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.

man that sounds like a win win, fuck investors

Sorry, you misunderstand slightly.

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?

a place to live?

Exactly! Imagine if I said, “If we devalue my car, why did I spend years of toil to purchase it?” I’d look crazy. You buy a car for its innate utility, just like you buy housing for its innate utility! Cars ain’t an investment, and neither should housing be. Possession of artificially scarce property should not be the key to free money taken from those with the misfortune of being younger or later to market than you — that’s exactly the mechanism speculators and landlords exploit, driving up economic inequality and making life 100x harder for the rest of us.