If you need to have a home to afford to retire;
And most young people will never own a home;
How do we expect this to play out?
I think what's being said is: if housing prices lower, you are going to ruin some people's retirement plan -- at least some of those people will have worked hard their entire life to purchase and pay off that house. There's been some incentive to save in this way as well (first time home buyer plan, tax deductions for more ecologically sound houses, that kind of thing).
I suspect he's probably right, that letting house prices drop would over all make things worse in Canada. My goto solution would be to subsidize housing by increasing taxes on corporations and people/corporations that own more than one house. but i'm not any kind of expert
If I stay in my house for my retirement, why would I care how much it is worth? I would only care about monthly costs like energy or insurance, what am I missing?
People have been told that their house is an investment first and a home second for years. This has caused some people to not be happy they own a home, they can only feel happy if that home is getting more valuable. It really is an unfair system but many people aren't intentionally being greedy, they are playing by the rules they were taught and many are thinking towards the future for their children. We can't blame poor policy and lack of housing investments/developments on the average owner.
Nearly every other physical asset will lose value with time and use, such as a car. Somehow houses can maintain value, and even go up as their condition worsens because we have been lacking in supply and increasing demand for at least a decade.
The value of houses are tied to the value of land, and you can't make (much) new land. That's why houses in economically advantaged cities are more expensive than houses in economically disadvantaged cities or out of the way places (unless those places are desirable for being out of the way).
That said, we can do things to get more people per square km in cities, even without going to high rise apartments. And certainly, not promoting more effective housing options hasn't helped the price of homes, either.
In many municipalities the majority of residential zoning only allows single family homes, sometimes with minimum lot sizes, set backs and parking minimums. We've made it legal and incentivized to only build spread out and inneffecient housing regardless if thats what the city or people really needs or not.
Sometimes home owners will sell their house after retirement for something smaller, live off the difference, then sell that house and use the money from that for long term care, or inheritance.
There's also the obvious: they worked for something, possibly quite hard, why do they have to pay the price for others? Presumably they've been paying taxes all along, and have already been contributing to the greater good.
I guess my feeling is, it's not so simple to just wreck housing prices. I absolutely feel like corporations, and probably some ultra wealthy don't work that hard and get most of the rewards (or aren't even people), like if the money has to come from somewhere there is a clear set of people who could afford to lose some wealth, and not materially effect their life; and that's not necessarily single dwelling home owners.
@Mkengine @karlhungus You are missing the high cost of aging in a retirement home/long term care facility. Because you retire in a home that you worked decades to pay off does not mean that will be your last “home” before death. Some retirement “homes” are charging $60,000 year.
This is true. The idea that housing-as-asset is a gift to middle-class elderly is a false promise. The middle class elderly will have all their assets stripped by the old-age industry regardless of how their home appreciated while they owned it.
Assuming you're talking about a full service retirement home and not just a 55+ building $5000/mo seems like a good deal to me, at least from a BC perspective. You'd be looking at almost $2000 just to rent anywhere, you'd be lucky to have a meal cooked for you for $10, $20 if it's decent quality, that's another $900-1800/month. Once you consider utilities you're pretty close to what a new renter would be paying if they refused to cook for themselves.
Investment property
This is how I read his comment as well.
Not their problem. They, and especially their backers, expect to be well out of it by that point. The rich don't really think about the future; they think about how things were in the past, and how to keep it going, but they don't really plan or fret about the future because they don't have to.
If you want this problem to be fixed sooner, the government and their backers need to start being afraid enough for their bank accounts, if not their lives, to do something now.
That's how we got the modern welfare state: the rich and their pets in government were afraid they'd get Russia-in-1917'ed and begrudgingly put in the supports needed to prevent people from being that pissed off. After all, we'd just had a world war and there were millions of vets returning with PTSD and training and an informal support network, and they weren't going to put up with a repeat of the 1930s.
Every action since then is the rich trying to claw back the New Deal and it's equivalents in other countries.
Since LTC was privatized, the cost of care has skyrocketed, and the LTC industry and it's hangers-on are salivating at the idea of soaking Boomers for every cent their house equity is worth.
This isn't poetic license on my part, either. I've been in board meetings with executives who say exactly this: their five- and ten-year plans amount to "suck the Boomers dry". The former premier of Ontario, for example...
Trudeau and his government are just the latest in a long line of neoliberal tools that started with Mulroney: killing unions, watching as companies' pension funds were underfunded, destroying bonds as a viable savings mechanism, allowing the stock market to become a lottery of quarterly price-inflation: all of it because the market values next quarter over next-quarter century, and each government was convinced that somehow, some way, it'd all work out, or at least that by the time it crashes they'll be out.
Or maybe, just a crazy idea, the government could provide for people's basic needs so that no one has to worry about dying alone on the streets when they're too old or infirm to usefully participate in the endless meatgrinder of capitalism.
It's not the simple unfortunately, because of 2 factors:
Our boomers are a very large generation, larger than the millenials
Life expectancy has increased so people live much longer (with high medical costs)
In the 70s - 2000s we had a large generation of in their working years paying for a small generation's 5-10 year retirement
Now, we have a small generation in their working years paying for a large generation 15-25 year retirement
And this is not something we can solve by just "taxing the rich". The numbers are so huge that taxing Canada's richest people is a drop in the bucket
Life expectancy has been decreasing.
https://globalnews.ca/news/10116838/life-expectancy-decrease-canada-stat-can/
There's been a slight downtick in recent years, but it's still up +10 years from 1970
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/CAN/canada/life-expectancy
Why the fuck would he say this right now.
Because he knows conservatives are coming, and this is yet another futile attempt to cater to these devils before election
He's primarily after the youth vote. I'm not sure which "devils" you mean exactly, but young people don't usually own a home.
By "devils" he means property investors, bankers and in general the kinds of people that donate to parties and give board seats and reciprocal business arrangements to politicians.
It could be, but this benefits all homeowners, and ordinary ones make up the most politically important block, which is why I'm unclear. OP could mean anything from all homeowners (the edgey take) to just the billionaire ones.
Fuck me that's stupid.
Australian politicians from our main two parties very obviously think like this as well. But they're both—even the right-wing "hates the poor" party—smart enough to not fucking say it out loud. They even pay lip service to the idea housing should be "affordable" from time to time.
Boomers lived through the greatest economic period in modern history, where a simple salesman - such as a shoe or VCR salesman - could make enough to own a home, two cars, have a SAH spouse and several children, all while taking decent vacations every year and having plenty of money left over to save for retirement.
Millennials have none of this. In my corner of this rock (Kelowna, BC) median home values have gone from 2.8× average annual income (1978) to 19.4× average annual income. Compare average home values to average annual income, and the 2024 spread increases to 22×.
There is absolutely no way a millennial can achieve the same life benchmarks at the same ages that boomers did without being a card-carrying member of the 1%, and supported by massive amounts of intergenerational wealth to enable these benchmarks.
No wonder so many have given up on home ownership of any kind, as well as (for many of them) even having children.
Prioritizing boomers over the current generations will be the worst possible decision for our future.
Perhaps instead of giving up on home ownership, today's generations should give up on not guillotining the 1%
That might come to a head within the next decade.
I have already heard rumours of a list (American, I believe, but maybe International) being compiled through debates on who could be taken out to produce the greatest narrowing of the wealth gap. As in, maximum impact with minimum effort.
Because when you hoard so much wealth that you impoverish millions, the question needs to be asked if you still meet the minimum requirements of being human, or if you are truly a parasite fit only to be eliminated. I strongly suspect that the inherent sociopathy of billionaires such as our own Galen Weston, and their abysmal disregard of basic humanity in the pursuit of unbridled greed, makes many to most of them fail to meet this very important threshold.
I may not be among those in the crowd when the torches and pitchforks come out, but imma gonna be holding the door open for them and looking the other way.
I'm a millenial home owner, that would not really mind seeing a radical adjustment of housing prices. (Because I want my friends to be able to own their homes)
Unfortunately, I think Trudeau's right.
GenX spent their entire lives trying to catch up with the boomers. Boomers got great careers and big houses in the city, lost a bunch of money in the dotcom bubble, and lost a bunch of money in 2008, but were mostly okay.
GenX got mediocre careers (less manufacturing, more outsourcing by the time they entered the work force) more competition for existing jobs (women now expected to work too). They got houses in the suburbs and had long commutes. While Boomers lost money in dotcom and 2008, GenX lost jobs. The Boomers won't retire from the cushy management jobs so GenX is stuck in middle management.
Now that Boomers are finally retiring GenX feels it is time to get PAID!
They don't have the penions that the Boomers got, but their suburban houses are a lot closer to the city than anything that's being built these days. They're depending on that value to retire.
These millenial upstarts want to pull the rug out from under them? There would be blood in the streets.
Just my impression though, idk.
Modern problems require modern problems
I'm an old-ish dude who owns my house outright.
My retirement nest egg doesn't trump my children's future.
I thought pensions and RRSPs were supposed to pay for retirement.
Housing is for living in. Maybe some small- and medium-sized business in rental housing because not everyone wants to own.
But investment commodity or retirement vehicle? Sounds dangerous!
so the problem is not enough taxation and a lack of social safety nets. got it.
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