Housing Prices Gotta Drop, No Cap 🏠📉

The Deets

Aight, so here's the tea: everyone's beefing about whether Canadian housing prices need to, like, actually drop for millennials and Gen Z to ever afford a crib. The housing minister is out here saying nah, we just need to build more houses. But some experts are side-eyeing that hard.

One expert, Mike Moffatt, is straight-up saying we can't fix this without prices falling. He crunched the numbers and says if prices stay high and wages grow at the same old rate, it'll take, like, forever (18 years across Canada, 25 in Ontario and BC) to get back to affordable levels. That's a major L.

The government's tryna be slick, though. They're talking about cutting the GST on new homes and giving incentives to cities to lower development costs. They also want to use more prefabricated parts to build houses faster and cheaper. But the issue is that If building costs stay high, while prices stall or drop, then housing developers would likely say "Bet, good luck building houses, bye" meaning that nothing will be built, and the crisis only deepens.

Then there's Moshe Lander, a professor at Concordia University, is calling out that the fed government is not in control on housing, as that would be municipal and provincial governments. This makes the topic super contentious, as no politician would want to be advocating for lower prices, which make up a lot of homeowners' equity.

Plus, one expert even suggested that we need to stop hyping up homeownership as the only way to win at life. Like, maybe renting isn't so bad after all? It's a whole vibe shift, tbh.