so long. Canadians are doing this to other Canadians but no politician wants to do this to help end this gross cycle of exploitation, add in the fact provinces like Ontario that remove things like rent control and things become even further out of reach.
but no politician wants to do this
Because it's political suicide. They have a Silver Tsunami coming up, and thanks to a) many companies weakening retirement plans (defined benefit? LOL), b) recessions wiping out people's savings, there's been a concerted shift to using home-ownership to bandage over old-age income security.
Prior to this, moderate investment and company pensions were enough to see you through, but that's largely gone--just another part of our society that we sold off so that the rich can get more tax breaks. The cherry-on-top? We sold off LTCs to private companies, so elder-care is now a for-profit luxury.
The only way Boomers can retire is home equity. Heck, it's the only thing fuelling our economy in general.
Of course, this is fixable: tax the rich. Pay for a society that works for everyone, not just Galen Weston or David Thompson. It would have been easier to do this back in the 1990s (before the problem really started in earnest) or before 2018 (when it got fully out of control) but it's still possible.
This is quickly becoming a crisis for the next twenty years but nobody is doing a god damned thing to actually fix the cost of living issue.
We need to vote in people affected by this, not benefitting from it.
Do you have the time or resources to run for office?
Wealth and power is a feedback loop.
I would love to pump some baby batter into my gf and start having a kids, can't do that while we're stuck living paycheque to paycheque on a combined 130k in my parents basement.
I hate the beginning of this comment
I hate that I can't do it so I guess we're even?
You technically can, but she has to be on the pill.
She does have an iud so I could before, but her Dr put her on medication for her rheumatoid arthritis last year that causes birth defects so at the moment we gotta double up. Even if that wasn't the case, still couldn't afford to have a kid right now.
How bad is housing in Canada right now? This is not a prominent topic here in Europe, so let's say you look for a 200 m² house in the outer parts of a bigger city, what would be the price for that?
Start with income perspective. The average annual salary in 2022 was just under $60,000. Nationally, the average house price in summer 2023 was a bit over $750,000. These incomes and house prices are affected pretty strongly by the lower incomes and lower housing costs in rural Canada vs the major cities like Vancouver and Toronto
So.. shift attention to the cities. In Toronto and Vancouver, the average house price is around $1,200,000 give or take a little. You need at a combined income of least $280,000 to qualify for a house like that (or have substantial equity built up in previous home purchases). Most people are earning at or close to the national average... with a few - especially those in STEM careers (sw devs for example) up over $100,000 per year.
I live in a suburb city (I own my house)... it's inconveniently located if you want/need to be in the core city centre for work (I'm about 3 hours commute right now if I needed to go in to a downtown office.. thankfully I don't). Houses on my street are relatively new (most built in 2019 and 2020). The houses currently for sale are listing between $1,250,000 and $2,350,000.
Renting can be really awful in Canada too... you get stunts like this https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/this-is-egregious-sisters-shocked-when-toronto-landlord-raises-rent-to-9-500-a-month-1.6548845 simply because they can...
tl;dr Housing in Canada is bonkers
Thanks for the insight, this is crazy. We are looking for houses right now here in Germany, and and the last one we visited was 269 m² for around 500.000€ and 30 minutes drive away of the inner city of the next major city. I hope politics does something about your problem, it can not stay like this.
The issue is that investors are buying houses 100k over asking price same or next day because they don't plan on living in them, they just want to make the investment and prop up the housing market bubble for as long as they can.
Speculators need to be heavily taxed. We need to discourage this and put a stop to it ASAP.
I bought a townhouse that was 1700sqft (~150m^2) in Markharm, a suburb of the GTA (1hr to the center of toronto by car, 1.5hrs by bus), in a pretty bad area for 800K CAD during a slight market crash during covid. By all accounts this was an exceptionally good deal, by realtor didn't think we could get anything for under 900. I sold that townhouse for 1.1 mil in 2023.
There are a few people in my family that are married with good jobs and own their own homes and they are not having children. They are focusing on other things. I am proud of them as I am proud of those in my family who have chosen to have children. This does not need to be one more point of division. It is OK to have kids and it is OK to not have kids.
Oh hey! It's literally describing my current situation.
Got engaged, got a promotion, have solid long term housing ("renting" from family)
Still can't keep more than 1.5k in savings month over month. No way in hell in having a baby in these conditions... and i feel like I'm better off than most
Imagine wanting to have a child in times where the only way to afford a house is to never purchase a single thing with your next 4 decades worth of pay cheques from a high paying job.
Then come find out you get to finally own a single square foot of land because everyone else comes in and swoops up everywhere else or the bar rises quicker than you could ever hope to catch up with or some other dumb reason.
Financial capitalism is another factor. Investing in the housing to have financial products with high financial return. It's part of the speculation allowed in our neoliberal economy.
Add that the incomes are the same for decades and you end up with this. Housing or better having a decent place to live has to be a fundamental right.
There’s too many people on this planet anyways.
By what measure? Industry and a small minority of extremely wealthy people are setting the agenda to destroy the planet, not average people.
By what measure?
Literally every objective measure of our planet's health? We are permanently changing the atmosphere, simultaneously causing a mass extinction event, and virtually every environmental preserve and tourist attraction is facing huge damage from overuse.
Every human being has a carbon cost, none of us are carbon negative or neutral, until we build systems that change that, every extra human we add is destroying our planet faster.
I mean if you're concerned about the actual planet then don't worry the Earth will survive with or without humans lol. If your concern is our survival as a species then that's a different story.
Look at what we did to the planet with the current (and smaller) population sizes. You think adding MORE people isn’t going to become an issue?
We are, in the near future, going to have a mass migration of people away from no longer inhabitable land.
Those people you’re talking about aren’t going to give up power and let “average people” right the ship. And those same “average people” have been placated and conditioned to buy shiny trinkets and celebrate touchdowns and home runs instead of organizing and uprooting the real problem makers.
By just about every measure? Would you rather have a smaller population and the same standard of living, or a larger population and a considerably lower standard of living? The earth's resources and abilities to heal itself are finite. The more people we have, the more restrictive our quality of life needs to be. Instead of having a house on some usable land, a garden, and some chickens, you're forced into a stacked box, with one window, and no yard, surrounded by other stacked boxes. Plus the impact of everything you do is magnified. Oh, you want to drive to the store? Better walk 20 blocks instead, because we're already at our carbon capacity. That last example was hyperbole, but it's not that far fetched. Basically a lower population gives us a lot more leeway to live our lives comfortably.
Totally agree. We should have <1B people living like kings, not 10B people living like peasants. A lot of environmentally unsustainable things become perfectly sustainable if there are fewer people on the planet. Like, we shouldn't have to be worried about the impact of beef production or overfishing - the planet should be able to sustain the number of humans that want to eat those things. At 8-10B it obviously can't.
Ugh, I hate this argument. I always wonder: so what do you propose ? Many countries' retirement system are built on the active population paying for the retired population. What do you think happens when there are more retired than actives?
Low birth rate is a real serious issue for many countries. The problem is not overpopulation, it's poverty and how we manage our resources.
Capitalism and retirement is set up as a pyramid scheme. We shouldn't be looking at situations that were recklessly arranged assuming endless growth and saying "how do we prevent population contraction" - that's insanity. We need to figure out how to retool society for a post-growth world.
If the only way to prevent the music from stopping is a pyramid scheme, we're all fucked.
at the same time we've had the highest immigration numbers. Canada was always immigrant country. I don't see it as a negative thing in general. Lots of immigrants and their children are higher motivated individuals so it could be a good thing. One thing to watch out for is erosion of values in society. So just welcome newcomers and show them what does it mean to be Canadian 😃
But immigration is mostly made up of refugees who are usually pretty poor, and they come here and we have no housing for them. It's honestly embarrassing that we welcome so many and yet they end up in shelters.
I have long speculated that the reason why birthrate goes down in societies with a higher standard of living is because a higher standard of living effectively reduces the "carrying capacity" of the environment for humans. Which is not a bad thing, IMO, it's just the underlying explanatory reason for why we see this pattern. Access to family planning and such is just part of the mechanism this operates by.
A common pattern in population dynamics is the S-curve, where population initially grows in an exponential-like pattern and then flattens back out again as it approaches the environment's carrying capacity. I think we'll see that with the human population too, and we are in the unique position as a species of being able to somewhat control where that carrying capacity will be. In this specific case here, we could boost our capacity for population growth by making housing more affordable.
What's going on Canada?
🍁 Meta
🗺️ Provinces / Territories
🏙️ Cities / Regions
🏒 Sports
Hockey
Football (NFL)
unknownFootball (CFL)
unknownBaseball
unknownBasketball
unknownSoccer
unknown💻 Universities
👒 Lifestyle
coming soon
💵 Finance / Shopping
🗣️ Politics
🍁 Other
Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here: