Housing CANNOT be an investment, and I say this as a homeowner whose house value has nearly tripled since I bought it. I bought a house simply because I didn't want to rent for the rest of my life.

It's obviously absurd to claim to want affordable housing and refuse to cause prices to go down. If housing is an "investment" then you are by definition fucking over all subsequent homebuyers. Everybody needs a place to live.

Absolutely fucking wrong. The immense value tied up in housing is killing the economy...

So written, a condo owner whose property value went up 50% over the past five years.

I don't get what the point is except for investors.

People using it as a "retirement holdings" might try to sell and then find they can't afford to live anywhere in retirement.

People saving property to leave an inheritance have kids waiting for their parents to die so they can afford a home to own.

Lmao how is selling my house and buying another ridiculously inflated house part of my retirement?

The fundamental issue with housing as an investment is that it is a monolithic and non-fluid vehicle, which makes it worse when leverage comes into play. Whereas stocks can be purchased/sold at any time in an instant and have fractional costs (sometimes as cheap as 10$ per stock), houses are not, and fast fluctuations in prices could heavily impact your ability to realize your gains. So it is, on that aspect, a terrible investment.

For large companies owning thousands of units, this is not an issue since they are spreading the risks across the units (by buying diversely located units of all types). They can also quickly execute purchases and sales since they are in that exact business.

So the argument that houses are ways to pass down wealth is misguided: they are terrible ways to pass down wealth, and parents should leave a trust fund or safe investments rather than a house if their goal is to build generational wealth - housing should be passed down for personal reasons.

Another way to say this: if no one can afford housing, no one retires or has a nest egg.

That's a fact, but like, I'd prefer not to be homeless when I can't retire.

The place next door just got rebuilt as a fourplex, each unit of which is going for 1.6 million dollars. The mortgage would be $8k/month. I and my partner have no kids, no car, and both have solid incomes in union jobs. Our current rent is a hair under $1k/mo because we've been in this place awhile.

That mortgage plus taxes, utilities, would still be almost all our income. It's ridiculous.

I'd say that would be fine in theory, if "retain its value" meant that housing would follow very closely but tailing local inflation. That won't happen though. As long as "housing needs to retain its value" ideology runs the country, housing will be viewed as an investment and scarcity will cause it to push inflation upwards. Even trying really hard to quell these prices it might beat inflation, and even if it were a success it would take decades of nominal-growth with negative-real-returns to bring those prices to parity with incomes.

So no, even if "technically maybe?" the answer is still no.

Fuck. The. Investor. Class.

It's like they know they lose next election and are just trying to leave the most broken mess in attempt to smear the next party

At this point PP wins by just saying he's not Trudeau, this is such a bad situation

High housing prices are bad for the economy

Housing prices become high when there is a scarcity of houses in job markets. This means you will have a shortage of labour in those markets because people can’t afford to be there

And if you have a house + are paid well that is still bad for you because there will be less in your area for you

Housing needs to retain its value so politicians can stay in power. Appealing to homeowners with policies that enrich them is popular, but bad for everyone.

Well yeah. People's entire life savings are wrapped up in their houses. We all saw what happened in 08 when the housing market crashed. It would cause absolutely massive fallout if people's largest asset that they've been investing in their entire lives lost a bunch of value. It's unfortunate that they're not more affordable, but devaluing them would be catastrophic.

Land should retain its value, houses should deteriorate just like they do physically.

Suddenly I want to buy an F-350 and a "F 🍁 UCK TRUDEAU" flag. It's nice to see that every political party in Canada has finally united to fuck Canada.

Here's my case for keeping housing prices high: the rich are largely insulated from fluctuations of the market. If housing prices drop then what's left of the middle class will be destroyed. Then the rich will come in to pick its corpse. Property will be concentrated even more in the hands of the rich and given 20 years we'll be in a worse position than before. I think what we need is to slowly increase housing supply while financially weakening the owner class. Eventually, housing prices will come down but the rich won't be able to buy all of it. But shocking the system in the short term will prevent any average Canadian from owning property ever again. We'll have to weather the storm for a while but things will get better. But I'm not a rocket economist, so feel free to refute this.