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.

You want a dystopia, you’ll get it if the bubble bursts. You’ll also get it if the bubble continues to inflate.

Yeah, the range of ways out of this that don't suck are small. Even if you get the mildest of fixes: property values stay steady for decades while they're eroded by normal levels of inflation, that's going to be hell for people waiting for the prices to become reasonable, but also hell for people who bought property as an investment and instead see it losing value. Some of those people are rich, but other people were just using it as a retirement plan.

And for that, we need the political will

The problem is that political will always aligns with the self-interest of the parties or their leaders. Since home owners vote and donate, they're the ones who get listened to. Since property developers donate, they get listened to. Homeless people don't vote, and definitely don't donate to political campaigns. People struggling to make ends meet don't take time out of their busy days to get involved in politics, they just hope someone will help them.

Since politicians invariably come from a class that not only owns houses, but often owns multiple houses, the idea that they'll voluntarily take actions that reduce the value of their investments is pretty laughable.

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.

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.

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.

The last time a housing bubble popped, so did the entire economy.

You sure you're ready for that?

You're saying this but no you're not.

The riskier mortgages are guaranteed by the government, that means everyone pays if people stop paying their mortgage.

Retirement for most owners without a pension fund depends on being able to sell their property, that's also something the whole country would end up paying for through safety nets.

If prices crash that means even more easy to snatch properties for the richest, so even less supply.

The housing bubble bursting would lead to the same social crisis they had to go through in the USA, wishing for it to burst is wishing for people to die, more than are now because of the bubble.

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.

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

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

Because there's zero opportunity in small towns. Another major issue with Canada right now

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.