Imagine if people burned investment homes to the geound on a regular basis. They would eventually become uninsurable.
Do you want to start?
Construction is slowing faster than demand, especially for ownership housing (particularly condominiums). Weak presales, high building costs, financing difficulties, and elevated inventories of unsold units are causing developers to delay or cancel projects.
Then why the hell aren’t more of you anti-property?
edit: Somebody responded with something funnier than I expected, and I’m leaving this here because I can actually see it being something some of you read and agree with without ever thinking twice. There’s a lot of good reasons why public housing isn’t a very pleasant way to live, but this is definitely my favourite to talk about when people start saying landlords are motivated to do anything for them: https://www.readthemaple.com/mp-landlords/
Because renting from the government isn’t a good option either. I’ve done that and you couldn’t pay me to do it again. If I’m gonna be stuck renting, give me a landlord who’s motivated to fix shit when I say it’s broken. That is emphatically not the government.
I don’t know what kind of altruistic landlords you’re renting from, but all the ones I have had dragged their feet and eventually “fixed” the problem in the cheapest and bare-minimum-that’s-technically-true way possible. They’d love nothing more than for me to leave so they could jack the rent 100%.
Mom and pop landlords, perhaps? That’s why I avoid those.
Oh yeah wow, I wonder if there’s a reason why socialized housing in Canada would be unpleasant.
This isn’t what I was suggesting either way, at least not directly, but I think it’s very funny to live in Canada and talk about landlords being motivated to fix things even though they’re hoarding shelter, and say that’s better because the same system that has purposefully insufficient disability support programs also doesn’t seem to want public housing to be comfortable; it’s almost like they’d do it on purpose.
Somebody better talk to that “government,” and get them to shake their heads straight, amirite? https://www.readthemaple.com/mp-landlords/
I mean, find a party that actually wants proper government-run housing and you’ll change my mind. Alternatively, you can explain what you mean by being anti-property if not that. Because, as a person with a disability who’s experienced both the housing and support, I can throw pretty much every government in this country farther than I trust them.
That’s not really what they were saying. It’s also a solvable problem.
Not in Canada it’s not. We can’t even solve proper rent control, which includes vacancy control.
Aussie here, what’s the primary cause for your house price bubble?
Here it was a stupid LNP policy to funnel investment dollars into land banking via negative gearing coupled with a capital gains discount; we are only now starting to roll back changes from 25 years ago.
We’ve lost an entire generation’s wealth to greed.
Others answered you with some uncritical, kneejerk explanations.
Yes, private property is a root cause since like, this is a capitalist system, but the idea of it being exceptionally “foreign,” or more exclusionary than comparable markets is ignoring why it is like this in Canada specifically. There’s a lot of long term contributors like suburban sprawl city planning without the same population explosions like in the US, conflicting interests and power dynamics between provincial and municipal govts that inhibits some practical regulatory responses, and a gradually disparate quality and cost of living as neoliberal politics eroded social welfare programs (healthcare, postsecondary education grants/ institutional funding, unemployment and disability support).
However, the big one that people credit for the specific boom of the past twenty years is actually how the current PM, Mark Carney, responded to the '08 financial crisis during his tenure as the Governor of the Bank of Canada. While Canada fared much better than other G7 states, it did so by reducing prime and encouraging spending, which meant that real-estate was a more reliable asset than usual under those circumstances; certainly more than businesses or labour. Since people were already severely underpaid in a system with less public supports and exponentially increasing infrastructure costs, this market bubbled with the Canadian economy balanced ontop of it (y’know, more than before).
Mix all that with Canada’s low and concentrated population, fewer career opportunities outside of those population centers, and neoliberalized framework, you have a system that relied on an unsustainably expensive real-estate market where regulators’ material interests (either individually or systemically since property value effects property tax and therefore city budgets) made it pretty much impossible for any bottom-up change to be implemented before a massive shift in material security for middle class workers.
So uh, guess when prime went up again and when more people started actually talking about how fucked the housing is here, and guess why it all came to a head around 2020.
capitalism and chasing passive income
so, greed
Foreign investment and greedy landlords.
The cause is people treating houses as an investment, but most of those people are individual Canadians.
People like to blame foreign billionaires and corporations but my experience has been with Canadian house flippers and landlords wanting “passive income”. I’ve purchased 2 houses, both from house flippers, and I work with 4 people who are also landlords who brag/complain they make more money collecting rent than they do from their paycheque. I also believe that a huge portion of our elected officials are landlords themselves.
Private Equity firms (like blackrock) buying up all the homes to artificially inflate the price for profit. Some get rented out, but tons are just sitting literally empty
With long mortgage periods available, you would think there would be more home buyers using it instead of throwing money away with rent.
Rent isn’t necessarily throwing money away. You need to run the numbers for your scenario. Ben Felix has some great analysis on this. Home ownership as the only sensible financial move is a myth that really needs to die.
You’d think, but volatility in the job market makes mortgages extra risky. We’re watching two houses circle the drain as both incomes were killed by tariff or Ai layoffs and now only one spouse works while the other searches, and 1/3-1/4 house income is not supporting a house AND food.
Life actually became less stressful when I stopped having the expectation that I’d ever own a home. If I do at this point, it’ll be a nice surprise or a sad event that led to me getting an unexpected amount of money.
To be real investing in a proper, comfortable retirement will probably do you better off at this point. Thats what I realized anyway.
Definately what I’m enjoying
You guys think you’re going to retire? Between inflation and healthcare I don’t expect to last much longer than I can stay employed.
The bigger shift is among the young. Ownership among Canadians aged 25 to 29 fell from 44.1% in 2011 to 36.5% in the 2021 Census. Statistics Canada found that, not counting those living with their parents, millennials owned at a lower rate at ages 25 to 39 than baby boomers or Gen X did at the same age: 49.9%, against 55.9% and 56.2%. And 55% of Canadians aged 18 to 29 lived with a parent in 2024.
I’m sure a few more decades of voting for the uniparty will fix this…
And a majority of the others are wrong.
