The parallel housing journeys Mexico and Canada have been on since the 1990s are now diverging. Claudia Sheinbaum’s government has shown that another path is possible. Canada’s misguided strategies, built around supporting financial and real estate industries, are not our only option. We can draw inspiration from Mexico’s decision to actively restructure its housing system.
Most Canadians basically have their net worth in their homes and many treat their homes as their retirement plan. An economy with a solved housing crisis is an economy with a much lower competitive demand for housing, which naturally means lower housing prices, which means most voters in the country seeing their net worth go down and their retirement expectations negatively affected. So, there’s a petty strong incentive to pay lip service to solving the crisis, but a very strong disincentive for actually solving it.
That can just mean adding lots of affordable apartments dropping cost of housing but houses remain high.
Many houses are turned into investment opportunities and become rentals/apartments so building apartments would still ease demand on houses and lower prices.
What does it mean that you’re home is your retirement plan? You’ll sell it when you retire? And what, move somewhere cheaper? Doesn’t that do weird things to demographics?
You sell and use the funds to pay rent to your long term care home until you die.
You can borrow against its value or reverse mortgage it for money to fund your retirement. Or as you said, many choose to sell their expensive city homes and retire to a small town with lower cost of living. That usually drives up prices in the nearby, more desirable small towns.
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Yes, we’ve already seen that with people moving to the Maritimes to retire. As such Nfld, NS, NB have the highest average age in Canada.
The traditional path is that you have a bigger house when you have children and downsize when the kids leave the family home. By the time this happens, the house has appreciated in value and you can have the extra value as cash for retirement.
Tom Sellek takes your home.
These people also don’t understand that, even if their houses end up selling for less, they still get a shit load of money for them.
Like, isn’t wild that for landlords the tenants are expected to pay for the mortgage and the maintenance and then, after the landlord has profitted once by getting their building paid for, they get to sell it and get all that momey a second time, essentially for free?
I really, truly, do not give a shit about the people that demand they get more than they paid for for their house. They can rot in hell.