First time home buyers will not be charged GST (5%) when buying a home, as long as the place they’re buying costs less than $1M. This means that people buying a home for the first time will save up to $50k on their purchase.
Edit: Note, GST is mostly only charged when buying newly built homes, so this won’t have any effect for people buying used homes.
Same shit different PM.
These people don’t have the fucking cojones to do the right thing and just make foreign ownership of residential homes illegal. And make it illegal to have investment vehicles based on residential properties like ETFs. And straight up make it illegal for a publicly traded company to own residential property. And limit ownership of residential properties per person. And ban AirBnB and the like.
But nooooo. Just make it even cheaper for the already wealthy people to buy even more peppery.
“Why won’t the liberals deliberalize the economy?”
lol. Nice one.
Many of these things you’ve suggested have been tried in various parts of Canada, and while they feel good they haven’t been effective at lowering prices.
We need to build more homes. That’s it. That’s the thing we need to do. Build homes at a faster rate than we add potential new homeowners. Block nimby laws that prevent density and keep building until the prices go down.
Like markets? Enable the market to build em. Socialist? Have the government build em. Someone’s got to. If you want to focus on Airbnb and other feel good stuff fine I won’t stand in your way if we also just build more goddamn homes.
That’ll take time. What I mentioned can be applied now.
We’re 3 million homes in the hole according to CMHC. Nobody is pretending we’re gonna get those built in the next five years. Along with building houses, increasing density, and reducing limitations on construction; we need to lower the cost of houses.
Like the Lemmite up thread says: tax unreasonable house gains, and disincentivize rentals.
We’re in a crisis, we can’t wait to build.
I’m 100% on board with solutions to help mitigate the short-term effects if we also start building now for the medium and longer terms.
The reason I was being prickly on this is that my home city and province (Vancouver) has been doing these feel-good things for years as a politically expedient distraction and excuse to not prioritize building.
So it scares me when people suggest these as the solution —and I’ll include Carneys announcement in with that same bucket. If folks suggest these as a stop-gap relief to the current situation and are also gonna build our way out? Alright I’m on board with that.
Yes. I think that’s a pretty universal sentiment. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone say that we should just do GST rebates - we want construction and immediate relief.
It’ll probably be a generation or so until the proportion of homes to people gets back to affordable territory. That’s not gonna help me, but hopefully it’ll help my kids.
In the meantime, we need to adjust other parts of government to get money out of housing: remove capital gains exemptions on housing, implement the anti-money laundering stuff BC has been asking for; do all the zoning crap; train people for the trades; import trades workers (with a path to citizenship); increase density; etc etc etc.
You’re correct that no one says that, but that seems to be what’s been happening. So I want the focus to be on the things that are going to deliver the actual results.
But maybe also I can get my head out of my own ass and not derail your enthusiasm for helping things in the here and now. So yeah, I’m with you. But let’s make those things a comma. I want my leaders at the federal, provincial, and municipal level to start moving the needle today, and stay focused in the months and years to come and ensure that the steps they are taking are the ones that are making meaningful improvements.
Awesome! Please email your MP and ask them to address the housing crisis. I typically send something along the lines of:
I’ve sent similar messages to my MP, MLA, and councillors over the past few years.
I have written my MP about this multiple times, signed a counter-petition against a movement to block a high rise in my building, and promoted the development with my neighbours. I’m also meeting my MP tomorrow and I won’t shut up about this, I promise.
And if they don’t move the needle I’m gonna vote the bastards out and support the next ones instead. I don’t care if it drops my house value — because my kids deserve to be able to afford to live.
I haven’t gone as far as meeting with my MP, but I ran a mailer site so people could mail their three levels of rep. It sent a lot of messages and got some feedback from officials, but it’s hard to know if any of them cared.
Meeting in person sounds more effective.
Same. I think there’s a lot of (potential) homeowners who feel that way.
Another part to consider is how house sizes have gone up by a fair margin over the past 50 - 70 years. If you look at old bungalows built after the war they are 1000 - 1500 sqft homes, modern builds (around me at least) are all 2500+ sqft. So part of why homes are more expensive is that we’re building more home on each lot (just speaking on fully detached homes here).
A “starter home” isn’t really a thing anymore.
It seems like we have lots of single bedroom starter condos at 500-900 sqft, but I think those are designed to appeal to investors. 😬
I think a lot of people would be open to smaller homes/condos (1200 sqft) if they were affordable and nice.
Let’s imagine a world where an unapologetic socialist NDP leader stood up and said: “the market has failed to deliver homes at a price the median Canadian family can affords. So our govt will build homes across the country, employing Canadians and using Canadian products. These will not be luxury condos for the rich, but they will be functional and good, and will be made the wood and materials we used to send to America at a discount. And we will close the gap in 5 years, and deliver public monthly status reports on what we have accomplished.”
After the election, assuming Singh steps down, can we all agree to get someone who says something like that? Pretty please? Because I already got my wish with a perfect candidate to match my way of thinking, and I want you to be waiting in the wings if our way fails yet again.
That’s exactly what I want. And I also want tax changes that stop homes from being a investment vehicles. That’s part of what has run prices up, in addition to the stuff we both listed above.
I generally agree with you, but there’s some complexity.
Change all those things too quickly and housing plummets in value. That’s great for buyers, but bad for sellers. Some old people have most of their life savings wrapped up in their houses, and some are even using reverse mortgages to make ends meet.
At the least though, they should tax those things, and ramp up the taxes so they’re really painful. If an ultra-rich foreigner wants to own a house in Canada and is willing to pay huge taxes for that privilege, maybe that’s OK because those taxes can be spent on housing solutions for everyone else.
I don’t care if houses plummet in value. You want to invest? You gotta assume the risk, just like in the stock market. And peppery prices are way over inflated anyway.
And if we limit who can buy these properties to Canadians and PRs and limit the number of properties per person you won’t have a hoarding problem. And everyone will have better access to housing.
Just like any form of investment, diversifying is important. If someone is 100% invested in Loblaws stock, do you expect the government to defend Loblaws to protect their investment just because they’re relying on that to retire? The people made the choice to depend on a single volatile investment to retire, it means they took a chance that its value could drop.
Hell, it could happen for a bunch of other reasons, one bad neighbor fucking up their lot and your home loses value.
Yeah, Boomers getting special protections is kind of annoying.
A generation of millenials were told to go to post secondary no matter the cost and then when we did and incurred a ton of debt but the good jobs that were promised to us weren’t there, the reaction was “oops, oh well, get fucked I guess”.
Maybe if we stopped funneling a billion dollars into “managing” our CPP plan into poorer performance and used that money to increase CPP payouts instead, boomers could afford more of a hit on their housing.
I do wonder if another large contributing factor is that most of our MPs have conflicts of interest when it comes to the real estate market.
Not to burst your bubble buddy but it’s not just boomers who reaped the benefits, the X and Y generations did as well. Many millennials are over 40 with a career, a house, a family, all the typical stuff boomers are known for. I’m under 40 and already sold a condo for profit and we sold a cottage for profit which allowed us to buy a bungalow that we can afford on a single income and that will be paid in by the time we turn 50.
Older millennial here. Boomers bought their homes in their 20s.
Guess how long it took me to afford my tiny condo?
I bought mine… In my 20s. Without help and with a middle class background.
So yeah, experiences vary but things are really getting bad since the end of the Y generation, but most of the Ys will have had it pretty great in comparison.
Bought mine at 39. In 2019. And was only able to afford it because I have a partner with whom I bought it, who suddenly received a huge amount in backpay.
As I said, experiences vary, but looking at statistics millennials are on average very well off and catching up on previous generations.
Sure, I get what you’re saying. But, from a practical point of view, older people vote, so the government isn’t likely to want to piss them off.
I just think this is realistically going to take decades to fix. We need to get back to thinking of housing as a boring expense, not a huge investment. That’s going to take a long time to unwind.
That’s why you begin by taking advantage of the incoming boomer drop off. They’re gonna start dropping fast. Unfortunately, that’s what most of the wealthy and powerful want to take advantage of too.
As long as our population is growing, the death of boomers isn’t going to make a difference.
I don’t know if the baby boomers dying is going to be a big sudden event. If you look at the population pyramid, many boomers are already gone. The rest are going to trickle out over several decades.
Boomers are ‘46-‘64, the oldest boomers are just now turning 80.
Right, and a lot of boomers never made it to 80. If you look at that population pyramid, the deaths really start once people hit 60, which was 2 decades ago for the first people in the baby boom generation. It looks like roughly 1/3 of the oldest boomers are already gone. The youngest boomers are 60, so about 1/3 of them will die in the next 20 years or so.
It’s not going to be a big, sudden event.