Honestly, I feel like at this point most of the people saying this *know* they are wrong. No one wants to feel like their advantages came from luck or even unfairness, and pointing out supposed overspending gets around some of that cognitive dissonance. There's a real sense in which some older people want young people to 'play the part' of striving for a goal that is not actually attainable, like they pretend they could muster up some sympathy if young people tried harder and still failed. (But, sometimes people treat sacrifices like living with roommates longer or living at home as a failure to sacrifice.) But I know (just a few) people who have downpayments that at one time could have bought modest homes outright, and still can't afford anything appropriate for their life stage and family plans. I don't believe at this point that anyone really believes you are making up that difference in lattes, if they ever did.
But even beyond that, young people are mostly making choices that make sense for our lives. I saw a great article (https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/society/2022/02/boomer-mathematics-why-older-generations-cant-understand-the-millennial-struggle-to-buy-a-house) about how older people act like many things that didn't exist when they were young are more expensive than they are. A netflix subscription costs barely more than a single movie ticket, which would not have seemed like a wild luxury for most. Some things that seem like luxuries are substitutes for space or time or even more expensive things. An occasional delivery or uber ride is cheaper than a car, and someone buying meal kits is not necessarily any lazier than someone who (on average) had more time at home. I even increasingly know people who don't have space to cook much because there are more people sharing a kitchen. Some budgeting advice from older people feels like it's from a different world. 'Get a chest freezer to stock up on sales' and... put it where? Most people I know are making pretty reasonable trade-offs giving what is actually expensive (as much space as previous generations enjoyed) and what isn't (basically everything else).
Let’s face it Valerie, older folks grew up and became adults in a much different world. I don’t hold it against them and I appreciate it when they don’t hold it against us. I think we’re all here in this space to address the housing crisis in our country. This is a positive step in the right direction. Civic engagement beyond simply voting. Still, I wish I could do more if only I knew how.
That's a really generous viewpoint, but I (personally) do blame people who use that as an excuse to ignore systemic issues. Not holding it against someone for being on the losing end of an unfair system is kind of a bare minimum, and the opposite isn't (at least for people who are interested in drawing out their advantages).
This was short and to the point. Great article! Younger people face moving goal posts Kareem. As a millennial I've been facing it all of my adult life. The numbers don't lie -- it's harder than ever to own a home in Canada. It's even harder to pay the rent. This is not the fault of the most educated and yes hard working generation of Canadians (see the productivity numbers). It's a systemic problem and I am heartened to see other groups of Canadians finally see that problem for what it is. These comments you highlighted are a minority view and almost seems like "trolling" to me. I don't take them seriously because the facts on the ground speak for themselves.
My Dad, who has been gone since 2009 railed against the reverse mortgage adds. They embody cultural sickness. They are effective and resonate because they capture the American/Canadian greed ethic. Look to the advertising slogans and you see were the bulk of Canadian values reside. As a Kid I was struck by L’Oréal's "Because I am worth it." and E. F. Hutton's “We make money the old-fashioned way. We earn it” Humans are so vulnerable to myths-assumptions especially when they are self- justifying assumptions. The bottom line is this. We know that success is based on good fortune taking advantage from advantaged positions. Successful people have compounded advantages unsuccessful people have compounded disadvantages. The thing is to get people to give up some advantage for the disadvantaged... rather than just say would in a poll. As a consumer society rather than a civics society we are not very willing to sacrifice our positions or our time rail against the extremely advantaged keeping the disadvantaged-disadvantaged. Even though we know better we know "it's good to be King" King of the castle. “I’m the King of the castle, you’re a dirty little rascal” is the nursery rhyme that our culture was nurtured on. Yes, we have other values but this one dominates our ideology.
Yes, it's very short sightedness. We think like consumers getting luck-winning is part of the deal game. We don't think like democratic citizens. No generation has been lazy-but past generations have been far luckier regarding housing. A friend of mine who just sold his house for 1.7 million when he paid less than 100K for it 1990 said “It's like winning the lottery” “It’s worth more than my pension!!” he declared, and I said yes, and you worked 30 years for that!
“I’m the King of the castle, you’re a dirty little rascal” is the nursery rhyme that our culture was nurtured on. Yes, we have other values but this one dominates our ideology. It’s not a nice thing to say. But as James Baldwin said we must first face the truth before we can address it.
Two things can be true at once: you can work hard and be lucky.
Many boomers worked hard, made sacrifices and made prudent financial decisions AND have experienced a windfall of paper wealth they now have in their homes that was produced by unrelated factors. But they see these two things as the same, all their hard work, etc., earned them their home values, and to undermine their entitlement to the massive paper gains feels like a dismissal of their hard work, etc.
I noticed all the enraged comments on the article, too. It's a bummer to read them, but that's life, contentious political issues over something as important as housing are bound to have people who disagree about nearly every aspect. I've got a relative who sees today's housing market as similar to what he experienced in Toronto in the 80s and 90s. It's all the same to him, today is no different than then, and he won't budge. Not until his children have their first grown-up job and want to rent on their own will he truly comprehend what's gone wrong.
Fundamentally I think there are three groups of people that deny this sort of thing
1. who know they are benefitting from the status quo and don't want the money to stop coming in
2. those that are in denial about themselves or someone else benefitting because it's an uncomfortable truth
3. those who hold to open immigration as a sacred value and emotionally hate the concept of closing our borders
1. is a lost cause 2. requires a strong emotional pull to get them past denial 3. is hard to convince until they start seeing everyone suffer in mass amounts.
The weird thing about the last point is that the relative uncontentiousness of immigration in Canada has come alongside policy that (I think contrary to many Canadian's self-image) is in some ways relatively less open, more controlled, and more focused on economic benefit than in many comparable countries. (Canada has historically had a bigger focus on economic immigration than family reunification compared to the US, for example, and at one time had a much higher percentage of high-skilled immigrants.) It's not actually an enormous break from the status quo to evaluate the success of immigration policy according to its economic effects. People can, of course, prefer policy more focused on principled openness, but for the most part that is not the system we actually had.
But I think a larger group of people take it essentially at face value that immigration policy is a more or less 'free' way to combat population aging and hang on to some the economic magic that having an (abnormally large working age population brought. In reality, rapid population growth has costs (like housing strain) even as it might grow GDP, and immigration has distributional effects (basically: winners and losers) on top of whatever aggregate effect it has on the economy. (Not all of these costs would have gone away with better planning, which I think is a common narrative.) I read a great interview about this: https://thehub.ca/2023-11-13/canadians-are-turning-against-immigration-labour-economist-mikal-skuterud-on-how-to-reform-the-system-and-reverse-this-trend/ that said the government largely ignored advice from concerned economists in favour of just believing in their hearts it's a one-stop solution. So imo there's some combination of principle and sound-bite economics, or fear of an aging population that makes people think we need to 'fix' it instead of adapt to it.
As a Canadian who has been concerned about the rising affordability crisis since 2016, I have watched Generation Squeeze with hope, and eventual disappointment. This group has become the CBC of voices - always far too unwilling to address the hard issues and say what truly needs to be said.
What I see in the wider dialogue with Canadians that own homes is: they are afraid of what it means to acknowledge there is an affordability crisis, because they are counting on their home equity to give them excessive investment returns and / or depending on it for their retirement. Anything that threatens their home equity, even ideas, is seen as a threat. As a result, writing about the replies in the Globe & Mail is basically make-work; the response was entirely predictable and anybody who is surprised by it is not really in touch with the housing affordability crisis in Canada.
And there's another massive issue of concern: the ethics of bias and conflict of interest on affordable housing in our media and government - roughly 1 in 3 people in the Liberal Cabinet of the current Federal Government own housing. The Cabinet has 39 people including the PM, so this means 13 of the most-senior elected government officials in Canada have investment properties. The Liberals knowingly ran and successfully elected a serial housing speculator in Taleeb Noormohamed, who has made over $4 million dollars buying and selling properties over a period of 15-20 years in BC. This guy is now an elected representative for Canadians. The former Minister of Housing, The Honorable Ahmed Hussen, bought an additional investment property while he held that position - the odds that Canadian tax dollars turned into MP salaries ($182,000/yr plus allowances) have been used to buy investment properties is probably 99.999% certain at this point. So the existence of bias and conflict of interest influencing the inaction on this issue is extreme. We see daily articles in the business news from business professionals basically praying for interest rate cuts from the Bank of Canada. We've seen the independence of the Bank endangered by politicians and home owners!
The housing affordability crisis is beyond the need for dialogue at this point. In fact everyone suggesting more dialogue and research is needed in 2023, when this crisis began in BC in 2014 and ballooned into public view in 2016... is literally stalling this issue, and it's no stretch to suggest that stalling could be exactly what people want, since the wealth of Canada is tied up in housing.
We need louder and bolder voices than what Generation Squeeze is currently offering. As an organization I pose to you the idea: your relevance as a credible organization is questionable if you are still trying to dialogue on these issues, and not going after the heart of the issue, like whether Canada should allow investment properties at all. After all - Canada has targeted investors under categories like "Foreign", "Speculator / Flipper", and now "AirBnB". We've regulated or taxed all of these types of housing investor, but the overwhelming majority of housing investment in Canada comes from ordinary Canadians, and then of course there are REITS and pension funds. We don't hear a peep from governments on the issue of reducing overall investor-owned properties (50% of the condos in the GTA and Vancouver are investor-owned, btw).
So if we are not tackling the hard issues, if we are not calling for action that goes after the heart of the affordability crisis, we are basically irrelevant at this point. Does Gen Squeeze want to have an impact, or does it want to create a lot of discussion leading nowhere?
In that article we describe how our government is failing to recognize that ordinary Canadians using housing as an investment rather than as homes is driving up prices.
Our solutions framework also mentions that "one of the root causes of housing unaffordability is the so-called “financialization” or “commodification” of housing. - https://www.gensqueeze.ca/housing_solutions
I'm sorry to hear that you think that we need louder and bolder voices than what GenSqueeze is offering. We are open to any suggestions you might have on how to dial up our volume!
Nice rant but Generation Squeeze has been going after treating Housing as a basic need and not as an investment scheme. Maybe someone from Squeeze can direct you to their efforts on this. It's been a central theme.
What I hate about this ‘discussion’ as each side pointing fingers at the other. We all know how this happened and intuitively know how to fix it so that everyone gets out of this in one piece. We have to be looking at the cascading impacts of various inputs. There is no silver bullet and trying to deploy one will make the situation worse, not better.
My generation was taught to think of your house as a liability more than an asset. House prices did not rise that much over time and required expenses for maintenance. My dad schooled me that the word “mortgage” is Latin and means “death grip” So I bought within my means and paid of the mortgage rather rapidly. That whole thinking has changed. That whole opportunity for young people has changed. Because I never thought of my home as an investment asset if the government said to me, you cannot sell it for 12 times but something like 1.5 or 2 times what you paid for it 20 years ago, I would be fine with that as long as that was applied to all housing. So, I could sell and afford to buy another house.
Honestly, I feel like at this point most of the people saying this *know* they are wrong. No one wants to feel like their advantages came from luck or even unfairness, and pointing out supposed overspending gets around some of that cognitive dissonance. There's a real sense in which some older people want young people to 'play the part' of striving for a goal that is not actually attainable, like they pretend they could muster up some sympathy if young people tried harder and still failed. (But, sometimes people treat sacrifices like living with roommates longer or living at home as a failure to sacrifice.) But I know (just a few) people who have downpayments that at one time could have bought modest homes outright, and still can't afford anything appropriate for their life stage and family plans. I don't believe at this point that anyone really believes you are making up that difference in lattes, if they ever did.
But even beyond that, young people are mostly making choices that make sense for our lives. I saw a great article (https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/society/2022/02/boomer-mathematics-why-older-generations-cant-understand-the-millennial-struggle-to-buy-a-house) about how older people act like many things that didn't exist when they were young are more expensive than they are. A netflix subscription costs barely more than a single movie ticket, which would not have seemed like a wild luxury for most. Some things that seem like luxuries are substitutes for space or time or even more expensive things. An occasional delivery or uber ride is cheaper than a car, and someone buying meal kits is not necessarily any lazier than someone who (on average) had more time at home. I even increasingly know people who don't have space to cook much because there are more people sharing a kitchen. Some budgeting advice from older people feels like it's from a different world. 'Get a chest freezer to stock up on sales' and... put it where? Most people I know are making pretty reasonable trade-offs giving what is actually expensive (as much space as previous generations enjoyed) and what isn't (basically everything else).
Let’s face it Valerie, older folks grew up and became adults in a much different world. I don’t hold it against them and I appreciate it when they don’t hold it against us. I think we’re all here in this space to address the housing crisis in our country. This is a positive step in the right direction. Civic engagement beyond simply voting. Still, I wish I could do more if only I knew how.
That's a really generous viewpoint, but I (personally) do blame people who use that as an excuse to ignore systemic issues. Not holding it against someone for being on the losing end of an unfair system is kind of a bare minimum, and the opposite isn't (at least for people who are interested in drawing out their advantages).
This was short and to the point. Great article! Younger people face moving goal posts Kareem. As a millennial I've been facing it all of my adult life. The numbers don't lie -- it's harder than ever to own a home in Canada. It's even harder to pay the rent. This is not the fault of the most educated and yes hard working generation of Canadians (see the productivity numbers). It's a systemic problem and I am heartened to see other groups of Canadians finally see that problem for what it is. These comments you highlighted are a minority view and almost seems like "trolling" to me. I don't take them seriously because the facts on the ground speak for themselves.
My Dad, who has been gone since 2009 railed against the reverse mortgage adds. They embody cultural sickness. They are effective and resonate because they capture the American/Canadian greed ethic. Look to the advertising slogans and you see were the bulk of Canadian values reside. As a Kid I was struck by L’Oréal's "Because I am worth it." and E. F. Hutton's “We make money the old-fashioned way. We earn it” Humans are so vulnerable to myths-assumptions especially when they are self- justifying assumptions. The bottom line is this. We know that success is based on good fortune taking advantage from advantaged positions. Successful people have compounded advantages unsuccessful people have compounded disadvantages. The thing is to get people to give up some advantage for the disadvantaged... rather than just say would in a poll. As a consumer society rather than a civics society we are not very willing to sacrifice our positions or our time rail against the extremely advantaged keeping the disadvantaged-disadvantaged. Even though we know better we know "it's good to be King" King of the castle. “I’m the King of the castle, you’re a dirty little rascal” is the nursery rhyme that our culture was nurtured on. Yes, we have other values but this one dominates our ideology.
In other words, why fight for change if you're already on the winning side? Or, since I'm winning then nothing is wrong.
Yes, it's very short sightedness. We think like consumers getting luck-winning is part of the deal game. We don't think like democratic citizens. No generation has been lazy-but past generations have been far luckier regarding housing. A friend of mine who just sold his house for 1.7 million when he paid less than 100K for it 1990 said “It's like winning the lottery” “It’s worth more than my pension!!” he declared, and I said yes, and you worked 30 years for that!
“I’m the King of the castle, you’re a dirty little rascal” is the nursery rhyme that our culture was nurtured on. Yes, we have other values but this one dominates our ideology. It’s not a nice thing to say. But as James Baldwin said we must first face the truth before we can address it.
Two things can be true at once: you can work hard and be lucky.
Many boomers worked hard, made sacrifices and made prudent financial decisions AND have experienced a windfall of paper wealth they now have in their homes that was produced by unrelated factors. But they see these two things as the same, all their hard work, etc., earned them their home values, and to undermine their entitlement to the massive paper gains feels like a dismissal of their hard work, etc.
I noticed all the enraged comments on the article, too. It's a bummer to read them, but that's life, contentious political issues over something as important as housing are bound to have people who disagree about nearly every aspect. I've got a relative who sees today's housing market as similar to what he experienced in Toronto in the 80s and 90s. It's all the same to him, today is no different than then, and he won't budge. Not until his children have their first grown-up job and want to rent on their own will he truly comprehend what's gone wrong.
Fundamentally I think there are three groups of people that deny this sort of thing
1. who know they are benefitting from the status quo and don't want the money to stop coming in
2. those that are in denial about themselves or someone else benefitting because it's an uncomfortable truth
3. those who hold to open immigration as a sacred value and emotionally hate the concept of closing our borders
1. is a lost cause 2. requires a strong emotional pull to get them past denial 3. is hard to convince until they start seeing everyone suffer in mass amounts.
The weird thing about the last point is that the relative uncontentiousness of immigration in Canada has come alongside policy that (I think contrary to many Canadian's self-image) is in some ways relatively less open, more controlled, and more focused on economic benefit than in many comparable countries. (Canada has historically had a bigger focus on economic immigration than family reunification compared to the US, for example, and at one time had a much higher percentage of high-skilled immigrants.) It's not actually an enormous break from the status quo to evaluate the success of immigration policy according to its economic effects. People can, of course, prefer policy more focused on principled openness, but for the most part that is not the system we actually had.
But I think a larger group of people take it essentially at face value that immigration policy is a more or less 'free' way to combat population aging and hang on to some the economic magic that having an (abnormally large working age population brought. In reality, rapid population growth has costs (like housing strain) even as it might grow GDP, and immigration has distributional effects (basically: winners and losers) on top of whatever aggregate effect it has on the economy. (Not all of these costs would have gone away with better planning, which I think is a common narrative.) I read a great interview about this: https://thehub.ca/2023-11-13/canadians-are-turning-against-immigration-labour-economist-mikal-skuterud-on-how-to-reform-the-system-and-reverse-this-trend/ that said the government largely ignored advice from concerned economists in favour of just believing in their hearts it's a one-stop solution. So imo there's some combination of principle and sound-bite economics, or fear of an aging population that makes people think we need to 'fix' it instead of adapt to it.
As a Canadian who has been concerned about the rising affordability crisis since 2016, I have watched Generation Squeeze with hope, and eventual disappointment. This group has become the CBC of voices - always far too unwilling to address the hard issues and say what truly needs to be said.
What I see in the wider dialogue with Canadians that own homes is: they are afraid of what it means to acknowledge there is an affordability crisis, because they are counting on their home equity to give them excessive investment returns and / or depending on it for their retirement. Anything that threatens their home equity, even ideas, is seen as a threat. As a result, writing about the replies in the Globe & Mail is basically make-work; the response was entirely predictable and anybody who is surprised by it is not really in touch with the housing affordability crisis in Canada.
And there's another massive issue of concern: the ethics of bias and conflict of interest on affordable housing in our media and government - roughly 1 in 3 people in the Liberal Cabinet of the current Federal Government own housing. The Cabinet has 39 people including the PM, so this means 13 of the most-senior elected government officials in Canada have investment properties. The Liberals knowingly ran and successfully elected a serial housing speculator in Taleeb Noormohamed, who has made over $4 million dollars buying and selling properties over a period of 15-20 years in BC. This guy is now an elected representative for Canadians. The former Minister of Housing, The Honorable Ahmed Hussen, bought an additional investment property while he held that position - the odds that Canadian tax dollars turned into MP salaries ($182,000/yr plus allowances) have been used to buy investment properties is probably 99.999% certain at this point. So the existence of bias and conflict of interest influencing the inaction on this issue is extreme. We see daily articles in the business news from business professionals basically praying for interest rate cuts from the Bank of Canada. We've seen the independence of the Bank endangered by politicians and home owners!
The housing affordability crisis is beyond the need for dialogue at this point. In fact everyone suggesting more dialogue and research is needed in 2023, when this crisis began in BC in 2014 and ballooned into public view in 2016... is literally stalling this issue, and it's no stretch to suggest that stalling could be exactly what people want, since the wealth of Canada is tied up in housing.
We need louder and bolder voices than what Generation Squeeze is currently offering. As an organization I pose to you the idea: your relevance as a credible organization is questionable if you are still trying to dialogue on these issues, and not going after the heart of the issue, like whether Canada should allow investment properties at all. After all - Canada has targeted investors under categories like "Foreign", "Speculator / Flipper", and now "AirBnB". We've regulated or taxed all of these types of housing investor, but the overwhelming majority of housing investment in Canada comes from ordinary Canadians, and then of course there are REITS and pension funds. We don't hear a peep from governments on the issue of reducing overall investor-owned properties (50% of the condos in the GTA and Vancouver are investor-owned, btw).
So if we are not tackling the hard issues, if we are not calling for action that goes after the heart of the affordability crisis, we are basically irrelevant at this point. Does Gen Squeeze want to have an impact, or does it want to create a lot of discussion leading nowhere?
Hi Graham, we've done a lot of work on the issues that you mentioned.
Here's one example: https://gensqueeze.substack.com/p/pm-agrees-that-housing-should-be
In that article we describe how our government is failing to recognize that ordinary Canadians using housing as an investment rather than as homes is driving up prices.
Our solutions framework also mentions that "one of the root causes of housing unaffordability is the so-called “financialization” or “commodification” of housing. - https://www.gensqueeze.ca/housing_solutions
I'm sorry to hear that you think that we need louder and bolder voices than what GenSqueeze is offering. We are open to any suggestions you might have on how to dial up our volume!
Nice rant but Generation Squeeze has been going after treating Housing as a basic need and not as an investment scheme. Maybe someone from Squeeze can direct you to their efforts on this. It's been a central theme.
What I hate about this ‘discussion’ as each side pointing fingers at the other. We all know how this happened and intuitively know how to fix it so that everyone gets out of this in one piece. We have to be looking at the cascading impacts of various inputs. There is no silver bullet and trying to deploy one will make the situation worse, not better.
My generation was taught to think of your house as a liability more than an asset. House prices did not rise that much over time and required expenses for maintenance. My dad schooled me that the word “mortgage” is Latin and means “death grip” So I bought within my means and paid of the mortgage rather rapidly. That whole thinking has changed. That whole opportunity for young people has changed. Because I never thought of my home as an investment asset if the government said to me, you cannot sell it for 12 times but something like 1.5 or 2 times what you paid for it 20 years ago, I would be fine with that as long as that was applied to all housing. So, I could sell and afford to buy another house.