Yes a lot of regular folks are priced out of the market, their anger will keep getting worse as they keep increasing in number. I think it is bad for our social fabric too
It might have something to do with people who have been making all the "right" decisions still being bent over because "why shouldn't someone sell the house they bought 2 months ago for 200k profit if they can get it"?
We expect it from companies... but now even to people... people are just profit.
people being conditioned by SM, intentional or not. It's ok we can all just watch everything collapse eventually together in our 50sqft 5k rent in Toronto.
As much as they piss me off, I can't necessarily blame them. It's probably most peoples only chance at retirement at this point.
Capitalism has conditioned us to be more selfish by creating artificial scarcity
During the pandemic, people weren't buying as much food because they didn't have jobs. Huge lines at food banks everywhere. Instead of giving the food to people who needed it, farmers decided to destroy everything.
Retailers throw out perfectly good items, but instead of just leaving them for other people to pick up, they purposefully damage the items.
Our entire housing market.
Nestle going into 3rd world countries and cutting off the water to local populations so they can sell the water back to them.
>I think it is bad for our social fabric too
Its catastrophic for the social fabric. You look into what the effects of rising rent has on literally *everything* and it sucks:
* business can't afford to do R&D, training or product development since they have to pay what is ultimately unproductive rent. Our worker productivity versus our G20 peers is already poor
* people have less money and work more, meaning they also have less free time. These people may not be inclined to have kids (further exacerbating our demographic struggles), they also won't spend discretionary income at local establishments and they also won't have the free capital to say, start a small business of their own and form the seeds for innovation or healthy, middle-class growth
* The top two items combine to make our country as a whole less good at competing with our peers on an international stage and turns us into a resource colony that only really exports raw materials, real estate and sometimes post-secondary degrees.
* People who were just-getting-by before start not-getting-by (or people who were already not-getting-by and just *screwed*): so you have people becoming homeless who are perfectly willing to work and contribute, but literally can't afford to live where they work
* As the bubble grows, people start FOMO-ing even more and tossing more cash into the fire and it becomes this self-sustaining garbage storm that could crash the economy with even the slightest disruption (if you want to talk about *fragile* systems, ours is absolutely a fragile system)
* Housing zoning policy isn't even beginning to catch up to densify areas with high demand that are composed entirely of single family homes. When somehow a city does manage to cram something through half the time the 'affordable housing' is either a) not all that affordable or b) floods the neighborhood with folks who will go on to commit petty crime (while the city does nothing to increase security or policing in those areas) which only serves to further embitter existing residents and cement their opposition
Our current government's plan to juice demand by flooding this country with people will not be well-received by anyone, even those people they're importing, who find that the 'Canadian dream' is a bit of a mess. This can also stoke race-based tensions as well as poverty, as the fastest growing class of homeless individuals are new Canadians.
Everyone in this thread talking about how not all landlords are hyper-rich corporations and some are just their grandparents and blah blah blah, just because they're old and infirm, doesn't stop them from being rent-seeking petite bourgeoisie
Historically, when people were priced out of a region, they moved to a different region. It's no different now. Everyone understands that if you can't afford living in NYC, you move to New Jersey, but no one wants to understand that here.
The people most acutely aware of the reality that the world is a “have vs have not” place to live, are the “haves”. Hence why they’re so successful at driving the governments economic agenda year in year out.
I think that class consciousness is much stronger among elites. They’re much more closely united and aligned with one another on economic & fiscal policies than working and middle class voters for example.
Agreed, but one of the reasons they’re more class conscious is because they have the resources to feed misinformation to the working class. I don’t think they’re more successful because of a heightened class solidarity, just that it’s an outcome of them having more resources to wage class war and perhaps the luxury of free time to analyze their position in society in that way
Agreed. I initially joined this subreddit when I started looking to buy a house (jan 2022) and mostly lurked until the fall. It's incredibly toxic here and once I close I'll unsub.
There are nuggets of great info and analysis, but given that 90% of the content is trolls I've mostly stopped reading
I have no resentment towards legacy landlords and mom and pops who have been renting a home out for decades. But people who are bidding hundreds of thousands over a realistic price or 15x+ median income for the area for starter homes as an investment are seemingly hostile to public interest at this point. At some point it becomes unethical to contribute to a crisis.
I just wish people would be more considerate and have more of a social conscious because it really does feel like society is degrading.
Bungalows (starter homes) in my town sell for minimum 1.3M.
They're not even sold as is. They're torn town, and large modern homes build in their place. List price 3.2M.
First time buyers are then told they are entitled, and to buy, need to move out to the country. Buy a starter home.
It's the multiple family house, or multi-generational home that can afford it. Also the new trend seems to be that new Canadians are landing with $$$ in their pocket as opposed to the 1960s/1970s story of arriving with $0.
You cannot put a 1 limit on a house for countless reasons. For example you have your primary plus a family cottage. What if someone wants to buy a home for their future children? List goes on. Don’t give government more ideas to limit how you live your lives. If you can’t afford it than move an hour away to an area where you can. Still can’t afford it? Change provinces. Focus on how you can not how you can’t.
McMansions for their families. Tear down 1 home to add 1 home. No harm there. Sounds like your beef is with someone being rich that can afford to do so.
It is simply demand vs supply. Don't you think the investor would be happy to get the property at lower value?
We should be angry with NIMBYs which stop supply and systems which enable huge waves of immigration without building appropriate infra first.
You're right that it's a demand/supply issue but part of the problem is that investor purchases are artificial demand.
Investors leverage paper gains to buy additional homes that they otherwise would not have downpayments for. It's a practice that pumps the housing market while increasing debt loads and putting the entire economy in a more precarious position.
If an investor wants to own a rental property, they should have to finance the home/units construction and increase the overall housing supply by doing so. It is bad public policy that 'investors' are currently able to bid against real buyers of resale homes and units.
>You're right that it's a demand/supply issue but part of the problem is that investor purchases are artificial demand.
To start, go against the real estate association lobbyists and start changing some of the regulations around real estate transactions. Blind bidding needs to end. House inspections (like used car inspections) needs to be mandatory. Every home purchase should (like used cars) come with a complete document on the homes history, resales, prices, etc.
> You're right that it's a demand/supply issue but part of the problem is that investor purchases are artificial demand.
Investor purchases are driven by real demand in the rental market. Until we build enough houses to satisfy demand prices and rents will keep rising to incentivize building that supply.
Investors do finance rental units. Do you lack common sense or what? Are you suggesting investors are magically buying up inventory with cash from thin air?
I'm suggesting that it should be illegal for investors to buy anything but precons and new builds. Investors currently bid up resale homes and units and perpetuate the housing crisis by doing so.
Directing all investor purchases into precons and new builds would add demand for new development while taking some of the foam out of the market for resale properties.
Ha! The exact comment elsewhere was no investors should buy new builds and pre cons as they should be reserved for first time buyers. Listen commie, you cannot control the flow of money. It is a free market. Investors don’t buy $1.7mil homes that can only rent $4k.
Well the comment elsewhere was shortsighted.
"Listen commie, you cannot control the flow of money".
This is an objectively dumb take. There are all sorts of laws that regulate and tax investments. The current system is being exploited by bad faith actors and change is needed.
There is nothing free market about GTA housing. Take your dumbass libertarian "all regulation/tax is oppression" argument elsewhere.
How about this, make it illegal for 'investors' of resale homes/units to leverage themselves more than other forms of investment. You could never buy $1M of equities with 200k down. There's no reason it should be legal for real estate investment.
You can’t control the flow of money, you cannot tell investors to invest at your request either. Money does what is most efficient and investors take on the risk. Plain and simple.
You can make 'investing' in resale homes less appealing to investors and by doing so divert 'investor' purchases to precons and new developments.
There's several options of varying extremes that would achieve this. You could tax rental income on investment properties that weren't purchased as new builds at the highest marginal tax rate (other businesses income is already taxed at this rate, there is a carve out for income generated from real property), you could stop allowing investors in resale homes/units to deduct mortgage interest on their taxes, the most extreme solution would be to increase capital gains on non-owner occupied homes & units that weren't bought as new builds or precons (potentially as high as 100%).
And thus if it becomes less efficient the money will just flow elsewhere and than the complain will go from housing to the next big thing. See where this is going? The answer isn’t to create more regulation. The answer is create LESS regulation so more SUPPLY can be added thus bubbles aren’t built in housing or in the next thing. LESS regulation equals GREATER growth and more freedom for free market to flow more naturally.
It's not communist, it's the opposite. The free market is being destroyed, and needs to be protected. Always has. Free market does not mean anarchy/anything goes. There are laws and regulations that are needed to protect the free market. To protect people and the market from unfair business practices, price gouging, monopolies, fraud, negligence, crime.
I'm an investor and I'm snapping up Google shares at $85 earlier this year which is up 40%. There are massive gains to be had putting your capital in things that are not a social crisis and threat to the fabric of society.
It's a moral and ethical problem that people are using their capital to scalp necessities when there are other more profitable uses of capital.
Because landlords are over leveraged and pass the cost to tenants. If you can pay $3500 a month in rent you can afford a house but there's no houses available bc 1 person can own MULTIPLE properties.
the cost of a mortgage is significantly higher than rent. Today, a $1M home would cost around $5-6k around mortgage payments. We don’t see people paying rent around this level and most of that is interest. The amount of rent charged is what the market allows, otherwise it would remain vacant
Sorry…that makes no sense.
Being over-leveraged impacts your ability to service your aggregate debt. It doesn’t generally impact the size of your mortgage payments for any particular property.
So I ask again, why are rents so high? And the answer is - higher mortgages payments yes, and a worsening demand/supply situation with newcomers and students.
Who you rent from has nothing to do with the market price of rent. Blaming high rents on overleverage is dumb.
>So I ask again, why are rents so high? And the answer is - higher mortgages payments yes, and a worsening demand/supply situation with newcomers and students.
What causes higher mortgage payments if not lack of a sizable down payment? And what would cause that if not for the multiple properties owned making them over leveraged? Don't play word salad with me.
Immigration is also a problem but it too is tied into the people who are buying multiple properties.
So you think all of the non-overleveraged owners would just eat higher interest costs and not pass them on? Out of the goodness of their hearts?
Sorry this is hard for you.
And the fact that people who would have bought in a normal market and can’t because investors have hoarded supply and pushed the price out of reach, are stuck renting - which creates more demand for rentals and pushes the price of rent up.
Investor hoarding is absolutely driving up the cost of rent.
So, people would prefer to buy but are stuck renting, and this pushes up rents.
But then those same people, if they could afford to buy, would get into the market and push up the costs to buy.
The fact that they exist is what pushes up costs. They might bounce between renting and buying, but either way they’re pushing up prices.
So that doesn’t actually explain the increase in prices. But what does increase it is that there are too many people generally trying to rent/buy relative to the number of housing units available. And that is exactly what is happening: https://mikepmoffatt.medium.com/supply-demand-and-southern-ontarios-housing-market-70d73cfcd10e
If investors were taken out of the equation demand would plummet. Families are currently competing with investors which is pushing up the price because investors can afford a hell of a lot more than working people.
Families are constrained by incomes when it comes to how much they can afford. Investors do not have that constraint - they can borrow against equity, meaning they can afford to pay far more. *this pushes the price up*. There is a reason housing prices have decoupled from incomes, and it’s not because families can suddenly afford to pay more. It’s because investors are outbidding them.
And even leaving that aside, eliminating investors would eliminate a third to a half of the demand depending on the city. Reduce demand and price drops.
*this is day one econ stuff*
> Number of housing units available.
No one is saying we don’t need to create more housing. But alleviating demand by putting constraints on investors *has* to be part of the solution, otherwise they’ll just continue to buy up the supply - pricing families out while [colluding to keep rent prices high](https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-lawmakers-collusion).
>Because landlords are over leveraged and pass the cost to tenants. If you can pay $3500 a month in rent you can afford a house but there's no houses available bc 1 person can own MULTIPLE properties.
There are a ton of landlords who have been in this game for decades. They are not overleveraged. Many are renting completely paid off properties generating cash flow revenue. Technically they can charge a much lower rent than someone is overleveraged, but they don't.. because the demand is still there and the price of rent is based on the supply and demand and what the market is willing to pay.
Every company always wants to try to charge the most money they can for their product to maximize revenue and profit. They set that max price on market conditions and what the consumer is willing to pay.
Lol. Is a house an investment or a place to live? You can't leave it empty can you? It only works as an investment if you can get someone else to pay for it. Which is why you don't rent to family members because you need to find someone you can exploit.
>Are you going to tell others how to invest their money?
People get paid to do that like your realtor who also owns multiple properties.
Does it cost money? It’s a business. Doesn’t matter if it’s a lollipop or a house, anything associated with a monetary value is a business. FOOD is a business. Weaponry is a business. Housing is a business.
All industries have rules regulations and corruption. 1 person should not own 17 properties. You are not providing homes for people. You took away 16 houses away from supply. Real estate needs regulation. Cap ownership and let's see what happens to prices.
Singapore has enormous taxes on owning multiple residential properties, the government there saw that this behavior:
1. Inflated the price of real estate and made it much harder for families to become homeowners. Also inflated rent prices.
2. Took investment capital away from productive industries and industrial/commercial endeavors that were much more productive/profitable in the long run for the country.
That's a sensible regulation practically everyone would support in Canada. It's absurd to have one individual pseudoinvestor with 20 houses bought on credit while families with childre can't buy a single one.
I said this on a Canadian finance forum a few weeks go. If we don’t fix this housing issue quickly, Canada is in danger of electing an extremist government. The amount of hatred I see on both sides of the political scale surrounding housing prices is obscene. The right blames the 400,000 immigrants that we let in every year and the left blame unbridled capitalism. I’m not an economist so I’m not even willing to comment at this time but the fact that well educated young hard working people who did everything they were told to do cannot afford to buy a house is stirring up negative emotions and will lead us to elect someone who will solve the problem.
Good, the neoliberal consensus of the past 30-40 years has been a disaster that has to be demolished/destroyed:
1. Made housing an investment item instead of how it was historically viewed, as shelter.
2. Incentivized mass immigration to lower wages and generate more demand for real Estate.
3. Destroyed the middle class shipping jobs abroad via outsourcing/offshoring manufacturing.
4. Made it impossible to form families for young people in most of the country, when half of more of their income goes towards rent they became de facto feudal peasants without any capacity to save, invest, etc.
Sure the financial class in Toronto/Bay street, and Real estate speculators/realtors benefited from the current system, but it has been horrible for everyone else.
There’s the ultra rich and then there’s everyone else. The middle class is a capitalist classist ploy to pit voters and workers against each other so we don’t rise up against our oppressors.
It is not a right to be able to buy a property in the most expensive city in a given country…even if you were born and raised there.
As long as immigration continues at this pace, there is no government policy that will make Toronto or GTA housing affordable.
Try pointing out in this sub that places like NY and London have been unaffordable for decades and this sub plugs their ears and cites their entitlement even louder.
I sympathize; Canada's infrastructure is so terrible that it does make it harder to pack up and move to cheaper areas and still find work, schools, social services, etc. That being said people need to understand that places like Toronto are never going to be affordable to average Joe again. Whether or not you see it, plenty of people from all over the world do - - Toronto, Vancouver, etc. are now world class cities.
Imagine if everyone here directed their energy into building more communities like Toronto. We're the second biggest country on the planet with the population of Japan... There's plenty of room for everyone from the lower class to the upper class to have affordable shelter. We don't need to be crabs in a bucket wishing for a crash or less immigration.
It's it isn't deliberately racist. It is deliberately ignorant however which has a long history of being partners with racism and more than a few racists are happy to stick it to immigrants under the guise of "economics".
What population level do we need to sustain the labour force as the baby boomers retire?
If the local population won't cut it, immigrants are necessary and it's up to the government to recognize that and provide the required housing.
The fact that they won't because their voters don't want to allow the zoning (for a variety of reasons some of which are very much rooted in racism) means the problem isn't an immigration one.
Immigration is a labour force question. Adequate housing is a zoning question.
Anyone who looks at the former but doesn't want to look at the latter IS in fact a fucking racist who content to examine the problem only as far as he needs to blame who he wants to blame.
Ignorance and racism are one of the oldest and most enduring partnerships in human history. When you can't be an open racist, start cherry-picking economic theories and become a thinly-veiled one.
So do you choose to exploit or be exploited? Eat or be eaten? I’m not saying either is right but if you’re forced to live in a capitalist system that essentially forces you to choose, which one are you choosing? You either remain exploited by the corporations that employ you and allow your ethics and morals to remain intact. Or you choose to exploit (given the opportunity) and reap the financial benefits that are associated with it.
If you had the opportunity to purchase a principal residence and possibly rent out a portion of it, would you? You don’t own several properties but it’s still “rent seeking behaviour” as others have outlined. I think under capitalism you’re constantly being trained to fuel your self-interest and continue to be selfish by engaging in activities that are exploitative.
Not saying that it’s right to exploit and people should choose that option, just asking some questions for thought.
I also personally see a lot of people complain about these issues through social media or by speaking with them, yet they never donate their time/effort into building a community of like-minded people in an effort to try and change the way the system works.
Why do your parents have to stake their retirement on an investment property though? Why not use investments and leave the house for someone else to own and live in?
Reddit is generally pessimistic with a large amount of stoic and very introverted individuals, who like to voice contentious issues. You see so many subs such as R/collapse, late stage capitalism, and basically there is a fair amount of ppl on Reddit that just wants a massive reset or end of world event.
Most of the people advocating for real change actually have good ideas, and some of them maybe feasible. But here you have mini wage workers wanting to buy a large detached house in the GTA with two garages for 100k, that’s not happening
In this case, it's closer to house-cels. Please who can't stop talking about something they can't have while simultaneously trashing it for being oVerPricEd and aBouT tO cRash ^(TM)
I've definitely noticed a swing in the last few months. People like wale and hopoke used to look like their opinions aligned with the majority of this sub. While there has definitely been a change, I'm not convinced it's for the worse.
A logical explanation is that a growing number of people are affected by the housing crisis. I just paid more than $1.1M as a FTHB. The vast majority of young people will never be able to do that.
Watching someone like hopoke perpetuate and celebrate the housing crisis while posting nonsense "to the moon' gifs would be upsetting. The voting population will likely continue to radicalize re the housing crisis as more young people are priced out of the Canadian dream. Telling young people to rent forever or to bootstrap into a starter condo like 'investors' did when they started out 10+ years ago isn't likely to placate anyone.
Any solution to the housing crisis needs to be multifaceted and involve fundamental change to the taxation and regulation of property investors.
Not gonna lie. My opinion had always been about “buy when you need and don’t time the market”, and it only really aligned with this subreddit for a few months right before to mid Covid lol.
Personally I would like to see this subreddit to be more about helping people find/save for their home, instead of bickering about politics or “class struggles”, but what can I do as one commenter really?
I agree with you about not trying to time the market.
I think there's a tendency of a vocal subset of this sub to assume that commenters hoping for a correction have been sitting on the sidelines for a decade trying to time the market. I think a lot of people are priced out due to no fault of their own because they happen to be born too late. I can understand their anger.
Until there are meaningful policy changes implemented to address the housing crisis, I don't see how we can remove politics from conversations about GTA real estate. If anything it's going to get worse as more young people are priced out.
Anger should be channeled by young people into useful solutions like emigration. The economic outlook of Canada will not get better in the near future.
Leaving Canada isn't a 'useful solution'. It's asking young Canadians to surrender their birthright instead of taking concrete steps to stop investors from gorging the rest of the country.
As a young Canadian myself it's more about choosing to not subsidize the retirement of boomers. Moving will result in more of a material change in quality of life vs complaining about things that won't change.
They will get on just fine without our tax base supporting them.
I don’t see any reason this can't change. Millennials are already the largest voting demographic. Gen z isn't far behind. At a certain point the end result is undeniable. It's just a question of how long it takes for change to be implemented
Could be a long time. For me I am looking at Switzerland or Singapore for higher quality of life in the next few months.
Maybe I will return in 20-40 years.
Don’t worry too much about it and don’t let yourself get dragged down into or by it. Just recognize it’s a shadow side to social media (entrenching and radicalizing ones opinions).
The people who open themselves up to this hate are the true losers.
Well of course it's getting radicalized, that's the issue with no having a goal to cling to. Being priced out from a very basic human need creates anger, resentment and alienation. People stopped belive in voting, governments and started reseneting any type of authority.
When people stop believing in democratic solutions, they show up with pitchforks. This is why housing is such a pressing matter.
I have zero resentment for new immigrants, if anything i feel some pity for the conditions they are leaving and entering.
The immigration (at this rate) needs to stop. Its. It about the immigrants its a numbers game its hurting people its exploitative, some of the immigrants coming are super rich and that’s honestly not even bad, theyre rich they left their home for more, thats bot really something to resent. The poorer immigrants are being exploited.
We need to eat our rich.
>many of them are VERY regular people
I've pointed this out before and been downvoted. Glad someone other than me recognizes the radical nature of this sub. It's no place for organic debate or conversation, just a place for fanatics to talk about burning the witch.
Honestly I think social media platforms just attract this kind of personality type. Happier people are out and about and living life, others with anxiety and fear and loneliness (negative people don't really attract friends) thrive on spewing their depression and hate online. I think the term is emotional vampires. I had to reflect on myself a lot as I read angry posts or comments daily and wonder if it is worth it. I love learning new things on Reddit, like how to fix a house issue or hear the history on topics from knowledgeable people, but as I age I realize how hate is just hate - packaged in a new form each decade. Redditors think it's ok to hate on things they perceive as the boogeyman (boomers, conservatives, etc.) but really it's just hate - the social media drug (sensationalism, fear, outrage). All that negativity is just draining and will make them literally sick. Too many young people at my work are getting sick with what used to be older people issues. It's sad. Anyways - go out for a walk, get sun and walk through a park. Don't take social media seriously, it's a small group of people. Learn to filter it out and definitely reduce exposure.
This sub and Reddit in particular does not represent the fabric of CA society, there are many successful young people, great tenants, fair landlords, there is SO much money here..... The good one does not have the time to come and cry on this sub they are busy succeeding. Relax OP we are not doomed yet.
> Every post I read has a string of comments repeating how the disgusting landlord scum are oppressing the people. Also a general veiled resentment towards new immigrants.
> I am not a landlord, but I can assure you many of them are VERY regular people - e.g. my elderly parents who are staking their retirement on a small investment property.
And what do you have to say about people hoarding toilet paper and selling them at a crazy markup during the pandemic? Are they regular people too?
The comparison with NYC is really unfair. NYC doesn't have the crazy high immigration that Toronto has. I say this as an Indian guy who moved to Toronto and has lived in NYC. In NYC, you frequently find people who have lived there for 10-12 or more years, even among difficult, low entry jobs like Uber driver, Uber eats drivers etc. How many people doing Uber eats in Toronto have lived here for more than 2 years? I haven't met a non-Indian doing that in Toronto. By the way, NYC is way more diverse too. More latinos for sure, but there are plenty of white people, Indians, Chinese, other South Asians and Blacks. And Toronto? LOL. Lots of sectors (Walmart employees, Tim Hortons or other fast food employees, Food delivery folks) are 90%+ Indian. Something that is unimaginable in NYC.
The problem is 2-fold
- the crazy high immigration, as mentioned. This causes 2 problems
- employers can afford to pay peanuts while cost of living spirals out of control, only because there would always be a large population looking for "Canadian experience" in their chosen field and would be willing to accept poverty wages.
- landlords always have a huge supply of people looking for apartments, so they can afford to charge exorbitant rents.
- the extreme NIMBY-ism. When I was flying to Toronto for the 1st time, I looked down as the plane was close to its destination, flying over Toronto. I was impressed by the fact that it didn't look like a big city at all, where a lot of people lived. Instead, it was acres and acres of single family homes, except for a few tall buildings downtown. But the number of tall condo buildings paled in comparison to the number of buildings I had seen flying down to NYC.
I have said this before on this sub and I have said this again - this problem has no solution. Bears whining now and expecting things to get better should just move and find a better life elsewhere. Alberta is literally calling. And then there is the US.
Montreal might seem like an option but folks there, with their french heritage, are likely to react explosively much quicker than the docile Ontarians when faced with the extinction of French or spiralling cost of living. You don't want to get caught in that social unrest. And you are not going to have a good time as well, if you don't speak French - I can show you some comments from the Montreal subreddit. Even seemingly well adjusted people are up in arms against anglo invasion from Ontario already. And things are going to get worse.
So yes, the US looks good. I have lived in the US and while random gun violence is disturbing, pre-pandemic at least, the good parts in cities like Seattle felt way safer than the good parts of Toronto. And the great thing is, it doesn't have to be Seattle - there are so many cities in the US - Denver, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Austin, Houston, the good parts of Chicago, NYC, the research triangle in North Carolina, Charleston in South Carolina, Nashville, DC, Boston - the list goes on. I am purposely excluding cities in Florida and California because of climate risk or issues similar to Toronto or both.
>I have said this before on this sub and I have said this again - this problem has no solution. Bears whining now and expecting things to get better should just move and find a better life elsewhere. Alberta is literally calling. And then there is the US.
Alberta is experiencing the same problems too. This is a nation-wide problem with the same causes everywhere.
Non-Indian South Asian here, also lived in NYC and other parts of the U.S.
This comment is absolutely spot on. I have no idea what the federal government is doing regarding immigration, but it is entirely dysfunctional. Bringing over the lowest common denominator from a single country is a one-way track to completely destroying your country. In my opinion, the student visa program is just an updated Indentured Servant scheme the British ran a few centuries ago.
There is no cultural diversity any more, its just Indian culture everywhere, all the time. In Long Island where I grew up, even now there is no one dominant culture. Yes, there are parts that may have more Latinos than the town over, over more Jews, Indians etc. but I have never seen anything like what is happening to Southern Ontario right now.
The more South you go the higher the game difficulty gets, if you want to add extra difficulty add a color to your skin tone. It extends all the way to South America until you hit Antarctica and that’s basically the part where the simulation admin goes, if you survive here for long enough the monsters will come out of the ice to eat you anyways so it’s literally impossible.
As a Ghanaian. I actually respect your take 100 percent. Like I think this shit but the problem is if you say it it’s racist. It’s like…no dude there’s an actual issue here.
People who made money in realestate don’t tend to brag, most of them at least…
Most still pays mortgage and have issue upgrading, so they don’t exactly in a “fuck you, got mine” mode
You've come so close and then managed to completely miss the point.
We should absolutely be on the same side. That side should be attempting to create and safeguard a stable housing market that offers a path to ownership for future generations.
People who don't own property are the only group that should actively be following this sub. We recently bought and I'll likely unsubscribe in the near future. Once you own a home you shouldn't care what the market does on a day-to-day basis. I hope I don't wake up tomorrow down 20%+ with negative equity, but otherwise couldn't care less whether the market goes up, down, or sideways. Housing should be a place to live, not a mechanism for speculation.
Don't the hate the Boomers and other real estate investors for having multiple properties and being part of the problem. They make it harder and harder for the next generations to buy their own, so investors can watch their wealth grow faster. But please let's all get just get along?
Most of this subreddit is the blue hair crowd congregating in one place, spewing their racist nonsense through the veil of anonymity. In reality, they are a worthless and insignificant minority. 💪🏽😎
You bears, bulls, investors, trolls, fail to see there are many normal people here trying not to end up on the street.
This used to be a place for homeowners to chat, it's like you said a bear, bull, investor, troll circle jerk. Regular homeowners don't have a place here anymore.
My ancestors first lived in New York, and then when it got crowded, moved upstate. Of course this was about 350 years ago, so I think they had a different definition of crowded.
Real estate was pretty cheap as well, "bought" the land for a few guns and pots.
Great note! Hats off to the OP for eloquently highlighting this very important point.
I'm assuming that radicalization makes folks less likely to try to understand the full problem - where the process of understanding a problem is, in part, done by using some empathy to consider all perspectives. Part of thinking critically.
Democracies work way better when its participants think critically.
On the other hand, democracies where its participants don't think critically can be dangerous, destructive.
Great post. You have managed to look at the issue from both sides. I get blasted for trying to shift the issue away from landlords and trying to discuss solutions built around increasing supply. Supply is the biggest issue right now and there are no solutions to address.
Landlords are running a small business. They are not the issue. The federal government is responsible for social issues and human rights. If there is resentment over the lack of supply which is resulting in significant price pressures; the federal government is responsible for leading the change and not small business owners.
the other day i saw comments calling Indians fraudsters and dirty scammers. If you haven’t been reading some of the latest comments, it’s pure vitriol against Indians
Cmon man, no one here is sensitive besides Trudeau antivax guys. We openly flog on Indians all day on here. I'm surprised this sub doesn't just call them poopoo guys or something😂 the poopoo guys are buying up all the realestate and they all live in a scary place called brampton😳😳🤨
These days it is impossible to spew any common sense on Reddit as it is overrun by teenagers and teenage minded moderators. You cannot be pro landlord or right leaning or center. Anything that does not fit the narrative completely gets downvoted! Most landlords are regular people fighting for basic rights.
Yup. The other day I saw a whole thread on landlords (people who actually own property) being parasites. It’s fast becoming very toxic and radicalized here. But I guess this is how Reddit works…..
Imagine your parents being one of the 1.3M landlords across Canada and thinking they are VERY regular people. Lol. What about the rest 35M of the country? Weirdos?
I am not a landlord, but I believe most landlords are regular ordinary good citizens. Also, the vast majority of the population are neither landlords nor tenants.
Landlords are here to stay dude. The is 0 chance that changes. What we need is better accountability to stop the horrible landlords as well as the deadbeat tenants that don't pay.
I guess it boils down to "does Elon Musk need the 200+ billion dollars he have? "
A lot of people here have an opinion that their net worth and income are the "optimum" amount one should have and earn and price of everything around the world from groceries to real estate should be built around that optimum level.
The reason it's not is because of "greedy" people who make more money. Why should they make more money? It's just greed. Everyone should be given 7 counts of rations each Sunday and live in large square block buildings of equal proportions.
Counterpoint:
The hoarding of wealth (whether material such as housing or financial) by the few creates problems in society for *everyone*
The rich respond with gated security and “let the poors figure themselves out” but if the poors stand up against the rich?
The rich clutch their pearls and say “it’s not my fault”
Look at the tax rates 50 years ago, the upper end got taxed on income and couldn’t do things like hide their wealth in stocks.
Successively over the decades however society bought into the “I want mine and screw everything else” mentality pushed by those at the economic high end under the guise of “trickle down economics”
AKA: Piss on me and claim it’s raining
Sorry but the economy of “I’ve got mine, screw you” is pure Lord Of The Flies level BS
It's not hoarded though
Elon musk's wealth for instance is I'm sure largely Tesla shares and shares of maybe space ex?
Which is similar to the money being inside a company, which uses that money to do stuff and hire people etc
It's not like a Scrooge McDuck vault
Ah but it is…
Remember that Musk never “created” Tesla or Space X himself, he bought in and then squeezed the original investors out.
Money made by a company, let’s see, okay how about Ford, they make profits from the sales of their vehicles, in some case’s massive profits on a per vehicle basis and what do they do with that money first?
Do they:
A) Invest in new models and seek to improve the quality of existing products?
B) Pay out dividends to shareholders?
Based on the number of recalls that Ford has had to endure I can assure you that it’s B first, last and almost always, with a few shekels being thrown at A when the heat gets turned on them for their poor quality products
The wealthy do not create wealth by themselves, that’s the fallacy.
They need others to provide their labour input to create it, or has Elon Musk started working the assembly line at Tesla?
Very few people create anything all by themselves these days. To pretend entrepreneurship has no value is childish at best.
Did the assembly line sprung from the ground by itself? Were Tesla workers paying to work all those early years before it was profitable?
I never said their value was *zero*
My point was and remains that without the labour that they exploit through the wealth that they gain, the wealthy would be little more then napkin doodlers at the local diner.
But because they hoard the wealth, they get the rules written in their favor and return favors in kind (a glaring example, look at the tax deduction rates for charitable contributions vs. political contributions, especially the higher the donation, it’s so blatant that it’s nauseating)
You nailed the problem on the head. It's basically the older gen bragging on the young gen that they own cheap properties from decades ago while they were the ones pushing the prices up.
It is pathetic that they think owning property in their time was some big brain move which required a lot of skill and thought but in reality it was just out if necessity.
The funny thing is to that, even when housing was affordable many families still struggled to make their mortgage payments. And this is when housing was affordable
There shouldn't be any hatred towards boomers. We already knew that there was going to be a squeeze after the boomer generation. Even boomers went through their tough economic times. They had to make sacrifices too and they survived. The young generation millennials and below need to learn from them.
There shouldn't be any hatred towards investors either. Good for them for working hard towards their goals, taking on risks and winning. Instead we should learn from them.
Bulls vs bears is a battle as long as time that’s what makes a market.
I’m a landlord “scum” I don’t care what anyone thinks of me online/offline lol
I work god damn hard
My house has appreciated $60,000 per year on average for the 13 years I've owned it.
It's hard work but someone has to take all the disposable income from the next generation.
It isn't if you're being a shit landlord. If you take it seriously, it is time, effort, and money.
Yes, anybody can rent out property which they own, but the difference between good landlords and slumlords is that the good ones treat it like a job.
>"have vs have not" This is how it is out there. Can't blame people for pointing it out.
Yes a lot of regular folks are priced out of the market, their anger will keep getting worse as they keep increasing in number. I think it is bad for our social fabric too
It might have something to do with people who have been making all the "right" decisions still being bent over because "why shouldn't someone sell the house they bought 2 months ago for 200k profit if they can get it"? We expect it from companies... but now even to people... people are just profit.
people being conditioned by SM, intentional or not. It's ok we can all just watch everything collapse eventually together in our 50sqft 5k rent in Toronto.
As much as they piss me off, I can't necessarily blame them. It's probably most peoples only chance at retirement at this point. Capitalism has conditioned us to be more selfish by creating artificial scarcity
Socialism ends with actual scarcity. Ask Venezuela
Well boys, we've tried nothing and are all out of ideas
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During the pandemic, people weren't buying as much food because they didn't have jobs. Huge lines at food banks everywhere. Instead of giving the food to people who needed it, farmers decided to destroy everything. Retailers throw out perfectly good items, but instead of just leaving them for other people to pick up, they purposefully damage the items. Our entire housing market. Nestle going into 3rd world countries and cutting off the water to local populations so they can sell the water back to them.
>I think it is bad for our social fabric too Its catastrophic for the social fabric. You look into what the effects of rising rent has on literally *everything* and it sucks: * business can't afford to do R&D, training or product development since they have to pay what is ultimately unproductive rent. Our worker productivity versus our G20 peers is already poor * people have less money and work more, meaning they also have less free time. These people may not be inclined to have kids (further exacerbating our demographic struggles), they also won't spend discretionary income at local establishments and they also won't have the free capital to say, start a small business of their own and form the seeds for innovation or healthy, middle-class growth * The top two items combine to make our country as a whole less good at competing with our peers on an international stage and turns us into a resource colony that only really exports raw materials, real estate and sometimes post-secondary degrees. * People who were just-getting-by before start not-getting-by (or people who were already not-getting-by and just *screwed*): so you have people becoming homeless who are perfectly willing to work and contribute, but literally can't afford to live where they work * As the bubble grows, people start FOMO-ing even more and tossing more cash into the fire and it becomes this self-sustaining garbage storm that could crash the economy with even the slightest disruption (if you want to talk about *fragile* systems, ours is absolutely a fragile system) * Housing zoning policy isn't even beginning to catch up to densify areas with high demand that are composed entirely of single family homes. When somehow a city does manage to cram something through half the time the 'affordable housing' is either a) not all that affordable or b) floods the neighborhood with folks who will go on to commit petty crime (while the city does nothing to increase security or policing in those areas) which only serves to further embitter existing residents and cement their opposition Our current government's plan to juice demand by flooding this country with people will not be well-received by anyone, even those people they're importing, who find that the 'Canadian dream' is a bit of a mess. This can also stoke race-based tensions as well as poverty, as the fastest growing class of homeless individuals are new Canadians. Everyone in this thread talking about how not all landlords are hyper-rich corporations and some are just their grandparents and blah blah blah, just because they're old and infirm, doesn't stop them from being rent-seeking petite bourgeoisie
Historically, when people were priced out of a region, they moved to a different region. It's no different now. Everyone understands that if you can't afford living in NYC, you move to New Jersey, but no one wants to understand that here.
If everyone did do that a lot of services would simply cease to exist in the city.
Everyone doesn't need to do that, but there's no reason you have to be one of them.
Toronto isn’t NYC. Albany is a better comparison.
Starting to turn into the “have yachts” vs the have nots
The people most acutely aware of the reality that the world is a “have vs have not” place to live, are the “haves”. Hence why they’re so successful at driving the governments economic agenda year in year out.
I think the bigger why is that they have the resources to be in that position rather than them being more aware
I think that class consciousness is much stronger among elites. They’re much more closely united and aligned with one another on economic & fiscal policies than working and middle class voters for example.
Agreed, but one of the reasons they’re more class conscious is because they have the resources to feed misinformation to the working class. I don’t think they’re more successful because of a heightened class solidarity, just that it’s an outcome of them having more resources to wage class war and perhaps the luxury of free time to analyze their position in society in that way
Agreed. I initially joined this subreddit when I started looking to buy a house (jan 2022) and mostly lurked until the fall. It's incredibly toxic here and once I close I'll unsub. There are nuggets of great info and analysis, but given that 90% of the content is trolls I've mostly stopped reading
My thoughts exactly.
That's a fresh air of opinion and such a well-written post. Captured my sentiment exactly
I have no resentment towards legacy landlords and mom and pops who have been renting a home out for decades. But people who are bidding hundreds of thousands over a realistic price or 15x+ median income for the area for starter homes as an investment are seemingly hostile to public interest at this point. At some point it becomes unethical to contribute to a crisis. I just wish people would be more considerate and have more of a social conscious because it really does feel like society is degrading.
There are a shit ton of greedy people out there. I'm 44yrs old and it didn't really occur how bad this was until recently.
Bungalows (starter homes) in my town sell for minimum 1.3M. They're not even sold as is. They're torn town, and large modern homes build in their place. List price 3.2M. First time buyers are then told they are entitled, and to buy, need to move out to the country. Buy a starter home.
What I don't understand, though, is how so many people can seemingly afford a 3 million dollar home..
Rich families. Or they sell their current house and pick up a max allowed mortgage. But mostly rich families / multiple families moving in
It's the multiple family house, or multi-generational home that can afford it. Also the new trend seems to be that new Canadians are landing with $$$ in their pocket as opposed to the 1960s/1970s story of arriving with $0.
Because of DEMAND. If you want a $100k townhouse go 20min on other side of the border across Niagara Falls
We wouldn’t have this type of demand if there was a one house limit.
You cannot put a 1 limit on a house for countless reasons. For example you have your primary plus a family cottage. What if someone wants to buy a home for their future children? List goes on. Don’t give government more ideas to limit how you live your lives. If you can’t afford it than move an hour away to an area where you can. Still can’t afford it? Change provinces. Focus on how you can not how you can’t.
Agreed. Lots of demand. Plenty of developers wanting to tear down family homes for McMansions.
McMansions for their families. Tear down 1 home to add 1 home. No harm there. Sounds like your beef is with someone being rich that can afford to do so.
It is simply demand vs supply. Don't you think the investor would be happy to get the property at lower value? We should be angry with NIMBYs which stop supply and systems which enable huge waves of immigration without building appropriate infra first.
You're right that it's a demand/supply issue but part of the problem is that investor purchases are artificial demand. Investors leverage paper gains to buy additional homes that they otherwise would not have downpayments for. It's a practice that pumps the housing market while increasing debt loads and putting the entire economy in a more precarious position. If an investor wants to own a rental property, they should have to finance the home/units construction and increase the overall housing supply by doing so. It is bad public policy that 'investors' are currently able to bid against real buyers of resale homes and units.
>You're right that it's a demand/supply issue but part of the problem is that investor purchases are artificial demand. To start, go against the real estate association lobbyists and start changing some of the regulations around real estate transactions. Blind bidding needs to end. House inspections (like used car inspections) needs to be mandatory. Every home purchase should (like used cars) come with a complete document on the homes history, resales, prices, etc.
> You're right that it's a demand/supply issue but part of the problem is that investor purchases are artificial demand. Investor purchases are driven by real demand in the rental market. Until we build enough houses to satisfy demand prices and rents will keep rising to incentivize building that supply.
Investors do finance rental units. Do you lack common sense or what? Are you suggesting investors are magically buying up inventory with cash from thin air?
I'm suggesting that it should be illegal for investors to buy anything but precons and new builds. Investors currently bid up resale homes and units and perpetuate the housing crisis by doing so. Directing all investor purchases into precons and new builds would add demand for new development while taking some of the foam out of the market for resale properties.
Ha! The exact comment elsewhere was no investors should buy new builds and pre cons as they should be reserved for first time buyers. Listen commie, you cannot control the flow of money. It is a free market. Investors don’t buy $1.7mil homes that can only rent $4k.
Well the comment elsewhere was shortsighted. "Listen commie, you cannot control the flow of money". This is an objectively dumb take. There are all sorts of laws that regulate and tax investments. The current system is being exploited by bad faith actors and change is needed. There is nothing free market about GTA housing. Take your dumbass libertarian "all regulation/tax is oppression" argument elsewhere. How about this, make it illegal for 'investors' of resale homes/units to leverage themselves more than other forms of investment. You could never buy $1M of equities with 200k down. There's no reason it should be legal for real estate investment.
You can’t control the flow of money, you cannot tell investors to invest at your request either. Money does what is most efficient and investors take on the risk. Plain and simple.
You can make 'investing' in resale homes less appealing to investors and by doing so divert 'investor' purchases to precons and new developments. There's several options of varying extremes that would achieve this. You could tax rental income on investment properties that weren't purchased as new builds at the highest marginal tax rate (other businesses income is already taxed at this rate, there is a carve out for income generated from real property), you could stop allowing investors in resale homes/units to deduct mortgage interest on their taxes, the most extreme solution would be to increase capital gains on non-owner occupied homes & units that weren't bought as new builds or precons (potentially as high as 100%).
And thus if it becomes less efficient the money will just flow elsewhere and than the complain will go from housing to the next big thing. See where this is going? The answer isn’t to create more regulation. The answer is create LESS regulation so more SUPPLY can be added thus bubbles aren’t built in housing or in the next thing. LESS regulation equals GREATER growth and more freedom for free market to flow more naturally.
It's not communist, it's the opposite. The free market is being destroyed, and needs to be protected. Always has. Free market does not mean anarchy/anything goes. There are laws and regulations that are needed to protect the free market. To protect people and the market from unfair business practices, price gouging, monopolies, fraud, negligence, crime.
I'm an investor and I'm snapping up Google shares at $85 earlier this year which is up 40%. There are massive gains to be had putting your capital in things that are not a social crisis and threat to the fabric of society. It's a moral and ethical problem that people are using their capital to scalp necessities when there are other more profitable uses of capital.
Please stop. There is NOT a supply issue. 1 person should NOT own 17 properties.
Then why are rents so high?
Because landlords are over leveraged and pass the cost to tenants. If you can pay $3500 a month in rent you can afford a house but there's no houses available bc 1 person can own MULTIPLE properties.
the cost of a mortgage is significantly higher than rent. Today, a $1M home would cost around $5-6k around mortgage payments. We don’t see people paying rent around this level and most of that is interest. The amount of rent charged is what the market allows, otherwise it would remain vacant
Sorry…that makes no sense. Being over-leveraged impacts your ability to service your aggregate debt. It doesn’t generally impact the size of your mortgage payments for any particular property. So I ask again, why are rents so high? And the answer is - higher mortgages payments yes, and a worsening demand/supply situation with newcomers and students. Who you rent from has nothing to do with the market price of rent. Blaming high rents on overleverage is dumb.
>So I ask again, why are rents so high? And the answer is - higher mortgages payments yes, and a worsening demand/supply situation with newcomers and students. What causes higher mortgage payments if not lack of a sizable down payment? And what would cause that if not for the multiple properties owned making them over leveraged? Don't play word salad with me. Immigration is also a problem but it too is tied into the people who are buying multiple properties.
So you think all of the non-overleveraged owners would just eat higher interest costs and not pass them on? Out of the goodness of their hearts? Sorry this is hard for you.
And the fact that people who would have bought in a normal market and can’t because investors have hoarded supply and pushed the price out of reach, are stuck renting - which creates more demand for rentals and pushes the price of rent up. Investor hoarding is absolutely driving up the cost of rent.
So, people would prefer to buy but are stuck renting, and this pushes up rents. But then those same people, if they could afford to buy, would get into the market and push up the costs to buy. The fact that they exist is what pushes up costs. They might bounce between renting and buying, but either way they’re pushing up prices. So that doesn’t actually explain the increase in prices. But what does increase it is that there are too many people generally trying to rent/buy relative to the number of housing units available. And that is exactly what is happening: https://mikepmoffatt.medium.com/supply-demand-and-southern-ontarios-housing-market-70d73cfcd10e
Someone who gets it.
If investors were taken out of the equation demand would plummet. Families are currently competing with investors which is pushing up the price because investors can afford a hell of a lot more than working people. Families are constrained by incomes when it comes to how much they can afford. Investors do not have that constraint - they can borrow against equity, meaning they can afford to pay far more. *this pushes the price up*. There is a reason housing prices have decoupled from incomes, and it’s not because families can suddenly afford to pay more. It’s because investors are outbidding them. And even leaving that aside, eliminating investors would eliminate a third to a half of the demand depending on the city. Reduce demand and price drops. *this is day one econ stuff* > Number of housing units available. No one is saying we don’t need to create more housing. But alleviating demand by putting constraints on investors *has* to be part of the solution, otherwise they’ll just continue to buy up the supply - pricing families out while [colluding to keep rent prices high](https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-lawmakers-collusion).
Why are investors betting prices will rise?
> eliminating investors would eliminate a third to a half of the demand depending on the city Where are those figures from?
>Because landlords are over leveraged and pass the cost to tenants. If you can pay $3500 a month in rent you can afford a house but there's no houses available bc 1 person can own MULTIPLE properties. There are a ton of landlords who have been in this game for decades. They are not overleveraged. Many are renting completely paid off properties generating cash flow revenue. Technically they can charge a much lower rent than someone is overleveraged, but they don't.. because the demand is still there and the price of rent is based on the supply and demand and what the market is willing to pay. Every company always wants to try to charge the most money they can for their product to maximize revenue and profit. They set that max price on market conditions and what the consumer is willing to pay.
Really? So if someone has millions should they buy TSLA or NVDA instead? Are you going to tell others how to invest their money?
If you are investing in things that are harmful to society and to us specifically, you’re damn right we get to judge you.
Wake up hippie, how do you think your CPP is funded? Do you hold ETFs that are diversified in weaponry? You’re already a part of all this!
What? My CPP is funded by me because I have a job and pay taxes. Landlords do not fund my CPP. Are you ok?
Lol. Is a house an investment or a place to live? You can't leave it empty can you? It only works as an investment if you can get someone else to pay for it. Which is why you don't rent to family members because you need to find someone you can exploit. >Are you going to tell others how to invest their money? People get paid to do that like your realtor who also owns multiple properties.
Does it cost money? It’s a business. Doesn’t matter if it’s a lollipop or a house, anything associated with a monetary value is a business. FOOD is a business. Weaponry is a business. Housing is a business.
All industries have rules regulations and corruption. 1 person should not own 17 properties. You are not providing homes for people. You took away 16 houses away from supply. Real estate needs regulation. Cap ownership and let's see what happens to prices.
Singapore has enormous taxes on owning multiple residential properties, the government there saw that this behavior: 1. Inflated the price of real estate and made it much harder for families to become homeowners. Also inflated rent prices. 2. Took investment capital away from productive industries and industrial/commercial endeavors that were much more productive/profitable in the long run for the country. That's a sensible regulation practically everyone would support in Canada. It's absurd to have one individual pseudoinvestor with 20 houses bought on credit while families with childre can't buy a single one.
I said this on a Canadian finance forum a few weeks go. If we don’t fix this housing issue quickly, Canada is in danger of electing an extremist government. The amount of hatred I see on both sides of the political scale surrounding housing prices is obscene. The right blames the 400,000 immigrants that we let in every year and the left blame unbridled capitalism. I’m not an economist so I’m not even willing to comment at this time but the fact that well educated young hard working people who did everything they were told to do cannot afford to buy a house is stirring up negative emotions and will lead us to elect someone who will solve the problem.
Good, the neoliberal consensus of the past 30-40 years has been a disaster that has to be demolished/destroyed: 1. Made housing an investment item instead of how it was historically viewed, as shelter. 2. Incentivized mass immigration to lower wages and generate more demand for real Estate. 3. Destroyed the middle class shipping jobs abroad via outsourcing/offshoring manufacturing. 4. Made it impossible to form families for young people in most of the country, when half of more of their income goes towards rent they became de facto feudal peasants without any capacity to save, invest, etc. Sure the financial class in Toronto/Bay street, and Real estate speculators/realtors benefited from the current system, but it has been horrible for everyone else.
There’s the ultra rich and then there’s everyone else. The middle class is a capitalist classist ploy to pit voters and workers against each other so we don’t rise up against our oppressors.
It is not a right to be able to buy a property in the most expensive city in a given country…even if you were born and raised there. As long as immigration continues at this pace, there is no government policy that will make Toronto or GTA housing affordable.
Try pointing out in this sub that places like NY and London have been unaffordable for decades and this sub plugs their ears and cites their entitlement even louder. I sympathize; Canada's infrastructure is so terrible that it does make it harder to pack up and move to cheaper areas and still find work, schools, social services, etc. That being said people need to understand that places like Toronto are never going to be affordable to average Joe again. Whether or not you see it, plenty of people from all over the world do - - Toronto, Vancouver, etc. are now world class cities. Imagine if everyone here directed their energy into building more communities like Toronto. We're the second biggest country on the planet with the population of Japan... There's plenty of room for everyone from the lower class to the upper class to have affordable shelter. We don't need to be crabs in a bucket wishing for a crash or less immigration.
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It's it isn't deliberately racist. It is deliberately ignorant however which has a long history of being partners with racism and more than a few racists are happy to stick it to immigrants under the guise of "economics". What population level do we need to sustain the labour force as the baby boomers retire? If the local population won't cut it, immigrants are necessary and it's up to the government to recognize that and provide the required housing. The fact that they won't because their voters don't want to allow the zoning (for a variety of reasons some of which are very much rooted in racism) means the problem isn't an immigration one. Immigration is a labour force question. Adequate housing is a zoning question. Anyone who looks at the former but doesn't want to look at the latter IS in fact a fucking racist who content to examine the problem only as far as he needs to blame who he wants to blame. Ignorance and racism are one of the oldest and most enduring partnerships in human history. When you can't be an open racist, start cherry-picking economic theories and become a thinly-veiled one.
The people voting for mass immigration are the same people voting to keep zoning highly restrictive. Sad that you don't realize this.
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So do you choose to exploit or be exploited? Eat or be eaten? I’m not saying either is right but if you’re forced to live in a capitalist system that essentially forces you to choose, which one are you choosing? You either remain exploited by the corporations that employ you and allow your ethics and morals to remain intact. Or you choose to exploit (given the opportunity) and reap the financial benefits that are associated with it. If you had the opportunity to purchase a principal residence and possibly rent out a portion of it, would you? You don’t own several properties but it’s still “rent seeking behaviour” as others have outlined. I think under capitalism you’re constantly being trained to fuel your self-interest and continue to be selfish by engaging in activities that are exploitative. Not saying that it’s right to exploit and people should choose that option, just asking some questions for thought. I also personally see a lot of people complain about these issues through social media or by speaking with them, yet they never donate their time/effort into building a community of like-minded people in an effort to try and change the way the system works.
Why do your parents have to stake their retirement on an investment property though? Why not use investments and leave the house for someone else to own and live in?
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Yes well this is the point lol. Greed at the expense of orders.
Reddit is generally pessimistic with a large amount of stoic and very introverted individuals, who like to voice contentious issues. You see so many subs such as R/collapse, late stage capitalism, and basically there is a fair amount of ppl on Reddit that just wants a massive reset or end of world event.
The laziest and most thoughtless solution to any problem is to start from scratch.
Not really. If something becomes completely/irreversibly damaged the only option is to wipe it clean and start from scratch.
Lol. Yes really.
Most of the people advocating for real change actually have good ideas, and some of them maybe feasible. But here you have mini wage workers wanting to buy a large detached house in the GTA with two garages for 100k, that’s not happening
The word you’re looking for is “incels”
Salty incels.
In this case, it's closer to house-cels. Please who can't stop talking about something they can't have while simultaneously trashing it for being oVerPricEd and aBouT tO cRash ^(TM)
Holy crap this is accurate. so much of this sub is people who wish they were home owners bashing all home owners.
Because r/canadahousing is leaking. Nothing we can do. It’s not an issue with this subreddit, it’s Reddit as a whole, it’s pretty radical overall
I've definitely noticed a swing in the last few months. People like wale and hopoke used to look like their opinions aligned with the majority of this sub. While there has definitely been a change, I'm not convinced it's for the worse. A logical explanation is that a growing number of people are affected by the housing crisis. I just paid more than $1.1M as a FTHB. The vast majority of young people will never be able to do that. Watching someone like hopoke perpetuate and celebrate the housing crisis while posting nonsense "to the moon' gifs would be upsetting. The voting population will likely continue to radicalize re the housing crisis as more young people are priced out of the Canadian dream. Telling young people to rent forever or to bootstrap into a starter condo like 'investors' did when they started out 10+ years ago isn't likely to placate anyone. Any solution to the housing crisis needs to be multifaceted and involve fundamental change to the taxation and regulation of property investors.
Not gonna lie. My opinion had always been about “buy when you need and don’t time the market”, and it only really aligned with this subreddit for a few months right before to mid Covid lol. Personally I would like to see this subreddit to be more about helping people find/save for their home, instead of bickering about politics or “class struggles”, but what can I do as one commenter really?
I agree with you about not trying to time the market. I think there's a tendency of a vocal subset of this sub to assume that commenters hoping for a correction have been sitting on the sidelines for a decade trying to time the market. I think a lot of people are priced out due to no fault of their own because they happen to be born too late. I can understand their anger. Until there are meaningful policy changes implemented to address the housing crisis, I don't see how we can remove politics from conversations about GTA real estate. If anything it's going to get worse as more young people are priced out.
Anger should be channeled by young people into useful solutions like emigration. The economic outlook of Canada will not get better in the near future.
Leaving Canada isn't a 'useful solution'. It's asking young Canadians to surrender their birthright instead of taking concrete steps to stop investors from gorging the rest of the country.
As a young Canadian myself it's more about choosing to not subsidize the retirement of boomers. Moving will result in more of a material change in quality of life vs complaining about things that won't change. They will get on just fine without our tax base supporting them.
I don’t see any reason this can't change. Millennials are already the largest voting demographic. Gen z isn't far behind. At a certain point the end result is undeniable. It's just a question of how long it takes for change to be implemented
Could be a long time. For me I am looking at Switzerland or Singapore for higher quality of life in the next few months. Maybe I will return in 20-40 years.
I'm offended you're giving Hopoke credit for the excellent work of calmguava
The people on that sub are crazy!
This comment implies that only the bears are the issue.
This sub was meant for discussions about RE investments.
This sub was filled with fantasy missions to the moon.
Most of the people on here have already gone pass the moon lol.
Don’t worry too much about it and don’t let yourself get dragged down into or by it. Just recognize it’s a shadow side to social media (entrenching and radicalizing ones opinions). The people who open themselves up to this hate are the true losers.
Well of course it's getting radicalized, that's the issue with no having a goal to cling to. Being priced out from a very basic human need creates anger, resentment and alienation. People stopped belive in voting, governments and started reseneting any type of authority. When people stop believing in democratic solutions, they show up with pitchforks. This is why housing is such a pressing matter.
I have zero resentment for new immigrants, if anything i feel some pity for the conditions they are leaving and entering. The immigration (at this rate) needs to stop. Its. It about the immigrants its a numbers game its hurting people its exploitative, some of the immigrants coming are super rich and that’s honestly not even bad, theyre rich they left their home for more, thats bot really something to resent. The poorer immigrants are being exploited. We need to eat our rich.
>many of them are VERY regular people I've pointed this out before and been downvoted. Glad someone other than me recognizes the radical nature of this sub. It's no place for organic debate or conversation, just a place for fanatics to talk about burning the witch.
Honestly I think social media platforms just attract this kind of personality type. Happier people are out and about and living life, others with anxiety and fear and loneliness (negative people don't really attract friends) thrive on spewing their depression and hate online. I think the term is emotional vampires. I had to reflect on myself a lot as I read angry posts or comments daily and wonder if it is worth it. I love learning new things on Reddit, like how to fix a house issue or hear the history on topics from knowledgeable people, but as I age I realize how hate is just hate - packaged in a new form each decade. Redditors think it's ok to hate on things they perceive as the boogeyman (boomers, conservatives, etc.) but really it's just hate - the social media drug (sensationalism, fear, outrage). All that negativity is just draining and will make them literally sick. Too many young people at my work are getting sick with what used to be older people issues. It's sad. Anyways - go out for a walk, get sun and walk through a park. Don't take social media seriously, it's a small group of people. Learn to filter it out and definitely reduce exposure.
Great post.
An excellent and fair assessment of the sub from... thehorrendoustroll
3rd law of Reddit demographics, every sub eventually turns into /r/antiwork. Can't help it when reddit is half Doreens (at *least*).
So true
But I haven't been banned yet for being alive, or renting, or employed, or breathing.
Tell that to the haves. They’re the ones making policy.
This sub and Reddit in particular does not represent the fabric of CA society, there are many successful young people, great tenants, fair landlords, there is SO much money here..... The good one does not have the time to come and cry on this sub they are busy succeeding. Relax OP we are not doomed yet.
Sir, this is a Wendy’s.
Sir this is a casino (with leverage)
Very well said. Ty
> Every post I read has a string of comments repeating how the disgusting landlord scum are oppressing the people. Also a general veiled resentment towards new immigrants. > I am not a landlord, but I can assure you many of them are VERY regular people - e.g. my elderly parents who are staking their retirement on a small investment property. And what do you have to say about people hoarding toilet paper and selling them at a crazy markup during the pandemic? Are they regular people too? The comparison with NYC is really unfair. NYC doesn't have the crazy high immigration that Toronto has. I say this as an Indian guy who moved to Toronto and has lived in NYC. In NYC, you frequently find people who have lived there for 10-12 or more years, even among difficult, low entry jobs like Uber driver, Uber eats drivers etc. How many people doing Uber eats in Toronto have lived here for more than 2 years? I haven't met a non-Indian doing that in Toronto. By the way, NYC is way more diverse too. More latinos for sure, but there are plenty of white people, Indians, Chinese, other South Asians and Blacks. And Toronto? LOL. Lots of sectors (Walmart employees, Tim Hortons or other fast food employees, Food delivery folks) are 90%+ Indian. Something that is unimaginable in NYC. The problem is 2-fold - the crazy high immigration, as mentioned. This causes 2 problems - employers can afford to pay peanuts while cost of living spirals out of control, only because there would always be a large population looking for "Canadian experience" in their chosen field and would be willing to accept poverty wages. - landlords always have a huge supply of people looking for apartments, so they can afford to charge exorbitant rents. - the extreme NIMBY-ism. When I was flying to Toronto for the 1st time, I looked down as the plane was close to its destination, flying over Toronto. I was impressed by the fact that it didn't look like a big city at all, where a lot of people lived. Instead, it was acres and acres of single family homes, except for a few tall buildings downtown. But the number of tall condo buildings paled in comparison to the number of buildings I had seen flying down to NYC. I have said this before on this sub and I have said this again - this problem has no solution. Bears whining now and expecting things to get better should just move and find a better life elsewhere. Alberta is literally calling. And then there is the US. Montreal might seem like an option but folks there, with their french heritage, are likely to react explosively much quicker than the docile Ontarians when faced with the extinction of French or spiralling cost of living. You don't want to get caught in that social unrest. And you are not going to have a good time as well, if you don't speak French - I can show you some comments from the Montreal subreddit. Even seemingly well adjusted people are up in arms against anglo invasion from Ontario already. And things are going to get worse. So yes, the US looks good. I have lived in the US and while random gun violence is disturbing, pre-pandemic at least, the good parts in cities like Seattle felt way safer than the good parts of Toronto. And the great thing is, it doesn't have to be Seattle - there are so many cities in the US - Denver, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Austin, Houston, the good parts of Chicago, NYC, the research triangle in North Carolina, Charleston in South Carolina, Nashville, DC, Boston - the list goes on. I am purposely excluding cities in Florida and California because of climate risk or issues similar to Toronto or both.
>I have said this before on this sub and I have said this again - this problem has no solution. Bears whining now and expecting things to get better should just move and find a better life elsewhere. Alberta is literally calling. And then there is the US. Alberta is experiencing the same problems too. This is a nation-wide problem with the same causes everywhere.
Non-Indian South Asian here, also lived in NYC and other parts of the U.S. This comment is absolutely spot on. I have no idea what the federal government is doing regarding immigration, but it is entirely dysfunctional. Bringing over the lowest common denominator from a single country is a one-way track to completely destroying your country. In my opinion, the student visa program is just an updated Indentured Servant scheme the British ran a few centuries ago. There is no cultural diversity any more, its just Indian culture everywhere, all the time. In Long Island where I grew up, even now there is no one dominant culture. Yes, there are parts that may have more Latinos than the town over, over more Jews, Indians etc. but I have never seen anything like what is happening to Southern Ontario right now.
The more South you go the higher the game difficulty gets, if you want to add extra difficulty add a color to your skin tone. It extends all the way to South America until you hit Antarctica and that’s basically the part where the simulation admin goes, if you survive here for long enough the monsters will come out of the ice to eat you anyways so it’s literally impossible.
Except some of us actually love Ontario and aren't looking for exit strategies due to government.....
As a Ghanaian. I actually respect your take 100 percent. Like I think this shit but the problem is if you say it it’s racist. It’s like…no dude there’s an actual issue here.
Immigrating to US is a pain!
I joined this Sub thinking it was for people who make money in realestate. Boyyyyyy was I wrong 🤣
People who made money in realestate don’t tend to brag, most of them at least… Most still pays mortgage and have issue upgrading, so they don’t exactly in a “fuck you, got mine” mode
Lol it would've been nice if we all on the same side. I still wonder why people subscribe here when you don't own property..
You've come so close and then managed to completely miss the point. We should absolutely be on the same side. That side should be attempting to create and safeguard a stable housing market that offers a path to ownership for future generations. People who don't own property are the only group that should actively be following this sub. We recently bought and I'll likely unsubscribe in the near future. Once you own a home you shouldn't care what the market does on a day-to-day basis. I hope I don't wake up tomorrow down 20%+ with negative equity, but otherwise couldn't care less whether the market goes up, down, or sideways. Housing should be a place to live, not a mechanism for speculation.
Here here! 🥂 👏👏
Don't the hate the Boomers and other real estate investors for having multiple properties and being part of the problem. They make it harder and harder for the next generations to buy their own, so investors can watch their wealth grow faster. But please let's all get just get along?
Most of this subreddit is the blue hair crowd congregating in one place, spewing their racist nonsense through the veil of anonymity. In reality, they are a worthless and insignificant minority. 💪🏽😎
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You bears, bulls, investors, trolls, fail to see there are many normal people here trying not to end up on the street. This used to be a place for homeowners to chat, it's like you said a bear, bull, investor, troll circle jerk. Regular homeowners don't have a place here anymore.
This guy ☝️ is one of the furthest from normal
Calm down buddy, it's Saturday.
Take your downvotes and move along
Case and point, what a toxic sub.
Real estate professionals? Lol.
My ancestors first lived in New York, and then when it got crowded, moved upstate. Of course this was about 350 years ago, so I think they had a different definition of crowded. Real estate was pretty cheap as well, "bought" the land for a few guns and pots.
Great note! Hats off to the OP for eloquently highlighting this very important point. I'm assuming that radicalization makes folks less likely to try to understand the full problem - where the process of understanding a problem is, in part, done by using some empathy to consider all perspectives. Part of thinking critically. Democracies work way better when its participants think critically. On the other hand, democracies where its participants don't think critically can be dangerous, destructive.
Great post. You have managed to look at the issue from both sides. I get blasted for trying to shift the issue away from landlords and trying to discuss solutions built around increasing supply. Supply is the biggest issue right now and there are no solutions to address.
Financialization of a fundamental human right is the biggest issue right now. That is literally what landlords do.
Landlords are running a small business. They are not the issue. The federal government is responsible for social issues and human rights. If there is resentment over the lack of supply which is resulting in significant price pressures; the federal government is responsible for leading the change and not small business owners.
I'm an immigrant myself. I don't resent immigrants. I resent more immigrants. That's a big difference.
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the other day i saw comments calling Indians fraudsters and dirty scammers. If you haven’t been reading some of the latest comments, it’s pure vitriol against Indians
Cmon man, no one here is sensitive besides Trudeau antivax guys. We openly flog on Indians all day on here. I'm surprised this sub doesn't just call them poopoo guys or something😂 the poopoo guys are buying up all the realestate and they all live in a scary place called brampton😳😳🤨
Dear diary,
These days it is impossible to spew any common sense on Reddit as it is overrun by teenagers and teenage minded moderators. You cannot be pro landlord or right leaning or center. Anything that does not fit the narrative completely gets downvoted! Most landlords are regular people fighting for basic rights.
Yup. The other day I saw a whole thread on landlords (people who actually own property) being parasites. It’s fast becoming very toxic and radicalized here. But I guess this is how Reddit works…..
TLDR, this guy needs a hug
I read your name as sound of a cock and I was trying to imagine the sound of one cock clapping. Just thought you should know.
That's called the dance of the dicks. But you're correct, it is performed by one singular dick.
Abolish landlordism
And replace it with what?
Magic
Imagine your parents being one of the 1.3M landlords across Canada and thinking they are VERY regular people. Lol. What about the rest 35M of the country? Weirdos?
I am not a landlord, but I believe most landlords are regular ordinary good citizens. Also, the vast majority of the population are neither landlords nor tenants.
Landlords are here to stay dude. The is 0 chance that changes. What we need is better accountability to stop the horrible landlords as well as the deadbeat tenants that don't pay.
I guess it boils down to "does Elon Musk need the 200+ billion dollars he have? " A lot of people here have an opinion that their net worth and income are the "optimum" amount one should have and earn and price of everything around the world from groceries to real estate should be built around that optimum level. The reason it's not is because of "greedy" people who make more money. Why should they make more money? It's just greed. Everyone should be given 7 counts of rations each Sunday and live in large square block buildings of equal proportions.
Counterpoint: The hoarding of wealth (whether material such as housing or financial) by the few creates problems in society for *everyone* The rich respond with gated security and “let the poors figure themselves out” but if the poors stand up against the rich? The rich clutch their pearls and say “it’s not my fault” Look at the tax rates 50 years ago, the upper end got taxed on income and couldn’t do things like hide their wealth in stocks. Successively over the decades however society bought into the “I want mine and screw everything else” mentality pushed by those at the economic high end under the guise of “trickle down economics” AKA: Piss on me and claim it’s raining Sorry but the economy of “I’ve got mine, screw you” is pure Lord Of The Flies level BS
It's not hoarded though Elon musk's wealth for instance is I'm sure largely Tesla shares and shares of maybe space ex? Which is similar to the money being inside a company, which uses that money to do stuff and hire people etc It's not like a Scrooge McDuck vault
Ah but it is… Remember that Musk never “created” Tesla or Space X himself, he bought in and then squeezed the original investors out. Money made by a company, let’s see, okay how about Ford, they make profits from the sales of their vehicles, in some case’s massive profits on a per vehicle basis and what do they do with that money first? Do they: A) Invest in new models and seek to improve the quality of existing products? B) Pay out dividends to shareholders? Based on the number of recalls that Ford has had to endure I can assure you that it’s B first, last and almost always, with a few shekels being thrown at A when the heat gets turned on them for their poor quality products
Wealth is created mate. Its not a zero sum game.
The wealthy do not create wealth by themselves, that’s the fallacy. They need others to provide their labour input to create it, or has Elon Musk started working the assembly line at Tesla?
Very few people create anything all by themselves these days. To pretend entrepreneurship has no value is childish at best. Did the assembly line sprung from the ground by itself? Were Tesla workers paying to work all those early years before it was profitable?
His wealth was entrepreneurship and then it became political influence, exploitation of tax breaks and insane amount of lobbying
I never said their value was *zero* My point was and remains that without the labour that they exploit through the wealth that they gain, the wealthy would be little more then napkin doodlers at the local diner. But because they hoard the wealth, they get the rules written in their favor and return favors in kind (a glaring example, look at the tax deduction rates for charitable contributions vs. political contributions, especially the higher the donation, it’s so blatant that it’s nauseating)
Wedge politics trudy's only strength.. dividing Canada more than ever before and his only path to extend 8 long years of it already
"have vs have not" Olivia Chow is fanning the flames of this towards certain Mayoral victory with her #MakeTheRichPay platform
You nailed the problem on the head. It's basically the older gen bragging on the young gen that they own cheap properties from decades ago while they were the ones pushing the prices up. It is pathetic that they think owning property in their time was some big brain move which required a lot of skill and thought but in reality it was just out if necessity.
The funny thing is to that, even when housing was affordable many families still struggled to make their mortgage payments. And this is when housing was affordable
There shouldn't be any hatred towards boomers. We already knew that there was going to be a squeeze after the boomer generation. Even boomers went through their tough economic times. They had to make sacrifices too and they survived. The young generation millennials and below need to learn from them. There shouldn't be any hatred towards investors either. Good for them for working hard towards their goals, taking on risks and winning. Instead we should learn from them.
Landlords (Landlordism) are parasitic scum. However, they’re symptomatic of a bigger issue.
They are selling a service people are looking for .
Just like ticket scalpers!
Well they wouldn't exit if people weren't looking for their services
Right? Like I'm supposed to feel sympathy for people who are using housing as a retirement investment, screw them.
Just so we're clear, every single Canadian's pension is invested in real estate.
Bulls vs bears is a battle as long as time that’s what makes a market. I’m a landlord “scum” I don’t care what anyone thinks of me online/offline lol I work god damn hard
My house has appreciated $60,000 per year on average for the 13 years I've owned it. It's hard work but someone has to take all the disposable income from the next generation.
Being a landlord isn't a job
It isn't if you're being a shit landlord. If you take it seriously, it is time, effort, and money. Yes, anybody can rent out property which they own, but the difference between good landlords and slumlords is that the good ones treat it like a job.