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For those people who are actually wishing for the bubble to burst, remember that’s exactly what happened in 2008, and what happened back then. Literally the only people who won were the rich as they just bought out all the property that got severely discounted while other rich people got a massive payday from the government (aka regular Joe’s tax dollars) for fucking up. And the bubble simply got restored because those rich people could afford to sit on unproductive products for a decade at a time because they knew that without a constantly increasing supply of housing, the prices will explode again because housing is a requirement, not a luxury.
And the losers was everybody who doesn’t make 7 figures or more. People’s retirements were crushed, their savings crushed, their existing lives crushed. And the economy was set back for years and inflation skyrocketed for a little while, which never came back down.
And in places where such housing bubbles really burst, Japan hasn’t seen any growth for 30 years. They’re still in what they all the Lost Generation, because they realized that calling it the Lost Decade was premature and it didn’t end in 10 years. We’re watching China’s housing implode on itself right now with hundreds of thousands of people losing their entire investments and retirement savings. We’re watching 80 year olds going back to work so that they don’t starve to death while youth unemployment reaches levels so insane that they’ll take a job that only pays under the table because the company can’t afford to pay minimum wage!
You want a dystopia, you’ll get it if the bubble bursts. You’ll also get it if the bubble continues to inflate.
So the only solution is to slowly deflate the bubble by increasing housing construction so that it outpaces demand in a controlled manner until the prices come back down to something reasonable, then to continue keeping pace. And for that, we need the political will for both government subsidized housing and a overhaul of zoning laws to allow for mixed-use residential to replace all residential zoning.
Detached single family housing don’t belong in major cities, and suburbs shouldn’t be subsidized by the downtown core.
Detached single family housing don’t belong in major cities, and suburbs shouldn’t be subsidized by the downtown core.
Truer words were never spoken. If you want to be able to live on your own little plot of land surrounded by other people wanting the same thing - then development, upkeep and maintenance of all infrastructure and services needs to be paid for directly from your property tax. When you drive in to downtown to get to work, you should not expect to find parking. Downtown should belong to the people who actually live there, it’s crazy how far we bend over backwards to support a lifestyle that’s inherently unsustainable.
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) 9•10 months ago
Whether you hope for it or not, all bubbles burst eventually, and the government has already proven its unwillingness to do anything about it by allowing the bubble to form in the first place.
Oh, they’ll do something. They’ll make sure the rich don’t take a haircut on their investment.
It would be relatively straightforward to block Monopoly getting played should the bubble burst–legislatively speaking–but it would require governments to intervene against it’s donor class.
Hawaii’s post-disaster response is a good template: the government has threatened to buy land to prevent investors and speculators from doing the same. In Canada, this would be like a bizarro-world version of Doug Ford’s Greenbelt giveaway: where the government buys more land, and more houses, to block speculators.
I can’t see it happening, because our leaders are either feckless cowards (on the left) or complete corporate toadies (on the right), but I can dream.
When I read stuff like this I often wonder why nothing is mentioned about Canada’s lax laws on foreign ownership of multiple properties and failure to verify the legality of these owners’ funds.
Because that’s what started this shit show in the 90’s and nothing has been fixed.
There are foreign-ownership and vacant unit laws in all affected places in Canada AFAIK. They’re basically self-reporting driven but they exist. The BC ones came first. They put a small dent in housing prices and then prices continued their upward march, and they did nothing at all for rent because the color of your landlord doesn’t really change much.
Any solution that doesn’t involve constructing abundant housing is at best rearranging the deck chairs of the Titanic and at worst scapegoating.
Basically anything short of we’re going to expropriate land and build massive amounts of rgi’s and cooperatives will fix it on the supply side of the equation.
We need to tackle the problem at the source and that’s housing being used as an investment vehicle by wealthy people and corporations as a means of wealth extraction from the working class. It’s completely choking the economy.
The problem is, for a neoliberal government, wealth extraction is the point. They’ll look at the system and see it working as intended.
On the flip side, massive build-outs of affordable housing is all downside: it doesn’t make rich people the maximum amount of money, it requires wealth distribution downwards and there’s little to no incentive to get private sector participation.
I don’t think people realize how much government has changed since ~1979 and ~1995, or how we have had two to three whole generations of politicians and civil servants who have gone their whole careers believing that government shovelling money at the private sector is the only way to do things.
Here’s a little thought experiment:
- name me one institution implemented entirely with public funds since 1995. You can even go as far back as 1980, if you want. I’m an Ontarian, so something like GO Transit, the AGO, TVO, the Ontario Science Centre, Ontario Place, etc. The number is probably around zero.
- Now, list all the entities sold off since then. The list is long, and contains some things you probably didn’t realize, like Potash Corp, Air Canada, CN, Petro Canada and more. Think about how much money we’d have, how many services we’d still have, how much we’d be able to do about, eg, climate change if we had even a few of these.
It’s a real gut-punch to realize we sold our future to billionaries for pennies on the dollar, and now those same billionaires are squeezing us for more.
Look at our suburbs. They are immense. Immensely wasting the land for car parking and large road. We fucked up pretty 50years ago and now these are the consequences. Why the fuck do we need a parking lot for each building ? Before saying the investors are evil and all that shit, look how wasteful we are building our communities. The investors only got in the market because of the way we built our neighborhood. We wasted land, we made the house supply low and we got investors trying to make money with it. Preventing investors from buying houses is probably a good idea but is only a band aid that won’t last.
Stop wasting the land and this crisis is over.
I’m ready for this bubble to pop.
The last time a housing bubble popped, so did the entire economy.
You sure you’re ready for that?
One hundred percent.
This isn’t just some overvalued tulip in need of a correction. People need homes and can’t afford to exit the housing market entirely. If people can’t afford housing, that means they can’t really afford anything. Expect the economy to have collapsed. Wages and employment will be down. Home ownership will decline.
Only those with capital to ride out a bumpy economy will be able to snatch up the cheap housing.
The solution to our housing crisis is not to tank the economy. The solution is to tackle the supply of housing, income inequality, and corporate equity in residential real estate.
Yes, I am ready for that. I don’t buy this “but the economy” line. It smacks of “too big to fail”, and I think that occasional failure is necessary and healthy.
You haven’t lived through enough cycles then… Even 2008 saw a million people in Canada lose their jobs. The one in the early 90s was probably double that.
Besides, nobody understands what the real numbers would even be. Do you know how much of an implosion is required to return Vancouver or Toronto to “affordable” levels? Prices would need to drop something around 80-85%. That’s absolutely massive, and would wipe out the life savings of 10 million Canadians, who are now going to need more government support to make it through retirement.
There are ways to fix this problem, but they need to be gradual to not end up causing more problems than they fix.
Same. Burn it all down. I’m tired of paying my landlord the equivalent of a mortgage for fuck all security because I don’t have enough for a downpayment.
Hello from Australia. if you’re expecting this bubble to pop, don’t.
Yeah I’ll believe it when I see it, I’ve been hearing this since 2012
Thanks for always being there to show us what our future is like. It’s the time zone thing, and it’s great that you’re always a step ahead. Will these fires consume us or will we find a way out? What will the rains and the stampede of spiders be like?How’s Thursday going so far?
“I could never get the hang of Thursdays” – Douglas Adams, writing for Arthur Dent
Even though I had to pay though the nose to buy a house years ago, I hope for a crash so that people are not screwed forever more.
What I find really odd is the commercial market in smaller towns, its cheap as shit.
Crashes only hurt regular people. People who have money/capital can wait it out and then buy even more housing to make the bubble bigger next cycle.
source: lived through 2008 and that fucking sucked
Yeah well high prices only hurt regular people, too!! It’s almost like we’re getting fucking squeezed by our economic masters, eh?
Same and I don’t think a housing crash would hurt just the poor like say a 2008 style crash (it would still hurt the poor because everything does). I also don’t think there is any other option other then a crash, things are too out of hand bubble wise. It would be cool if someone in power could get crazy serious about the issue but there is no will and it is likely to late.
The downtown strip of the town I grew up in (about 2hrs from Toronto) is a ghost town. I doubt retailers want to risk starting a lease on a commercial property when in many situations, brick&mortar isn’t much of an asset.
That is the crazy part I am talking full on buying not renting. I run a few stores in more rural areas and my company just bought the building because the owner would not rent/lease to us but would sell it for less then you could buy a shed for.
I guess it is crazy you could buy a storefront in a small town for much less then a house in a small town (maybe a protip?).
While this is commonish sense, this news isn’t trustworthy without any evidence or numbers.
How much exposure is there, what order of magnitude of assets are at risk, what would a target for post-bubble prices be, how at risk is Canadian debt servicing, etc.
As far as I can see the risk is 2023 to 2026 sees fixed rate renewals happen from covid rates to current or elevated rates. Variable rates make up about 1/3 of mortgage debt and defaults/sales would already be priced in.
Let’s run the numbers for Ontario.
Avg mortgage last year (in June, the easiest number to pull from CREA website) was $829k, at 2.5%, which is $3713/mo or $44,555 annually. They do 5 years and renew at 6%, leaves $701k on 20 years for $4997/mo, 34% increase and $60k/year to service. The Bank can extend you by 5 years and reduce the payment to $4489/mo reducing the cost to $54k.
So the question is, can families who already bought homes find $10k annually to make up that shortfall? That will command supply of homes. This should be worse for 2021 and 2020 purchases, but they have a lower total mortgage.
The affordability calculators all suck because they’re based on the down payment, so we’ll do it ourselves. According to stat can, average after tax family income in 2021 was $99,100 (Table 11-10-0190-01, can’t link on mobile), with 32% of income on housing we’re looking at $2650/mo which is a $415k mortgage at 6%. At 50% they can do $4129 for a $650k. That’s feasible but not recommended. The CMHC calculator goes to 70% (seems farfetched to me)
So, 50% of couple-families can roughly afford $650k at current rates on after tax income, and the average family has about $10k additional exposure, that can probably lead to a 25% drop in prices. That’s if median families are buying and have the down payment ready.
This is all napkin math though and not using the full distribution of prices. If I were doing this professionally I’d have simulated pricing structures and rate increase schedules. But to me I don’t think this bubble is going to see houses drop to the 300s like they used to be.
Increasing supply to decrease prices is the best option, that should be a priority for all levels of government. It would also deflate the balloon but not catastrophically.
But to me I don’t think this bubble is going to see houses drop to the 300s like they used to be.
Is this a conclusion based on just direct impact, or did you consider the risk of people trying to bail out of a perceived-collapsing market in fear of an ever more challenging monthly payment?
I’d agree if you said it’d be difficult to even guess at the exact effects if people started panic-selling houses to unload on income properties to limit their risk - my own family was caught in that in the early '80s Calgary market and we’ve never recovered - but is there a nod to the potential for that slippage in your conclusions?
I did not, no.
I’m just a guy with a spreadsheet and some extra break time I banked.
At 50% they can do $4129 for a $650k
That’s a MASSIVE stretch for a typical family of 4 on your average income scenario, Once you factor in all the utils, maintenance… the $400 to $500/month property taxes, a $650/month car payment (an average family has a car payment)… and the incredibly high cost of food… they will be well over stretched at a 50%.
I think $4k a month can cover that, but it’s not comfortable. 3k on groceries seems quite high to me.
Plenty of big, big funds have massive exposure to short sellers
DRS GME to stop global financial crime
That’s true. My assumption was the bubble doesn’t pop unless people default, and what would cause that.
Flippers, investors, speculators, and banks aren’t really factored in here.
Certainly couldn’t be the global instability in housing markets
What is bnnbloomberg, anyway? I see them in my feed sometimes and they have highly-produced news, but they don’t seem to have a lot of it, which makes me feel like it is carefully targeted (ie propaganda)
They’ve been around forever and it’s for financial wonks so their intended audience in this case is people involved in everything financial as it pertains to houses from C level to keener analysts.
It’s legit.
Bloomberg a legit news source. Two things though:
- This BNN Bloomberg, which is Business News Network after getting acquired by Bloomberg. It’s still a pretty factual news source (sometimes even more so than Bloomberg itself)
- This isn’t news. It’s a person (Phillip Colmar, partner at Global Strategist at MRB Partners) saying what they think. It’s more like an opinion piece, improvised on live television, and most of those are indeed garbage even in otherwise respectable outlets.
I’m sure a large commercial financial news outlet is factual most of the time. And I’m sure a lot of the time that they aren’t (even if through omission), it’s serving their owners.