this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2025
64 points (98.5% liked)
Canada
9369 readers
1842 users here now
What's going on Canada?
Related Communities
🍁 Meta
🗺️ Provinces / Territories
- Alberta
- British Columbia
- Manitoba
- New Brunswick
- Newfoundland and Labrador
- Northwest Territories
- Nova Scotia
- Nunavut
- Ontario
- Prince Edward Island
- Quebec
- Saskatchewan
- Yukon
🏙️ Cities / Local Communities
- Calgary (AB)
- Comox Valley (BC)
- Edmonton (AB)
- Greater Sudbury (ON)
- Guelph (ON)
- Halifax (NS)
- Hamilton (ON)
- Kootenays (BC)
- London (ON)
- Mississauga (ON)
- Montreal (QC)
- Nanaimo (BC)
- Oceanside (BC)
- Ottawa (ON)
- Port Alberni (BC)
- Regina (SK)
- Saskatoon (SK)
- Thunder Bay (ON)
- Toronto (ON)
- Vancouver (BC)
- Vancouver Island (BC)
- Victoria (BC)
- Waterloo (ON)
- Windsor (ON)
- Winnipeg (MB)
Sorted alphabetically by city name.
🏒 Sports
Hockey
- Main: c/Hockey
- Calgary Flames
- Edmonton Oilers
- Montréal Canadiens
- Ottawa Senators
- Toronto Maple Leafs
- Vancouver Canucks
- Winnipeg Jets
Football (NFL): incomplete
Football (CFL): incomplete
Baseball
Basketball
Soccer
- Main: /c/CanadaSoccer
- Toronto FC
💻 Schools / Universities
- BC | UBC (U of British Columbia)
- BC | SFU (Simon Fraser U)
- BC | VIU (Vancouver Island U)
- BC | TWU (Trinity Western U)
- ON | UofT (U of Toronto)
- ON | UWO (U of Western Ontario)
- ON | UWaterloo (U of Waterloo)
- ON | UofG (U of Guelph)
- ON | OTU (Ontario Tech U)
- QC | McGill (McGill U)
Sorted by province, then by total full-time enrolment.
💵 Finance, Shopping, Sales
- Personal Finance Canada
- BAPCSalesCanada
- Canadian Investor
- Buy Canadian
- Quebec Finance
- Churning Canada
🗣️ Politics
- General:
- Federal Parties (alphabetical):
- By Province (alphabetical):
🍁 Social / Culture
- Ask a Canadian
- Bières Québec
- Canada Francais
- First Nations
- First Nations Languages
- Indigenous
- Inuit
- Logiciels libres au Québec
Rules
- Keep the original title when submitting an article. You can put your own commentary in the body of the post or in the comment section.
Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage: lemmy.ca
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That wasn't the case in Canada (or in the States I believe.) Real wages (wage growth accounting for inflation/CPI) increased every year until the pandemic. Even then, inflation outstripped wage growth but not by much:
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/14-28-0001/2020001/article/00006-eng.htm
Similarly, the timing doesn't really line up for this. If you've read Piketty's arguments about Capital in the 21st century, inequality has been taking off since the mid 70s. So maybe there's some sort of tipping point but that seems a little odd.
But, we do both agree that this supply of homes is a good thing and worth fighting for, so that's groovy!
According to the article you linked, there is no housing crisis, since our income has kept pace with cost of living. 🤨 I'm struggling to contradict that with hard data, but I don't believe it for a millisecond. (Or to put it less argumentatively, I don't understand how that data fits into the bigger picture.)
Anecdotally, I as a very early millennial was very lucky to get my first and current house during a brief window where I'd finally mustered the means and housing prices hadn't yet completely galloped away. That was after over a decade spending more on rent than a mortgage would cost but next to nothing on transportation, and without having children, which was an economic non-starter even if I'd wanted them. (My partner and I did lots of cycling year round and bought a cheap utility vehicle before a house only because it was a prerequisite to accessing cheaper semi-rural housing.) If I could have gotten into a house 5 years earlier, I'd have about double the net wealth today. If my parents had been able to financially support me -- heck, even just house me -- through university, I'd have easily been able to do just that instead of graduating with what back then seemed like a tremendous student loan debt burden. It would be quaint today.
I view my place in history as straddling the tipping point of Canada's cost of living (not just housing) crisis. I've since watched others in my same field but with a later start on life have basically no chance to advance. Their inflation-adjusted junior professional salary is similar to what mine was, but between student loans and exploding rent they'll take even longer than I did just to be able to start saving for a down payment. By then…
I tried to source some proper data to more clearly demonstrate my point, but when it comes to charting historical trends, I don't think Stats Canada could be more obtuse if they tried. So I'm falling back on this confluence of formula and policy changes to vaguely gesture in the general direction of my point:
The time span I "repurposed" before wasn't meant (by me) to indicate a tipping point of this wealth transfer. Rather I was ballparking that as how far this housing plan could roll back the trend (which is to say not all the way, and arguably the 70s isn't the true beginning either). Saying income has fallen behind inflation may be technically false, yet each new generation is still starting with less while their predecessor's wealth is/was siphoned into passive income for the investors backing mortgages and then buying the houses outright from retirees left with nothing to pass onto their children. Even if income is outpacing inflation, it's still falling short of the rate at which speculators can out-compete new generations for assets.
Anyway, imperfect a solution as it is, I'm all for this housing initiative because a) regardless we need more housing and especially the type not being provided by the free markets, and b) it'll disrupt the most egregious exploitation of the working class -- the new generations with the least means starting out by paying high rent for the privilege of owning nothing and getting nowhere while the rich pad their war chests to snatch up even more of the finite assets.
Ahhh, I see the confusion. Inflation is generally excluded as a measure of inflation (which is super helpful in this context, otherwise you'd be in for a bit of circular reasoning.)
This was always the case. It's not like in the 90s or early 00s, home buyers could magically outbid those with deep pockets.
I'm not claiming housing is now affordable but nothing has really changed in the fundamentals of capitalism that would explain the rise of housing prices.
What has happened, imo, is that unsurprisingly, population growth outpaced home starts (poke around the housing start data yourself, it's neat AND more home starts were of the type people didn't intend to live in forever (apartments, which is why there's now an odd glut of small condos in larger cities) AND land near desirable large cities became more scarce (do what you will, hard to increaelse the amount of land) prices rose quickly.
All this to say, it's easy to blame speculators and the wealthy but it's not a particularly convincing argument as those already existed in large numbers well before housing became unaffordable.
Anyway, glad we're both for the housing initiative!
Aw dang, I was all set to upvote and let lie. But I feel compelled to clarify I do not blame the speculators nor the wealthy (really, I don't), nor do I think the apparent prosperity of the 90s belies there being consistent problems going back even further than that and even just in terms of housing. A poorly engineered structure does not become flawed only as it collapses, and it was never going to end any other way. I see no reason to expect the moment it actually starts to be particularly special or interesting. If it were, I might have believed I could predict it. If I really could, there's be good money in that.
Ok so my rant continues for a while and it sounds like I might be preaching to the choir anyway. I'm pretty much doing it for my own benefit of getting these thoughts out at this point -- so no hard feelings if you're done. 😛
TLDR takeaway: I concur. Hooray for building more housing -- even if it's an imperfect solution, and even if a deeper problem remains.
the deeper problem
Some of the debt-nervous measures I mentioned were enacted during the 80s and 90s. The averted y2k and dot-com bust that really wasn't didn't stop plenty of people (like practically everyone around me from about 1997 onward through the rest of high school and all of university) from accurately predicting with some detail the next two decades of downturn. Housing squeeze was already rising in the discourse then, as was the middle class marginalization via wealth drain. Maybe it runs earlier than that, but I was too young to pay attention. The only key element that to my memory was absent back then, was the use of housing as an investment vehicle being inherently problematic. Also I should acknowledge that for a lot of people the general malaise and pessimism only truly started as a fairly direct reaction to 9/11, which got rolled into their economic views.I don't even blame (most of) our politicians (much). They were never in a position to dictate the world order, yet were subject to the rise of globalism and the advent of nations having to compete (sacrifice both monetarily and ecologically) for corporate participation. It was that or follow the various hard-left states that become impoverished pariahs if not outright overthrown. A major upside to potential U.S. collapse now is the possibility that the rest of the western world can collectively agree to stop doing that. It could then instead make capitalism pay-to-play with public cartels (collaborating nations) setting progressive prices that keep wealth distributed and fund kickstarting every new generation.
What I blame is laissez faire capitalism for rewarding and thus encouraging speculation and hoarding, neoliberalism for rebranding learned collective helplessness as a virtue, and most especially the economists and capitalists whose motivated reasoning laid this system's foundation. We (as a nation) should have forcibly maintained a balanced housing supply indefinitely, and should never have promoted homes as an investment vehicle. Middle class wealth should have been as much as possible invested into our own productivity and continued influence as shareholders. Those are maybe our own national-scale unforced errors.
I really don't know how it became the prevailing wisdom that we should all pour our wealth into the only physical asset that magically appreciates as it deteriorates -- like that was a perfectly reasonable thing to expect.
When I hear Carney praise the power of markets, it makes me sweat even as I know he's still clearly the best option. It is a tremendous relief seeing this housing initiative because it rewards my hope that he'll actually deign to put his hand on the tiller. I'm still worried this could go poorly in terms of positive effect vs reduction of public resources and future recourse, but I was/am way more worried about the consequences of not even trying.
Even if it delivers fantastically, it won't be enough. The natural forces that make power (of every kind, but most especially wealth) converge into few hands can only be slowed without the active management that's impossible when neoliberalism is the world order. But who know? Maybe we can at least add a layer of financialization and abstraction that shifts the next looming collapse away from people's homes.
Props for finding some actually pretty good long-term data on Stats Canada, BTW. It is kind of nuts seeing all the numbers stay around roughly the same ballpark, all the way back to when we had half today's population. Despite no major fluctuations or spikes, literally fewer housing starts in 2010 than 1970.