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Great Canadian housing bailout: How real estate unaffordability is being propped up
(nationalpost.com)
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Why would you be surprised?
More than 65% of Canadian homes are owned by the family that live in them. Given the propensity for owners to be older than average, and that the older you are the more likely you are to vote, that means the majority of voters have a vested interest in the price of their property.
The thing people fail to realize is that if we want affordable homes, current house values have to drop (by quite a bit) You can't simply build new cheap houses, but have all other houses stay expensive. It's not possible.
What's more concerning is that the goverment fails to realize that expensive housing is killing the economy.
Forget about the fact a huge chunk of money is going into an unproductive asset. Young people and immigrants who can't afford housing are gonna start looking elsewhere (US for example).
Who's gonna pay taxes to sustain the older folks in their empty million dollars SFH??
I think of the two concerns, the unproductive asset is more serious. With all our investment dollars tied up, we will struggle to compete globally.
The young people looking elsewhere is less concerning. I know lots of young people talk about moving to the USA, but that is not so easy these days. Immigration to the USA from kinda is not trivial, and with unemployment in the USA slowly increasing, it is only going to get worse.
I'd bet on US having a much more robust and faster recovery than Canada. Their unemployment while slowly increasing, historically is still very low, and I'd guess if you're in a specialized field immigration to US as a Canadian would be easy. I'm personally contemplating it.
And with bommers retiring I think the labour shortages will be with us for a while.