Why there is no easy fix to Canada's skyrocketing cost of housing 

That’s because of immigration. Increased labour market supply combined with increased housing demand gives you low wages and high housing costs.

@@Trythis837 a good deal of it is house speculation and flipping. You also missed those who leverage previous property to be able to take in higher mortgages (outbidding home owners who wanted to live in the houses) only to them make renters pay the extravagant mortgages. More than that, our government liked that high housing costs were artificially inflating our GDP (when a house is 2 million dollars and it's bought and sold multiple times, it looks like our economy is booming! Wow! *Facepalm). Many pension plans have invested in companies owning apartments, so if housing did come down, pensioners would be f***Ed. So, the government just didn't step in, despite ballooning housing costs, because it had benefits for them. Now younger people can't afford to buy homes (or even their rent) and they wonder why no one is having kids?! To put kids...WHERE? And with what income would they raise them on?! The gov. Seeing that our population rate is declining (and again thinking only of who would take care of older folk with no workers ((and f***ING over the younger)) and keeping the GDP at it's artificially inflated peak) decide to bring in record levels of immigration, making everything worse. And now, here we are: younger generations cannot afford children and Canada has messed itself up so badly that we actually can't stop immigration or our country will collapse in about four decades. Although those childless generations will FINALLY get houses by approx. 2040, when baby boomers (who hold 40 percent of the housing) finally kick the can. But it will be too late-- most millennials and gen zers who wanted kids but couldn't have them, will be too old to do so at that point. There, I think I covered most of the issues now. Maybe I should move to Europe, haha!

@@amyfrueh4808 yeah pyramid schemes always fail. What scares me is we talk about how inflation is caused by government debt but that’s only partly true. Mortgage debt is a bigger contributor to inflation. Right now Canada’s mortgage debt is 1.7 trillion. It’ll be over 2 trillion in the next couple years.

@@Trythis837 right? We haven't the highest household debt in the G7 due to housing. There is absolutely no ability for most people to have resiliency in case of--well, literally anything. That doesn't bode well for our country's future

@@amyfrueh4808 exactly our whole economy is based on the housing industry and that’s paid for with debt. There is no plan for what to do with all these people. We aren’t building hospitals or factories or anything just houses and roads. It makes no sense.

Wef is the world's greatest corporate lobbying group

Yeah we live in capitalism and are careening towards not owning anything

How are we expected to live in this world?!

That's crazy for a one bedroom. Do you live in a big city? In my area, $2500 gets you at least a 2 bedroom house/ modular on a piece of property, but we are 20 minutes from a small city and 1 hour from a big city

@@doitalldan5326 I live in Vancouver, B.C

Sounds like my old situation in Vancouver (I finally moved somewhere cheaper). I'm guessing you're in Vancouver? Those numbers are brutal and totally not worth it.

​@@Silversolstice548 by working 5 jobs for the oligarchs

Exactly !!!

Agreed. That guy has absolutely NO CLUE what he's talking about if he thinks low interest rates will lead to lower house prices.

it has always been the balancing act. There is no single way anyone in this world has found a solution to this problem!

Or lucky enough to have the bank of mummy and daddy.

The real elephant is government borrowing, deficit spending and expansion of the broad money supply.

Plus, students are exempt from the foreign buyers' ban.

People today think owning a home is a birth right. They think 5% or 6% is a high interest rate. Back in the day people paid through the nose to own their own place and they threw every extra dollar at the mortgage to pay it off as quickly as possible. They weren't going on tropical vacations every winter or buying all the crap people buy today or giving a cable company $400 a month. They scrimped and sacrificed to get mortgage free.

Instead people scrimp and sacrifice to pay rent. And who even has cable anymore, get real boomer.

​@@Infernal_PuppetThe great news is taxes go up January 1st. Raising the cost of everything in Canada. Even better news when the tax Raises the price of everything it will signal to hold or raise interest rates. They will say this happened because Canadians still have too much money to spend. Even though we have stagnant wages and a tough time affording food. Government overspending causing the devaluation of the Canadian Dollar. The good news for you is they will increase public sector jobs, for the numbers making things look good to you even though they do not help the economy. It would be nice to not know history and what's going to happen. I'm gen X before you say ok boomer.

​@@EyeSee4.8 genx tends to be just as disillusioned as the boomers FYI

@mathias8627 I guess in a way. The problem is we have seen it before and know what's coming. I know millennial's that could buy houses up until 2017. Seems like so many can't understand what changed.

Nope. Every time a housing crash happened it was because prices went up but supply remained relatively unchanged. Here we have a constant shortage of housing in the number of hundreds of thousands. Supply and demand. Prices aren't going to drop like they did in the past.

When was their a housing crash in Canada? There was a mini boom in the 80's and then prices levelled off for the next 15 years but the prices didn't go down.

Sadly not. This is a housing hellscape due to the short supply for the increasing demand thanks to the immigration rise. You need a stagnant or otherwise higher number of houses relative to demand not less to trigger a crash.

Should Canadians stop having kids as well to help?@@zserbs2326

A housing crash is triggered by an influx of supply. Canada has a shortage of houses. There will be no major crash.

they don’t

McDonald's promises WEF-endorsed "Bug Sandwiches" will be on their $1 menu. Very affordable!

The way things are going for me I might need a tent.

I am supportive of the interest rate rise, it should have been done sooner. Home prices are too high which has been supported by record low interest rates. I bought a house in autumn 2023 and, while I wish I could have got 4.54% from a local credit union that was available earlier in the year, I accept the 5.85% my broker got me from a monoline mortgage lender in October when I was ready to buy.

You understand the government keeps increasing the rates of immigration higher and higher eh? Like in the last 3 months we brought in 435,000 people. That’s completely unheard of and no country in the world can accommodate a 1.25% population increase in 3 months. It’s completely insane.

when you take out something you need to fill it with something else. No, fill it with air is not a solution.

Awe you still think voting matters, cute

Justin. Is that you.@@mathias8627

@blademan4089. Maybe these people should ask themselves why did they max out their credit cards on expensive furniture ?

it won't matter foreign corporation can sweep it and flip it.

Those aren’t suitable for families are they only one bedroom

LOL. Those are glorified flophouses that the Western world did away with due to the squalid living conditions and the questionable character of the people who lived in them, namely single men.

Nobody cares what you want to pay in rent every month but if you want the bank to lend you hundreds of thousands of dollars they want to know you will be able to pay them back.

Probably the most intelligent comment here

Peasants are not allowed homes.

Because the owners don't live here.

@@evangelesong6319 No. Empty means empty; as in not occupied.

@@momofighter3211 Yes. But sadly, everyone not making a quarter million bucks is a "peasant" these days.

Exactly. Then a couple on minimum wage could afford a house and even an individual that made a bit more than minimum wage. Plus no lack of decent rental in a rental market with a good vacancy rate.

I bought in 2017 and I would not be able to afford my place today. It almost doubled in price in a few years.

We moved to the prairies from the Fraser valley, in order to make the numbers work

@@penstateftw422congratulations! One needs a substantial increase in wage to justify moving to the Fraser Valley from the prairies.

You should do a better job of educating yourself on the issue before you make such uninformed comments.

Ok, let's start with you pointing out where I went wrong in the comment.

While under socialism , they'll have to put with squalid living conditions.

@@shauncameron8390 not to mention, if you complain about the squalid conditions - youre sent to the gulags for years of hard labour

Canada was never capitalist. It's a mixture of socialist and capitalist. What makes it socialist is we have free doctors, hospitals, welfare, disability benefits. What makes it capitalist is we can own our own business and invest in the stock markets. The powers that be want to create order out of chaos to bring in communism. Won't be long until we're offered UBI.

@@MikeyPaper Pretty much.

Average wage increase since 2000 was 20 percent. Average house costs since 2000 have risen by 380 percent. Sorry dude, we are all poorer than ever.

⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠@@amyfrueh4808society has been getting more efficient at producing food and consumer goods but not nearly the same rate for building efficiencies. Two reasons are reduction in available land in desirable areas and less automation relative to other industries. Government regulations and NIMBYism are certainly limiting factors in home completion. People ought to change their preferences in where they want to live. I can understand why Victoria BC is more desirable to live than Saskatoon SK with the much nicer weather but Saskatoon also does this crazy thing known as “allowing construction of new homes” more in line with demand. Homes cost 2.5 times as much in Victoria as Saskatoon so I can put up with putting on a big winter coat and doing some snow shovelling if it means a 60% lower home price. Wages aren’t 2.5x as high in Victoria so I couldn’t justify living there. Vancouver island is nice to visit but, for “normies” it’s too expensive to live. I used the comparison of Saskatoon and Victoria because I thought they were similar sized population centers but they aren’t as close as I thought. While the city of Victoria proper has a lower population than Saskatoon proper the greater Victoria CMA has over 1/5 more people than the Saskatoon CMA (391k vs 318k). For big cities I think Vancouver and Toronto could learn a lot from Edmonton. The Empire city is by no means cheap but at roughly 1/3 the price of Lion or Argo-city they are doing something right that the other cities aren’t.

lots of immigrants would be happy to pay.....you need to leave

This is a very good point and a massive part of the problem as well. Local councils say no to housing projects because they don't want their properties to become cheaper.

😂😂a house shouldnt be an investment tool its a house to live in and raise a family. ban foreign ownership and problem solved

@@user-zo3bf2hx4i That was already done. One problem, though. Students were exempt.

Imagine the unemployment at this rate😂

@@hsbd-hl7gn Imagine the retirement rate when people cash out of real estate and live on GIC deposits at 12%. There would be too many jobs that need to be filled. Then all the young generation can get jobs.

Awe

Where is the money?

@@switchlane2009 "Where is the money?" Who cares? Why should a BASIC need to subject to capitalism where they ARTIFICIALLY constrain the supply in order to keep prices sky high? (Why ELSE wouldn't they want to build more houses? Because this ISN'T a TECHNICAL question, but rather a political one.)

They constrain the supply to keep the prices high. The same thing is with oil/gas supply. Do more research on RU-vid, and you'll see videos of the wealthy Arabs and Americans openly talking on news on how they contrain on digging the oil. Because less supply increases demand , hence increase in price. They openly say they need to keep the shareholders happy by giving them big dividends /profits.

@@naturesounds2772 Your "capitalism" at work

@ewenchan1239 Trudeau's capitalism at it's best ! He needs to take care of his wealthy friends .