Homes will never again be affordable because the system is completely broken (and not broken in the Millhouse expression, but rather in a normal definition). We made housing a commodity rather than a necessity of life and it ended with predictable results.
Now we have the unpleasant decision of diluting the investment of millions of Canadians or continuing to allow millions of Canadians to never own a home.
I don’t mean investors in the sense of speculative parasitic humans who are devaluing life by overvaluing housing.
I mean, people like me who have worked from the age of 15-49 and now own a very modest sized apartment that is grotesquely overpriced and has quite literally enslaved me to mortgage payments for years to come.
If we devalue my apartment, why did I spend decades of sweat and toil to purchase it? Then it feels like I was playing the stock market.
And this isn’t the same argument as the “why should people get free school when I had to pay student loans” since one doesn’t affect the other. In this situation, if the value of homes come down too significantly, it’s literally devaluing my work.
I didn’t create the horrible dystopian system we live in but I do unfortunately have to abide by its rules. And now that I have a tiny piece (on paper but owned by the bank) I am hoping (like most Canadians) to take that piece and cash out to retire on in 10-15 years time.
What I’d really like to see is some kind of national housing strategy that guaranteed people basic housing regardless of their income (even if it’s “zero”). That housing wouldn’t impact the market but it could slow down the unhealthy growth of the valuation of housing.
If we could totally slow housing valuation growth to the normal 2% inflation, while also creating affordable housing for lower income/no income earners, then the system could adjust and that could be a true win win.
If we devalue my apartment, why did I spend decades of sweat and toil to purchase it? Then it feels like I was playing the stock market.
I considered the price of housing to be inflated, so instead of buying a home, I rented and invested the difference in the stock market.
Why is it okay for me to lose the the hard-earned money I invested in the stock market, but it is not okay for housing prices to go down? When stocks go down I still need to pay rent every month, but when house prices go down you don’t lose your home.
Either we treat housing as an investment, in which case we need to accept the risk that prices will go down, or we treat it as a basic life necessity, in which case it must be affordable. We can’t say: “I bought a home with my hard work, so now it must pay for my retirement”.
I never wanted my house to be a stock market investment. It’s just that I want some consistency. Tell me what I’m getting into. Are we playing this game where we bid for overpriced housing as a supplemental retirement benefit? Or are we building a better future where the former doesn’t matter? I just don’t want to get fucked, that’s all.
I never wanted my house to be a stock market investment. It’s just that I want some consistency.
But earlier you also said:
And now that I have a tiny piece (on paper but owned by the bank) I am hoping (like most Canadians) to take that piece and cash out to retire on in 10-15 years time
I.e. you see your home as an investment from which you expect to see a positive return, but now you are afraid that it may lose some of that value.
I get it: I would also like my investments to grow. The reality is that investing comes with risk. People who want to minimize that risk keep their money in a savings account, a GIC, or treasuries. With low risk come low returns, though. There is no free lunch.
Here is what is different: when we overbid for housing and it becomes expensive, real people suffer from homelessness and overcrowding. The same isn’t true of stocks or other investments.
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