Population and Housing

[ijmorlan]

TD Economics forecasts a potential -8% drop in national housing costs by 2023: https://economics.td.com/ca-forecast-tables#home-sales

I am increasingly of the opinion that there needs to be a bubble burst and crash like 1989 that brings back housing costs to pre-2014 levels with respect to present/future incomes, if not lower.

If not, we'll still have far too many people with issues affording housing.

A value crash won’t build more housing.

I dream of provincial and national policies that would regulate residential property to barely more than inflationary appreciation in order to make property a commodity rather than a speculatory investment to get rich on.

How would this result in more housing being constructed? Instead of people being priced out, they would have to queue for access to housing.

Somebody who has property and builds on it housing or other amenities needed by the community is giving value to the community. Somebody who is just sitting on a property and watching the value rise through no work of their own but expects to profit through a later sale is a leech and a parasite on the community.

I suppose if we believe that so much existing housing is sitting empty that flushing speculators out of the market and bringing it into use would give a significant increase in effective housing supply, then maybe this sort of tinkering with pricing rules could have an impact. I’m skeptical of this however: I’m pretty sure the only way out is to do things which cause more housing to be built.