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Canada is currently entering catastrophe levels, but because of lagging consequences people don't realize how much of a disaster is before us. There is a collec

Canada is currently entering catastrophe levels, but because of lagging consequences people don't realize how much of a disaster is before us. There is a collective delusion that has sustained some profoundly self destructive policies. The toll is coming due. Almost all of Canada cannot qualify for a home at current housing prices. Either to buy or to rent. The rental market is currently at the level of parody where the requirements filter out almost everyone. The bottom 50% of Canada, income wise, is in the precarious situation where if anything happens to their current housing, they will be homeless. Slowly social assistance and related programs are going to have to start resetting and the costs are going to be enormous. https://archive.ph/4xWtC https://archive.ph/4xWtC This is a problem created by multiple governments over various parties, and at this point I don't see an exit that isn't enormously painful.

88913527 3y ago
Stuff like UBI sounds less insane if that's your alternative, and if it's truly as bad as you're suggesting it is. I wouldn't know the Canadian market well enough but based on armchair knowledge of list prices, paired with the knowledge of lower wages, it doesn't seem too far off.
- creato 3y ago
  I don't see how UBI helps. It would help if home prices were low enough such that builders aren't incentivized to build, but high enough that people can't afford them. But that isn't the scenario. In the current scenario, UBI or any other form of rent subsidy is just going to go almost directly into property owners bank accounts.
  - midasuni 3y ago
    UBI would simply increase housing costs. The only way it wouldn’t is if UBI was funded from a land value tax, but even that would require enough housing in non desirable areas.
- chiefalchemist 3y ago
  Unless there's in increase in housing supply, UBI will simply increase what the market can bear. That is, in due time, the UBI "advantage" will end up in the pocket of landlords.
DoreenMichele 3y ago
The US may be in a more or less similar situation. We have a lack of affordable housing in every state, have underbuilt for decades, etc.
- mitthrowaway2 3y ago
  I don't want to underplay the housing crisis in the US; the problems are serious. But the situation in Canada is like taking all of that and tripling it.
- llm_nerd 3y ago
  There is a problem in many parts of the world right now, and the same housing problem can be cited in almost all of the West. The scale of the problem is dramatically different. In the US, like much of the world, there are the expensive areas and then the less expensive areas, and people migrate accordingly. Gentrification happens and people have to move further afield, etc. I see listings for extraordinary homes in various towns in the US for prices that are absolutely dreamy (not like ghettos, but nice little towns). In a remote world, the US has astonishingly attainable options throughout the union. In Canada, far-flung garbage towns have million dollar bungalows and $3000 rents. There are no inexpensive options anywhere, no matter how far out you're willing to move just to have a place to live. The country literally has politicians telling people to loan a bedroom. Yet in the face of actually falling home building and recurring disasters, the governing party has doubled down on an immigration rate that exceeds every other developed country (and I'm not talking about per capita, I'm talking about in absolute numbers!). It's unbelievable.
  - DoreenMichele 3y ago
    I was homeless for nearly 6 years. I was willing to relocate to anywhere in the western US to make my life work and get back into housing and spent a few years researching my options. I'm not convinced the "affordable housing" people imagine is available if you go far enough out in the US is as available as is popularly presumed.
    - 3y ago
brailsafe 3y ago
Yep. I've been thinking about this a lot. It's... very very very not good.
remarkEon 3y ago
>Almost all of Canada cannot qualify for a home at current housing prices. How are you quantifying this? If this is true, how is it not reflected in some manner in prices? In other words, who are are the buyers propping up prices? I'm not trolling, because if what you're saying is true it suggests that there is something fundamentally fraudulent about the Canadian housing market.
- Fervicus 3y ago
  Canadian housing market is full of fraud at all levels, from people falsifying incomes, to real estate agents, to money laundering [0]. [0] - https://www.reca.ca/consumers/financial-considerations/money-laundering-real-estate/ https://www.reca.ca/consumers/financial-considerations/money...
- gemstones 3y ago
  The buyers are foreign to Canada (investors), so the effects don’t affect the Canadian economy as directly as you might expect.
- shagmin 3y ago
  I don't have a source on me but I've read plenty about wealthy people in other countries buying large amounts of Canadian real estate as a store of value, even if it sits vacant. Mostly people in countries where there aren't so many great places to invest. But I don't know off hand if that's just a drop in the bucket compared to other things or what.
  - cscurmudgeon 3y ago
    That is just vanilla racism/xenophobia. https://news.westernu.ca/2023/01/expert-insight-canadas-ban-on-foreign-homebuyers-is-unlikely-to-affect-housing-affordability/#:~:text=Data%20that%20tracks%20foreign%20buyers,Canadian%20residential%20properties%20in%202020 https://news.westernu.ca/2023/01/expert-insight-canadas-ban-.... Data that tracks foreign buyers and owners in Canada are scarce and patchy. The Canadian Housing Statistics Program shows that non-residents only own about two to six per cent of Canadian residential properties in 2020. Edit: Those numbers are in line with the US. Why is the US real estate market not that crazy then?
rewmie 3y ago
> This is a problem created by multiple governments over various parties, and at this point I don't see an exit that isn't enormously painful. Isn't Canada's housing problem caused by a supply crunch? Other than the Canadian government going into the real estate business and start building medium and high-density appartment blocks, what role does the Canadian government have in this mess? Also, please note that this issue is plaguing basically the whole European housing market as well.
- ttul 3y ago
  The supply crunch is caused by wealthy Canadians owning multiple homes, most of which are empty. There are some relatively new speculation and vacancy taxes, but they are trivially easy to evade - just have your adult child “rent” your vacant cottage and suddenly it’s occupied. During the pandemic period, low interest rates caused home owners with plenty of house equity to go on a virtual binge of home buying. I know of people who bought four extra houses in 2021 just because they could. The bank gave them free money. Why not?
  - rewmie 3y ago
    > The supply crunch is caused by wealthy Canadians owning multiple homes Is it, though? I mean, that would drive up demand, but what happened to supply? If your hypothesis had any basis, wouldn't real estate developers rush to profit from that demand by building more homes? They wouldn't turn down all that free money, would they? And more to the point, why is that a government problem?
    - randomdata 3y ago
      > but what happened to supply? Insufficient labour. Anyone who builds houses was booked up for years. It looks like this is finally starting to turn, but that doesn't help right now. You need to build houses in the past to be able to live in them now. With the strongest labour market possibly ever seen in Canada, you didn't find anyone going to build houses because they had no other work. So you throw more money at workers to try to compel them away from the work they were doing and into housing work, but that just... drives up the cost of housing.
Grimburger 3y ago
And here's me escaping the west along with my neighbors escaping China, none of us have had a rental price rise in 4 years. We live only a few hundreds metres from the beach and even closer to vibrant national parks. What would you all pay for such a thing? I'm ashamed of how little it actually costs, you can't even rent a car park in my old city for the same amount. If this really is hacker news then you can either find somewhere good to live with a bit of searching or you aren't particularity good at hacking the basics of life.
- colordrops 3y ago
  Do you have children?
  - Grimburger 3y ago
    No but many of the other transplants here do, they seem to survive fine. It's very strange to see a 12yo kid who was born in the anglosphere being able to speak 3 languages fluently.
    - colordrops 3y ago
      Where are you? Southeast Asia?
      - Grimburger 3y ago
        Why does it matter?
- moltar 3y ago
  Where did you move?
  - Grimburger 3y ago
    I don't answer that question anymore because I know the exact response it entails. All that matters is that I'm happy as a migrant from the west, I go home to visit family/friends regularly and who are always stressed with long commutes and up to their necks in debt in cities that are overflowing with population growth. I truly worry for my nephews and nieces there, we've created a rough world for the kids. There's plenty of good things from my home country that I appreciate but for the average person life isn't that great considering their net worth on global scale. When suicide rates are on par with Japan it's somewhat comical to see the city I grew up in on the "top ten greatest places to live" stats that come out every year. If you took the median house price from where I'm from and put it into a basic savings account you could have $60k USD annually. That goes a very long way across most of the planet, is the house actually worth that much or is it a mass delusion? Know plenty who have gotten out while the going is good.
mdorazio 3y ago
Your link was heavy on opinion and light on data, so I went looking for numbers on Canada to verify your assessment. Median income after taxes: $68,400 [1] Median rent (2 bedroom): $2,300 [2] Average tax rate (single worker): ~32% [3] If we apply the 30% rule (it's ok to spend up to 30% of pre-tax earnings spend on rent), your assertion doesn't hold up - well over 50% of Canadians are making plenty of money to afford rent. Of course, in expensive cities where rents have far outpaced wages things are going to be bad but that's true pretty much everywhere in the West these days. If anyone has better numbers, please share. [1] https://www.policyadvisor.com/magazine/what-is-the-average-income-in-canada-2023/ https://www.policyadvisor.com/magazine/what-is-the-average-i... [2] https://www.zumper.com/blog/rental-price-data-canada/ https://www.zumper.com/blog/rental-price-data-canada/ [3] https://www.oecd.org/tax/tax-policy/taxing-wages-canada.pdf https://www.oecd.org/tax/tax-policy/taxing-wages-canada.pdf
- llm_nerd 3y ago
  What is the purpose of your [3] link? Genuinely curious. -Very few Canadians can currently qualify for a mortgage for an average home in most markets. The housing market has lost all rational basis. -Canada has approximately 2 million apartment units across all of Canada [1]. The vacancy rate is currently at less than 1% across Canada, and in many areas is hovering around zero. Just as some context, the vacancy rate in California pushes above 5%. NYC is an especially tight market at 3.1%. In both cases the apartments per capita is dramatically higher than Canada. -Landlords of apartments that do come to market have become spectacularly picky, because they can be. Perfect credit. Perfect history. No debts. People have been in situations where they've offered tens of thousands in deposits and a seemingly perfect application, to be denied. It is fascinating how often data is shown that betrays that Canada is in a particularly terrible situation -- like this very submission -- yet people still retort with "oh well it's bad everywhere". No, it is nothing like Canada. Canada is a fully saturated market like nowhere else on the planet. And this government is squeezing a hundred thousand more a month into an already full container, with zero indication of a letup. [1] - As some fun context relative to the 2 million apartments across the entire country, Canada currently has >900,000 international students in Canada, a number that is growing by leaps and bounds.
Thuggery 3y ago
> This is a problem created by multiple governments over various parties Why blame "government" and not capitalism? Canadian Gosplan didn't conspire to set housing prices at insane and rising levels. It was the market mechanism doing its own thing.

88913527 3y ago

Stuff like UBI sounds less insane if that's your alternative, and if it's truly as bad as you're suggesting it is. I wouldn't know the Canadian market well enough but based on armchair knowledge of list prices, paired with the knowledge of lower wages, it doesn't seem too far off.

creato 3y ago
I don't see how UBI helps. It would help if home prices were low enough such that builders aren't incentivized to build, but high enough that people can't afford them. But that isn't the scenario. In the current scenario, UBI or any other form of rent subsidy is just going to go almost directly into property owners bank accounts.
- midasuni 3y ago
  UBI would simply increase housing costs. The only way it wouldn’t is if UBI was funded from a land value tax, but even that would require enough housing in non desirable areas.
chiefalchemist 3y ago
Unless there's in increase in housing supply, UBI will simply increase what the market can bear. That is, in due time, the UBI "advantage" will end up in the pocket of landlords.

DoreenMichele 3y ago

The US may be in a more or less similar situation. We have a lack of affordable housing in every state, have underbuilt for decades, etc.

mitthrowaway2 3y ago
I don't want to underplay the housing crisis in the US; the problems are serious. But the situation in Canada is like taking all of that and tripling it.
llm_nerd 3y ago
There is a problem in many parts of the world right now, and the same housing problem can be cited in almost all of the West. The scale of the problem is dramatically different. In the US, like much of the world, there are the expensive areas and then the less expensive areas, and people migrate accordingly. Gentrification happens and people have to move further afield, etc. I see listings for extraordinary homes in various towns in the US for prices that are absolutely dreamy (not like ghettos, but nice little towns). In a remote world, the US has astonishingly attainable options throughout the union. In Canada, far-flung garbage towns have million dollar bungalows and $3000 rents. There are no inexpensive options anywhere, no matter how far out you're willing to move just to have a place to live. The country literally has politicians telling people to loan a bedroom. Yet in the face of actually falling home building and recurring disasters, the governing party has doubled down on an immigration rate that exceeds every other developed country (and I'm not talking about per capita, I'm talking about in absolute numbers!). It's unbelievable.
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  I was homeless for nearly 6 years. I was willing to relocate to anywhere in the western US to make my life work and get back into housing and spent a few years researching my options. I'm not convinced the "affordable housing" people imagine is available if you go far enough out in the US is as available as is popularly presumed.
  - 3y ago

brailsafe 3y ago

Yep. I've been thinking about this a lot. It's... very very very not good.

remarkEon 3y ago

>Almost all of Canada cannot qualify for a home at current housing prices. How are you quantifying this? If this is true, how is it not reflected in some manner in prices? In other words, who are are the buyers propping up prices? I'm not trolling, because if what you're saying is true it suggests that there is something fundamentally fraudulent about the Canadian housing market.

Fervicus 3y ago
Canadian housing market is full of fraud at all levels, from people falsifying incomes, to real estate agents, to money laundering [0]. [0] - https://www.reca.ca/consumers/financial-considerations/money-laundering-real-estate/ https://www.reca.ca/consumers/financial-considerations/money...
gemstones 3y ago
The buyers are foreign to Canada (investors), so the effects don’t affect the Canadian economy as directly as you might expect.
shagmin 3y ago
I don't have a source on me but I've read plenty about wealthy people in other countries buying large amounts of Canadian real estate as a store of value, even if it sits vacant. Mostly people in countries where there aren't so many great places to invest. But I don't know off hand if that's just a drop in the bucket compared to other things or what.
- cscurmudgeon 3y ago
  That is just vanilla racism/xenophobia. https://news.westernu.ca/2023/01/expert-insight-canadas-ban-on-foreign-homebuyers-is-unlikely-to-affect-housing-affordability/#:~:text=Data%20that%20tracks%20foreign%20buyers,Canadian%20residential%20properties%20in%202020 https://news.westernu.ca/2023/01/expert-insight-canadas-ban-.... Data that tracks foreign buyers and owners in Canada are scarce and patchy. The Canadian Housing Statistics Program shows that non-residents only own about two to six per cent of Canadian residential properties in 2020. Edit: Those numbers are in line with the US. Why is the US real estate market not that crazy then?

rewmie 3y ago

> This is a problem created by multiple governments over various parties, and at this point I don't see an exit that isn't enormously painful. Isn't Canada's housing problem caused by a supply crunch? Other than the Canadian government going into the real estate business and start building medium and high-density appartment blocks, what role does the Canadian government have in this mess? Also, please note that this issue is plaguing basically the whole European housing market as well.

ttul 3y ago
The supply crunch is caused by wealthy Canadians owning multiple homes, most of which are empty. There are some relatively new speculation and vacancy taxes, but they are trivially easy to evade - just have your adult child “rent” your vacant cottage and suddenly it’s occupied. During the pandemic period, low interest rates caused home owners with plenty of house equity to go on a virtual binge of home buying. I know of people who bought four extra houses in 2021 just because they could. The bank gave them free money. Why not?
- rewmie 3y ago
  > The supply crunch is caused by wealthy Canadians owning multiple homes Is it, though? I mean, that would drive up demand, but what happened to supply? If your hypothesis had any basis, wouldn't real estate developers rush to profit from that demand by building more homes? They wouldn't turn down all that free money, would they? And more to the point, why is that a government problem?
  - randomdata 3y ago
    > but what happened to supply? Insufficient labour. Anyone who builds houses was booked up for years. It looks like this is finally starting to turn, but that doesn't help right now. You need to build houses in the past to be able to live in them now. With the strongest labour market possibly ever seen in Canada, you didn't find anyone going to build houses because they had no other work. So you throw more money at workers to try to compel them away from the work they were doing and into housing work, but that just... drives up the cost of housing.

Grimburger 3y ago

And here's me escaping the west along with my neighbors escaping China, none of us have had a rental price rise in 4 years. We live only a few hundreds metres from the beach and even closer to vibrant national parks. What would you all pay for such a thing? I'm ashamed of how little it actually costs, you can't even rent a car park in my old city for the same amount. If this really is hacker news then you can either find somewhere good to live with a bit of searching or you aren't particularity good at hacking the basics of life.

colordrops 3y ago
Do you have children?
- Grimburger 3y ago
  No but many of the other transplants here do, they seem to survive fine. It's very strange to see a 12yo kid who was born in the anglosphere being able to speak 3 languages fluently.
  - colordrops 3y ago
    Where are you? Southeast Asia?
    - Grimburger 3y ago
      Why does it matter?
moltar 3y ago
Where did you move?
- Grimburger 3y ago
  I don't answer that question anymore because I know the exact response it entails. All that matters is that I'm happy as a migrant from the west, I go home to visit family/friends regularly and who are always stressed with long commutes and up to their necks in debt in cities that are overflowing with population growth. I truly worry for my nephews and nieces there, we've created a rough world for the kids. There's plenty of good things from my home country that I appreciate but for the average person life isn't that great considering their net worth on global scale. When suicide rates are on par with Japan it's somewhat comical to see the city I grew up in on the "top ten greatest places to live" stats that come out every year. If you took the median house price from where I'm from and put it into a basic savings account you could have $60k USD annually. That goes a very long way across most of the planet, is the house actually worth that much or is it a mass delusion? Know plenty who have gotten out while the going is good.

mdorazio 3y ago

Your link was heavy on opinion and light on data, so I went looking for numbers on Canada to verify your assessment. Median income after taxes: $68,400 [1] Median rent (2 bedroom): $2,300 [2] Average tax rate (single worker): ~32% [3] If we apply the 30% rule (it's ok to spend up to 30% of pre-tax earnings spend on rent), your assertion doesn't hold up - well over 50% of Canadians are making plenty of money to afford rent. Of course, in expensive cities where rents have far outpaced wages things are going to be bad but that's true pretty much everywhere in the West these days. If anyone has better numbers, please share. [1] https://www.policyadvisor.com/magazine/what-is-the-average-income-in-canada-2023/ https://www.policyadvisor.com/magazine/what-is-the-average-i... [2] https://www.zumper.com/blog/rental-price-data-canada/ https://www.zumper.com/blog/rental-price-data-canada/ [3] https://www.oecd.org/tax/tax-policy/taxing-wages-canada.pdf https://www.oecd.org/tax/tax-policy/taxing-wages-canada.pdf

llm_nerd 3y ago
What is the purpose of your [3] link? Genuinely curious. -Very few Canadians can currently qualify for a mortgage for an average home in most markets. The housing market has lost all rational basis. -Canada has approximately 2 million apartment units across all of Canada [1]. The vacancy rate is currently at less than 1% across Canada, and in many areas is hovering around zero. Just as some context, the vacancy rate in California pushes above 5%. NYC is an especially tight market at 3.1%. In both cases the apartments per capita is dramatically higher than Canada. -Landlords of apartments that do come to market have become spectacularly picky, because they can be. Perfect credit. Perfect history. No debts. People have been in situations where they've offered tens of thousands in deposits and a seemingly perfect application, to be denied. It is fascinating how often data is shown that betrays that Canada is in a particularly terrible situation -- like this very submission -- yet people still retort with "oh well it's bad everywhere". No, it is nothing like Canada. Canada is a fully saturated market like nowhere else on the planet. And this government is squeezing a hundred thousand more a month into an already full container, with zero indication of a letup. [1] - As some fun context relative to the 2 million apartments across the entire country, Canada currently has >900,000 international students in Canada, a number that is growing by leaps and bounds.

Thuggery 3y ago

> This is a problem created by multiple governments over various parties Why blame "government" and not capitalism? Canadian Gosplan didn't conspire to set housing prices at insane and rising levels. It was the market mechanism doing its own thing.