In Montreal, Québec, 0.045% of the population own over 30% of residential properties.

Edit: actually that’s 0.46% of property owners own 32% of rental properties in Montréal.

Source (French)

Leave major cities.

You will never own property in one.

You simply commute to work. That’s what people in rural areas who work in cities have done since forever.

If you can’t afford to live in the city, then you don’t live in the city. That’s how you make ends meet and stay financially solvent.

many already commute to work. All this does is make us drive farther. What’s in it for me? Cheaper house prices - well we had cheaper house prices but they went away, so now I have to commute more.

You really look at the world we’re in now and think “you know what this world needs? More vehicle exhaust emissions, tire wear, and longer working hours - but hey, at least Blackstone got to create a monopoly on empty houses!”

Why do I have to take the soggy end of a short straw? Why do I have to burn fossil fuels and my free time otherwise I’m SOL? Why can’t it be the billion dollar companies who sacrifice a fraction of a percent instead of me sacrificing double-digit percents of my time and money?

Nowhere did I say that any of that “is what the world needs”

I just explained the current reality and a solution for people who might want an answer to their current problems. There’s nothing you or I can do about the prices of real estate and rent in the big cities. You can wish it was cheaper to live in the city all day but it’s not going to accomplish anything, and Congress and the President are not going to fix it for you either, probably at least in the span of a few decades from now.

So if you want to be able to afford a place to live NOW the answer is what I said.

To recap:

• “housing prices are too expensive”
• “Just move out of the city bro!”
• “But we have job that’s physically located in a city”
• “Just commute”
• “That doesn’t solve the problem, it just replaces it with a different problem that is in some ways worse”

then

• "that’s just reality, I’m trying to solve the problem here"
• “you can’t solve this problem”
• “I have the solution to this problem”
• “there is no solution to this problem and no one can solve it”

???