The truth is that homes deliver enormous non‑financial value — stability, community, belonging. Those are reasons to buy. But as financial assets, they come with structural constraints: They are expensive to maintain, difficult to trade, impossible to diversify, and usually purchased with significant leverage. The investment component is real but volatile, and its return path can be long and uneven. For home buyers now facing losses, this is not an individualized failure. It is the predictable outcome of society promoting an undiversified, illiquid, highly leveraged asset as if it were the ultimate life goal.
You need shelter. You can pay money and have nothing at the end, or you can put it into equity. Owning a home is the best investment you’ll make in your life. The maintenance costs are trivial. Beg, borrow or steal whatever you need to afford the shittiest little thing you can afford and upgrade later.
House prices going down in Toronto are not a reason to ignore the value of home ownership. They’re an opportunity to get yourself out of rentals. This author is on drugs.
We need shelter, but our governments have stopped ensuring it’s attainable.
Tax policy encourages people to treat their home as an investment by exempting it from capital gains. Other tax policy has made the construction of rental units less attractive to developers. Our federal, provincial, and municipal governments stopped building affordable and low income housing. (There’s also the zoning/NIMBY crap, but that’s been discussed to death)
I generally agree, a home should not be primarily thought of as an investment.
It’s a roof over your head that you have more control over than if you were living in a rental.
And after a period of time, you actually own it and no longer have to keep paying someone else for the privilege of having a place to live.