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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I agree with letting air out of the balloon slowly. That’s what rezoning and densification shoots to do.

    My experience with densification was seeing 600k houses (that I could almost afford) be replaced with 2-4 1.1m houses (that I could not afford).

    We should pursue densification and rezoning are positive for many reasons, but price isn’t one of them.

    But limiting available capital (ie: competing for mortgages)? In what world does that make sense?

    A world where prices are increasing faster than wages. We’ve had historically low interest rates since 2008, which has made borrowing large sums easier, meaning people can afford to pay more for houses.

    That was great for people who got in early: they could get cheap money that wouldn’t reduce their quality of life. But it means they could bid up the price of houses. Folks coming after had to pay higher and higher prices, until they did start to see a quality of life hit.





  • In journalism there’s a phrase: feed the goat. Journalists need to produce a certain number of articles a day to keep their job, regardless of quality or relevence. This is an example of that: someone did what they should, and searched up famous Canadians in the Epstein, found zilch, and posted their findings.

    In this case, everyone is interested in the “Epstein” keyword, so I’m sure it’s getting lots of traffic.

    The goat is pleased.


  • Housing is seen as a huge part of Canadians’ retirement planning. Politicians are afraid to do anything to lower the price of housing (remember Carney’s housing minister saying they didn’t want to reduce house prices?) because they think they’ll be punished by voters. Because of that, house prices keep increasing.

    It’d be great if there was a bi-partisan consensus to gently let the air out of the balloon by carefully lowering the amount of money available in mortgages, or the amount of money exempt from taxes on the sale of a primary residence. By all means, increase supply at the same time, but we also need to make homes less of an asset.