Canada

Letting air out can happen a lot quicker if you give a good reason to people not to care about their home price. For example by providing an equivalent or otherwise decent government pension. My inlaws fall into that bucket.

I agree with letting air out of the balloon slowly. That's what rezoning and densification shoots to do. It is slow because development is slow. But limiting available capital (ie: competing for mortgages)? In what world does that make sense? And if primary residence cap gains aren't exempt, then anybody that had to move for work would get screwed. That's a corporate friendly policy, not a people friendly policy. The goal here is for people to own houses, and for there to be penalties for owning more than one. But that's exactly where policy is right now.

Housing size is specifically addressed:

On top of that, the square footage of housing units in Canada has on average been growing across all housing types, which should in theory provide more flexibility for people to live with roommates.

Housing units are bigger and there are more of them per capita any way you slice it: by population, by number of adults, or by number of households.

They make a very compelling argument that the big change is not anything to do with supply, it's entirely a result of easing burrowing standards and increased access to credit. It's not as simple a story, but it actually offers a reasonable explanation for the observed data, while ECON101 Supply & Demand arguments don't match the data. Doesn't matter if it makes sense if it's wrong.

It def is both financialization and zoning. Restrictive zoning increases the value of housing hence line goes up.

Rezoning is framed as increasing supply and affordablity, instead of decreasing values of existing homes. When both will happen.

2020 had that effect, where work from home spurred people to move to some of the extremely low cost areas but that just meant that the absolute cheap houses under 80k were all bought up and 100k is the floor. But that was a one time adjustment.

Yea, the only thing that would ever let me buy a home is my insane privilege. If even I am pissed, living a very advantaged life, I have no clue why the whole planet hasn’t been burned to the fucking ground yet.

Isn't that so funny? They care about the votes... To get in power to... Get the votes again... How ridiculous.

Votes are the people, and we keep letting this happen to us. It’s insane, really, knowing that even as fucked as our system is there’s still really no reason any significantly intelligent nation should be dealing with any of the crap we support.

It's not a housing shortage, it's a pricing issue.

If you do the math based on statscan data, there are FAR more bedrooms in Canada than people, even if you assumed couples never slept together and kids never shared a room.

People are splitting rooms to make it more affordable, not because rooms don't exist.

There are retired couples, or families with a single kid, living in 4-5 bedroom houses in Vancouver, because they either don't want to downsize, or they can afford the space so they buy more than they need.

The problem ais the distribution of housing, some people have too much, and some people don't have what we would reasonably consider enough.

There is also some distribution issues around where those houses are located compared to the desires of where people want to live. If someone has a house in Edmonton, but wants to live in Vancouver in a similar house and can't afford it, is that a housing shortage in Vancouver? I would argue it is not.

Where we define that "reasonable" line is where an ACTUAL shortage would come in. How much housing is reasonable for each person, and how reasonable is the location they want that much housing in?

However, I don't believe we have crossed that line. In my opinion we need to regulate the market better in order to have the distribution more aligned with overall social benefit. Of course we need to continue building more units with the population and to replace buildings over time, but policy could re-distribute the existing housing more fairly without needing a single one of those today.

I can't speak for Vancouver, but in Ottawa, I'm in a suburb that has a tonne of empty nesters living in 4 bedroom houses. There are young families that could use that space, but the current residents have no incentive to move. Housing is so expensive that selling off and moving to a smaller place would be hard. It's bizarre.

Your first quote conveniently leaves out the last sentence which says “historical data shows otherwise.”

Now, a strawman argument is where you create a fake thing to attack. I’m explaining this to you because there are so many people who genuinely believe that demand is growing higher than supply is.

You seem to be on the side which knows that supply is not the problem, rather it’s greed. The article agrees with you at every turn, but you fight it? Did you actually read it?

House prices are soaring because supply is being suppressed while demand is being stimulated while all locations have unique locational supply of land that creates small location monopolies.