this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2023
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How bad is housing in Canada right now? This is not a prominent topic here in Europe, so let's say you look for a 200 m² house in the outer parts of a bigger city, what would be the price for that?
Start with income perspective. The average annual salary in 2022 was just under $60,000. Nationally, the average house price in summer 2023 was a bit over $750,000. These incomes and house prices are affected pretty strongly by the lower incomes and lower housing costs in rural Canada vs the major cities like Vancouver and Toronto
So.. shift attention to the cities. In Toronto and Vancouver, the average house price is around $1,200,000 give or take a little. You need at a combined income of least $280,000 to qualify for a house like that (or have substantial equity built up in previous home purchases). Most people are earning at or close to the national average... with a few - especially those in STEM careers (sw devs for example) up over $100,000 per year.
I live in a suburb city (I own my house)... it's inconveniently located if you want/need to be in the core city centre for work (I'm about 3 hours commute right now if I needed to go in to a downtown office.. thankfully I don't). Houses on my street are relatively new (most built in 2019 and 2020). The houses currently for sale are listing between $1,250,000 and $2,350,000.
Renting can be really awful in Canada too... you get stunts like this https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/this-is-egregious-sisters-shocked-when-toronto-landlord-raises-rent-to-9-500-a-month-1.6548845 simply because they can...
tl;dr Housing in Canada is bonkers
Thanks for the insight, this is crazy. We are looking for houses right now here in Germany, and and the last one we visited was 269 m² for around 500.000€ and 30 minutes drive away of the inner city of the next major city. I hope politics does something about your problem, it can not stay like this.
Germany has its own insanity in the housing market :-P I lived in Germany or several years. I rented vs buying and I dreaded moving because facing that shit show of a rental process (at least in places like Hamburg) was... too much. Queuing up with 100 other people all racing to fill in the rental application form first just so they'd get a chance at a place. I quickly learned to use an agency to line up rentals... and ended up renting a VERY nice newly built flat for the same price as the old many-times-renovated flats in the same district.
I did buy a house elsewhere in Europe and it was... interesting as an expat. It was substantially cheaper than Canada... granted it was many years ago, so not a fair comparison.
The Canadian government makes noises about "fixing" the housing crisis in Canada, but... I honestly don't think they can. Houses are currently priced out of reach... WAY out of reach for the average new home buyer. People can't save up a 5% to 20% down payment fast enough to keep up with the rising cost of living. The cost of everything is increasing at multiple times their potential salary increases (if they even get any).
The issue is that investors are buying houses 100k over asking price same or next day because they don't plan on living in them, they just want to make the investment and prop up the housing market bubble for as long as they can.
Speculators need to be heavily taxed. We need to discourage this and put a stop to it ASAP.
Everything is worth what people will pay for it. The problem is that we aren't building anywhere near enough housing.
In America conservative estimates are 4 empty homes for every person.
That can't possibly be true. Just using simple logic: if someone owns a vacant house or unit, why wouldn't they rent it out considering the absurd rents that can be charged in this market?
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/05/vacant-seasonal-housing.html#:~:text=As%20the%20nation%20recovered%20from,vacant%20housing%20in%20the%20county.
That's a US statistic. Their housing market is very different from Canada's.
It's clearly referring to seasonal residences, many of which are properties that aren't suitable for year round use. My uncle owns a cabin up north that is only accessible by sled in the winter. Should that really be considered an "empty house"? It's a huge red herring to measure every single building someone can sleep in as housing, rather than measure the buildings people are actually treating as housing.
It isn't "4 empty homes for every person". That's a crazy number. It says some counties (again in the US) (specifically rural counties) have more seasonal vacant residences than non-seasonal. Which makes total sense. The county where my uncle's cabin is located doesn't have any major towns in it. It's just cottage country.
None of that has anything to do with the housing crisis.
I bought a townhouse that was 1700sqft (~150m^2) in Markharm, a suburb of the GTA (1hr to the center of toronto by car, 1.5hrs by bus), in a pretty bad area for 800K CAD during a slight market crash during covid. By all accounts this was an exceptionally good deal, by realtor didn't think we could get anything for under 900. I sold that townhouse for 1.1 mil in 2023.