- cowofwar
- Jul 30, 2002
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by Athanatos
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Government has been subsidizing affordable ownership by various means since the second world war. Nothing new here.
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Sep 20, 2014 00:54
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- Adbot
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ADBOT LOVES YOU
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Apr 25, 2024 21:13
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- Grand Theft Autobot
- Feb 28, 2008
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I'm something of a fucking idiot myself
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbzUPjc0N_g
Notice the age of the commercial: May 2012.
They're playing the poo poo out of this on City, CTV, and Global in Vancouver right now.
It's a mediocre building--so mediocre that it looks similar to its neighbouring building, a social housing project.
If it makes you feel any better, here's an advertisement from Minneapolis:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3RiV9zJfCk
Government has been subsidizing affordable ownership by various means since the second world war. Nothing new here.
Yes, I know. I think that it was a bad idea to subsidize and promote suburban development (and to make it so transparently racist), and I think it is a bad idea to continue such subsidies.
Grand Theft Autobot fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Sep 20, 2014
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Sep 20, 2014 01:17
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- Giant Goats
- Mar 7, 2010
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This is such a ridiculously strong cultural meme or what ever.
As someone who moved to BC from elsewhere, I keep stupidly assuming that people in Victoria are aware of how ridiculous the housing market is here. The problem is, most people only have Vancouver to compare us to.
I'm in my early 30s and I just signed a new lease on a rental apartment. Yeah, it's pricier than I'd pay in most other small cities, but it's still about $400 less a month than I'd be paying on a mortgage for a similar condo, with the benefit of having my heat and hot water and appliances and maintenance covered.
When my co-workers, mostly people in their 40s and 50s born in the area, heard I'm "still" renting, they gave me the usual spiel about throwing my money away. I shrugged it off and just said I don't have a down payment.
One of my co-workers replied: "Oh, no one expects you to pay off your house anymore. Just get 5% and the longest mortgage term you can and then sell when you're ready to retire."
Me: "...I'll keep that in mind."
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Sep 20, 2014 01:35
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- VERTiG0
- Jul 11, 2001
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go move over bro
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One of my co-workers replied: "Oh, no one expects you to pay off your house anymore. Just get 5% and the longest mortgage term you can and then sell when you're ready to retire."
Holy poo poo
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Sep 20, 2014 04:28
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- tagesschau
- Sep 1, 2006
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Guten Abend, meine Damen und Herren.
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"Oh, no one expects you to pay off your house anymore. Just get 5% and the longest mortgage term you can and then sell when you're ready to retire."
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Sep 20, 2014 15:03
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- Kafka Esq.
- Jan 1, 2005
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"If you ever even think about calling me anything but 'The Crab' I will go so fucking crab on your ass you won't even see what crab'd your crab" -The Crab(TM)
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Canada's Housing Bubble: tl;dr we are so screwed
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Sep 20, 2014 16:09
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- namaste friends
- Sep 18, 2004
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by Smythe
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What up bears, rentailures and various other irresponsible non-owning scumbags!
Check out what the world's envy, our bedrock banking and financial industry permits!
http://business.financialpost.com/2014/09/19/with-7000-a-month-going-to-service-debt-future-bleak-unless-couple-can-stem-the-red-ink/
quote:
Situation: In mid-60s, a couple faces collapsed property investments with scant savings
Solution: Sell last rental property, use money to cut home mortgage and slash other debt
In Alberta, a couple we’ll call John, 65, and his wife, Linda, 66, are on the verge of retirement. John works for a large manufacturing company, Linda for a local non-profit counselling group following an earlier career in health care. The transition to retirement ought to be smooth, but debt and disorganization stand in the way. Their job pension and the Canada Pension Plan will keep a roof over their heads, but their future is paradoxically fragile. They have scant financial assets and a rental property that will lose money when mortgage interest rates rise.
For now, John and Linda are able to keep up with current expenses which include $2,398 in spending each month for groceries, car expenses, grooming, etc, $818 a month in property taxes and a staggering $7,135 a month for debt service on their seven credit cards, line of credit and mortgages. That adds up to $10,351 a month or $124,212 a year. Debt service costs are about 70% of total spending. Their $9,027 monthly disposable income based on their take home salaries, $7,094, and $1,500 monthly rental income, adds up to $108,128 a year. They carry their deficits on their line of credit. But the future is bleak unless they can pay off their debts and staunch the red ink.
“This case is a mess, largely because of the amount and type of debt on their balance sheet,” explains Derek Moran, head of Smarter Financial Planning Ltd. in Kelowna, B.C. “As it stands now, they cannot afford to retire. But we can fix it by debt management first and asset management second.”
Debt management
The first move has to be to deal with credit card and mortgage debt, for interest rates, as much as 19.9% on their plastic and up to 4% on the mortgages and line of credit are likely to rise. They owe $44,360 on credit cards and line of credit. They have a $291,000 mortgage on their house with a 4% interest rate for another two years and a $251,000 mortgage with a 2.5% floating rate on a rental property.
The couple’s history of investing in real estate ventures is a string of misfortunes. At one time, they owned 12 rental properties, using growing equity in a succession of condos and single homes to provide down payments for the next purchase. But timing purchases and sales and getting enough rent in the notoriously volatile Alberta property market made it hard to manage the dozen profitably, John recalls. Two years ago, they sold all but two properties. Along the way, John had to tap $50,000 of RRSP assets and pay taxes on withdrawals for cash he needed to pay expenses for the properties. Problems with maintenance and tenants not paying rent produced anxiety and health problems. They lost a rental property in a recent foreclosure. One unit remains, a house which makes a small profit. Today, the most expensive debt the couple has is on their credit cards.
Debt management should begin with $35,360 credit card debt which has an estimated interest cost of about $7,000 a year. They could eliminate some of that debt by cashing $35,000 of RRSP assets. A one-time tax at 25%, far less than years of 20% interest on credit card debt, would reduce the net payout to $26,250. They could add $5,400 from their TFSAs to eliminate most of their $35,360 credit card debt. The far less costly line of credit debt, which carries a 4% average interest rate, will be paid off in a few years.
Planning retirement
They have one rental property with an estimated market value of $325,000. Its $5,200 annual return after its mortgage is paid, which is 7% on their equity of $74,000 would vanish were interest rates to rise on its floating rate note to 5%. They will have no financial assets after they cash out of their TFSAs and RRSPs. Rather than keep the rental property, they could sell it for an estimated $325,000 less selling costs of about $15,000 They could use the net gain of about $60,000 to reduce their home mortgage, Mr. Moran suggests. They would have less debt and could use their line of credit for emergency funds, the planner adds.
When fully retired, Linda and John will have job pensions that add up to $66,753 a year, two CPP cheques that will total $18,924 a year, and two OAS benefits that will total $13,410. The annual grand total, $99,085 will be taxed after pension splits, age and pension credits at an average rate of 17% and leave $6,850 for monthly spending. If they have eliminated $5,500 a month debt service costs on their credit cards and line of credit, sold the rental property, ended carrying charges on the rental property, eliminated property tax on the rental unit and reduced their own home’s mortgage by using money from sale of the rental property, their discretionary income for things they want to spend money on rather than carrying costs they must spend money on will be more in retirement than it is today, Mr. Moran estimates.
“John and Linda can uncomplicate their lives by cleaning up their disastrous finances and using money from sale of the rental property to reduce their own mortgage debt. They will have a comfortable retirement,” Mr. Moran says.
Dear Linda and John, please kill yourselves.
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Sep 21, 2014 16:47
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- Lexicon
- Jul 29, 2003
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I had a beer with Stephen Harper once and now I like him.
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Boomers and their loving obsession with real estate. Jesus.
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Sep 21, 2014 16:51
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- namaste friends
- Sep 18, 2004
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by Smythe
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I think it's amazing that the FP gave them a retirement readiness rating of 2/5. What in gently caress does 1/5 look like?
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Sep 21, 2014 17:06
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- LemonDrizzle
- Mar 28, 2012
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neoliberal shithead
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I think it's amazing that the FP gave them a retirement readiness rating of 2/5. What in gently caress does 1/5 look like?
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Sep 21, 2014 17:17
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- namaste friends
- Sep 18, 2004
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by Smythe
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OK, maybe I'm missing something about the workings of their pension schemes and/or the cost of living in Canada, but they look to be in tolerable shape if they sell the rental and use the proceeds to retire debt. OK, that's largely because they appear to have fairly generous workplace pensions but still, with the rental property sold they'd have a post-tax retirement income of $6850/mo with expenses of $4512/mo. Seems comfortable enough.
Fair enough, my outrage comes from the fact they've managed to squander the biggest expansion of capital in the last 100 years.
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Sep 21, 2014 17:33
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- namaste friends
- Sep 18, 2004
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by Smythe
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-21/oliver-says-canada-won-t-make-major-house-finance-changes.html
quote:
Canada won’t make any sudden changes to the country’s system of housing finance, even as the government looks at ways to reduce its role in the market, Finance Minister Joe Oliver said.
Oliver said that while he’s studying proposals, such as the idea of the government passing on more risk to lenders, these are longer-term issues that don’t require immediate action. The government guarantees about C$710 billion ($648 billion) worth of Canadian mortgages through state-run Canada Mortgage & Housing Corp. and private mortgage insurers.
“We’re looking at things, but we’re not going to be doing anything dramatic,” Oliver said in an interview in Cairns, Australia, where he was attending a meeting of finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of 20 countries. “We don’t see the need for it.”
Evan Siddall, chief executive of CMHC, said in a Sept. 19 speech his organization is looking at ways to better manage the government’s exposure to the housing market.
In the speech, Siddall outlined how his organization is “re-examining” its role to ensure the government isn’t distorting the housing market by assuming too much risk.
Possible steps could include risk-sharing with banks, higher capital requirements or smaller regulatory measures to curb over-borrowing by some households, Siddall said.
“We certainly aren’t going to do anything precipitous,” Oliver said. “You don’t want to cause the very thing you are trying to prevent.”
On the risk-sharing proposal, Oliver said the government hasn’t made any decisions.
“Obviously it’s one of the things one looks at, but I don’t want to signal we’re doing anything,” he said.
Accelerating Prices
Canadian housing has so far defied predictions of a correction with recent data showing an acceleration in resales, starts and prices. Policy makers have downplayed worries the market is at risk of a collapse, forecasting instead a soft landing. Oliver reiterated in the interview his government’s “longer-term objective” is to reduce the state’s role in the mortgage market and he doesn’t see a housing bubble.
In his speech, Siddall said that his organization’s research shows that even with some overvaluation, “there are no immediate problematic housing market conditions at the national level.” If prices don’t moderate as predicted though, Siddall said, it will strengthen case for additional measures to cool the market.
“Our educated opinion is that growth in house prices in Canada will moderate,” Siddall said. “If we are wrong, and price growth remains strong or accelerates, we may need to look to macro-prudential counter-weights to avoid excesses.”
Smaller Measures
Until now, the agency has been taking smaller measures to remove some of excesses from the market and reduce the amount of insurance it has in force, which is capped at C$600 billion. In June, it announced it would no longer insure financing for condominiums. In February, the agency said it will increase premiums on mortgage insurance by an average of 15 percent. In 2012, the government gave the country’s banking regulator new to oversee CMHC.
CMHC also is planning to increase its capital holdings to protect from insurance losses and has done stress testing that shows it would have survived a U.S.-style downturn in the housing market, Siddall said in the speech.
CMHC insures mortgages against default, and its insurance is fully backed by the federal government. By law, Canadian mortgages with less than a 20 percent downpayment must be insured.
While no major changes are planned, Oliver said there could be similar smaller steps that can be taken if warranted.
‘Sandbox Policies’
“That doesn’t mean we’re not going to take further steps,” Oliver said. “A lot of things as you know that have happened, they call it the sandbox policies, we believe moderated the growth.”
There have been calls for a more dramatic exit from the market by the government. In a June report, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said Canada should consider lowering the amount of mortgage insurance CMHC can write, and eventually get out of the business completely to limit taxpayer risk.
“Right now, government takes practically all the risk,” OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria said in a June 11 interview. “This is a contingent liability of the taxpayers of Canada. There has to be some risk borne by the intermediary institutions and the borrowers themselves.”
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Sep 21, 2014 17:46
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- ocrumsprug
- Sep 23, 2010
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by LITERALLY AN ADMIN
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THAT rates 2 stars on the retirement readiness chart?!?
E:fb
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Sep 21, 2014 17:58
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- peter banana
- Sep 2, 2008
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Feminism is a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.
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The comments under that article talking about how well off they'd be if they'd managed a balanced portfolio make me happy.
Though someone rightly points out how unlikely it is a couple spending 2k on food & grooming would make good financial decisions.
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Sep 21, 2014 18:02
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- Lexicon
- Jul 29, 2003
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I had a beer with Stephen Harper once and now I like him.
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THAT rates 2 stars on the retirement readiness chart?!?
E:fb
To be fair, these people, despite their tremendous fuckups and stupidity - will in fact have a reasonable retirement.
That's not true for a huge number of people who're just flat out poor, and don't have the pensions and such.
All these idiots did was squander the chance to be truly rich. They're still going to be very well off.
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Sep 21, 2014 18:02
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- mastershakeman
- Oct 28, 2008
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by vyelkin
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To be fair, these people, despite their tremendous fuckups and stupidity - will in fact have a reasonable retirement.
That's not true for a huge number of people who're just flat out poor, and don't have the pensions and such.
All these idiots did was squander the chance to be truly rich. They're still going to be very well off.
Solely because of their pensions. Without them they'd have no shot whatsoever.
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Sep 21, 2014 18:31
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- melon cat
- Jan 21, 2010
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Nap Ghost
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Glad this hasn't been posted yet. The title says it all: "Millionaires who don’t have any money face having to work to 70"
tl;dr: good luck eating those granite countertops when you need food.
I know that this does not bode well for our national economy, but I'm having a lot trouble sympathizing with these asset-rich, cash-poor people. They've been told time and time again that their primary residence isn't an investment, but they'll always shout you down and tell you about how much their nice house with its re-done floors, new windows, and granite countertops "is worth on the market".
Your "asset" is worthless if it can't be sold.
melon cat fucked around with this message at 20:41 on Sep 21, 2014
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Sep 21, 2014 20:29
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- namaste friends
- Sep 18, 2004
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by Smythe
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I agree with the the article's content, but take disagreement with the title- these people aren't millionaires. They don't own a penny of their equity, and you're not a millionaire until the money shows up in your bank account. And if you ask me, equity coming from a primary residence shouldn't even be part of the net worth calculation at all.
I know that this does not bode well for our national economy, but I'm having a lot trouble sympathizing with these asset-rich, cash-poor people. They've been told time and time again that their primary residence isn't an investment, but they'll always shout you down and tell you about how much their nice house with its re-done floors, new windows, and granite countertops "is worth on the market".
Your "asset" is worthless if it can't be sold.
Do you know if housing equity is included in GDP calculations?
e: This is an interesting Calculated Risk post but I'm not sure it answers the question. I wonder what Canada's GDP growth would look like without Mortgage Equity Withdrawals.
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2007/01/mews-impact-on-2007.html
namaste friends fucked around with this message at 20:57 on Sep 21, 2014
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Sep 21, 2014 20:48
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- namaste friends
- Sep 18, 2004
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by Smythe
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From Ben Rabidoux's twitter:
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/09/21/business/in-suburban-seattle-new-nests-for-chinas-rich.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0&referrer=
quote:
As wealthy Chinese stash more of their fortunes overseas, they’re bidding up the value of everything from Bitcoins and Burgundy to Picassos and pink diamonds.
And, increasingly, China’s rich are also offshoring their families along with their cash. That’s created a real estate boom in an unlikely corner of the United States: suburban Seattle.
Wealthy Chinese have become far and away the biggest foreign buyers of real estate in Seattle in recent years, accounting for up to one-third of $1-million-plus homes sold in certain areas, brokers say. Seattle real estate agents are hiring Mandarin speakers and even opening offices in Beijing. Builders are designing much of their new construction for Chinese buyers.
Seattle real estate agents have even added a new term of art to their deal language: “the feng shui contingency.” Before closing on a house, many Chinese buyers are asking to have a feng shui master or consultant approve the house as part of a general inspection. Bad feng shui means no deal. Or, sometimes, some last-minute landscaping.
“We had a case where a tree was blocking the chi, or energy flow, of the home,” said May Wan, an agent at Berkshire Hathaway Home Services in Bellevue who works with many Chinese buyers. “So it had to be taken out. They planted another one nearby.”
The business of relocating China’s uprooted rich is likely to grow in the coming years. A quarter of all real estate sold to foreigners in the United States last year went to Chinese buyers. Now the largest group of foreign buyers in the United States, the Chinese spent $22 billion on American real estate in the 12 months ended in March, according to the National Association of Realtors. That’s up 72 percent from the year-earlier period.
They lean toward luxury: The median purchase for Chinese buyers is $523,148 — nearly twice the national average. Three-quarters of their purchases are all cash.
That’s made Seattle one of the world’s top catch basins for the billions of dollars spilling out of China every year. While foreign money has also been pouring into New York, Los Angeles and London real estate, the impact of the Chinese rich on Seattle is far more concentrated, focused on a few small, upscale suburbs. They’re especially attracted to Medina — home to Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos — and the West Bellevue area. “The first question you often hear from Chinese clients is ‘Where does Bill Gates live?’ “ said Moya Skillman, a broker with Windermere Real Estate.
Brokers and analysts say 20 to 40 percent of $1 million-plus homes sold on the Eastside — a collective term for eastern suburbs of Seattle — were purchased by Chinese buyers.
A $1.1 million listing in West Bellevue recently attracted 24 bidders, virtually all of them Chinese, and the home quickly sold for $1.4 million. Ms. Wan said a $2.5 million lakefront property recently sold with three offers, just days after coming onto the market. The median sales price in Bellevue is up 82 percent since 2011, to $1.37 million, according to sales data.
The boom may be just starting. A survey by the Hurun Report, a China-based wealth research firm, found that 64 percent of China’s millionaires have emigrated or plan to emigrate in coming years. They listed their favorite destination as the United States, followed by Canada and Australia. While respondents cited better education, air quality and food safety as their main reasons, concerns about political and social stability have also caused the wealthy to secure more of their fortunes overseas, according to advisers to wealthy Chinese families. Chinese residents held an estimated $659 billion offshore in 2013. The number is expected to surge to $1.9 trillion by 2018, according to the Boston Consulting Group.
Their attraction to Seattle stems from its top schools, clean air, longtime Chinese population and, more recently, a hit movie. The 2013 film “Beijing Meets Seattle” (or “Finding Mr. Right” in English) became one of China’s top-grossing films of all time, telling the story of a pregnant woman who flies to Seattle to find true love and American citizenship for her baby. The film struck a chord with younger Chinese, who saw Seattle as a liberating, romantic escape from the intense materialism of China (even though much of the movie was filmed in Vancouver).
“People my age in China suddenly started talking about Seattle,” said Bangze Wang, a Beijing native who now lives in Seattle.
Mr. Wang, known as James, embodies the new Seattle-China attraction. The son of a successful developer in Beijing, he arrived in Seattle in 2008 with plans to attend the University of Washington and return home to the family business. After graduation, however, he was offered a job at Lochwood-Lozier Custom Homes, one of Seattle’s top builders. Now he’s a project manager, negotiator and all-around cultural liaison between the company and wealthy Chinese buyers.
“Seattle was a better opportunity for me than China right now,” Mr. Wang said. “A lot of Chinese families are planning to move here.”
Lochwood-Lozier used to sell its high-end homes to Microsoft millionaires and other local executives. Now it is building 10 new homes aimed mainly at Chinese buyers, with prices of $2.5 million to $5 million.
Todd Lozier, the firm’s president, said Chinese buyers prefer big, modern homes with two kitchens — a small, vented one and a larger display kitchen — along with grand entrances and rooms for extended family. “They like curb appeal,” he said.
They also like a classic American look, feng shui notwithstanding. Ms. Skillman was showing one Chinese buyer a home with Chinese antiques on display “and the buyer almost walked out,” she said. Now she tells sellers to clear out most Chinese collectibles or artworks before they list.
David Masin, president of Masins Fine Furnishings & Interior Design in Bellevue, said business from wealthy Chinese was up more than 50 percent this year. One Chinese family, he said, recently bought a $24,000 Thomas Pheasant dining table, which they said was for their son, who’s in college. Another customer bought a multimillion-dollar house and asked Masins to furnish it, sight unseen. The cost: around $250,000.
https://twitter.com/BenRabidoux/status/513778911936008192
Good question right?
e: It's the best place on earth factor rite
namaste friends fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Sep 21, 2014
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Sep 21, 2014 21:01
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- Lexicon
- Jul 29, 2003
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I had a beer with Stephen Harper once and now I like him.
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I know that this does not bode well for our national economy, but I'm having a lot trouble sympathizing with these asset-rich, cash-poor people. They've been told time and time again that their primary residence isn't an investment, but they'll always shout you down and tell you about how much their nice house with its re-done floors, new windows, and granite countertops "is worth on the market".
Your "asset" is worthless if it can't be sold.
Other than their superiority complexes about their financial genius, what's especially galling is the knowledge that it'll be up to the rest of us to stump up when the house of cards collapses.
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Sep 21, 2014 21:05
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- cowofwar
- Jul 30, 2002
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by Athanatos
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Well who knows because Canada doesn't believe in collecting data.
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Sep 21, 2014 21:22
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- namaste friends
- Sep 18, 2004
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by Smythe
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 I implore all of you to read this.
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/5a9aa84a-3e76-11e4-b7fc-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3DlQbwHS5
quote:
Housing finance matters. In most high-income countries it matters more than any other form of finance. It was intimately related to the recent waves of financial crisis – far more so than the bugbear of public finance. We must rethink what we have been doing, why we have been doing it and whether we could do it better.
Countries finance housing in different ways. In the US, for example, such finance is socialised to an astonishing degree. In the UK, it comes from (more or less) private banks. Amazingly, lending to individuals secured against dwellings accounts for two-thirds of the balance sheet of the British banking system, if one ignores lending by financial institutions to one another.
Yet, however the finance of housing is structured, its effects reach far beyond the housing market alone. Rising house prices justify more lending; and more lending then drives house prices higher. In the process, housing finance may generate asset-price bubbles, huge increases in leverage and unsustainable household spending. This is exactly what happened in many countries in the run-up to the post-2007 crises.
Behind all this lies a strong social consensus in favour of owner-occupation. This has justified a range of subsidies for this form of tenure. One of these is widely ignored: the universal failure to tax “imputed rent”. Owner-occupiers in effect “rent” from themselves. But this notional “rent” is tax-free. Landlords, however, pay tax on the rent they receive This makes owner-occupation far cheaper than renting the same property. Interestingly, this tax advantage would be ended if rent were tax-deductible.
Yet if such benefits to homebuyers remain, the policy challenge becomes how to manage the consequences. Here there seem to be three preconditions for greater stability.
First, and most obviously, the risks need to be internalised; that is, self-evidently borne by private sector lenders. The US practice of implicitly guaranteeing the liabilities of government-sponsored mortgage underwriters such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while allowing their managers commercial freedom has proved disastrous. But, as the UK discovered painfully, similar problems can emerge in the private sector. Insisting on higher equity and on the need for originators of loans to retain substantial positions in the assets they securitise and resell must be part of the response to these past failures.
Second, lending against property, including for purchases of housing but also commercial buildings, must be the focus of efforts at making “macroprudential” policy work. This will include changes in permitted loan-to-value ratios in response to movements in credit and asset prices. In the current context, such policy actions are essential. But do not imagine they will be without problems. Fine-tuning or even coarse-tuning of lending is very tricky since it is so often hard to identify bubbles. Moreover, by removing the property market as the principal vehicle through which monetary policy works, there is a significant danger of even bigger and more disruptive effects in other markets – those for financial assets or foreign exchange, for example.
Finally, consideration must be given to shifting away from inherently inflexible debt contracts to shared-equity contracts. It is possible to imagine that some finance would be supplied in the form of risk-sharing contracts of the following form: the finance supplied would carry a running yield for investors but their value would be linked to some index of house prices. This would cushion borrowers during a crash in house prices. It would also give savers the ability to invest in the housing market other than by buying actually buying lumpy (and expensive) houses. For investors, these new instruments could prove to be attractive assets. More important, the investors would automatically share the risks in the market. That would make the borrowers less exposed to the risks of extreme leverage and the financial system as a whole more robust. This is one of the recommendations of House of Debt , an important book by American economists Atif Mian and Amir Sufi.
Collectively, we have made a huge bet on leveraging up the housing stock. This has gone very badly. If we are to avoid future disasters, this aspect of our financial arrangements needs reconsideration and reform. The answers are not simple. But a repeat of the recent experience with overborrowing against housing is surely to be avoided, at almost any cost.
This article is written by Martin Wolf. Probably my favorite FT columnist.
tl;dr tax breaks for renters to level the playing field against ~*~*~pride of ownership~*~*~.
namaste friends fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Sep 21, 2014
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Sep 21, 2014 21:51
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- LemonDrizzle
- Mar 28, 2012
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neoliberal shithead
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tl;dr tax breaks for renters to level the playing field against ~*~*~pride of ownership~*~*~.
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Sep 21, 2014 21:56
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- namaste friends
- Sep 18, 2004
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by Smythe
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Uh, that piece makes three specific recommendations, none of which has anything to do with tax breaks for renters. It correctly notes that most countries don't tax imputed rents (although the UK used to in the 60s) but the recommendations are all about controlling the supply of credit and forcing lenders to hold more of the risks associated with their loans.
i can fantasize can't i
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Sep 21, 2014 22:01
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- namaste friends
- Sep 18, 2004
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by Smythe
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huffington post isn't even pretending to be journalism anymore.
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/cam-good/vancouver-real-estate-millennials_b_4958982.html
Don't give them the click. The article is just cam 'fake chinese buyers' good talking about how millenials making 20k/year can afford a 300k apt.
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Sep 22, 2014 01:13
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- Brannock
- Feb 9, 2006
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by exmarx
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Fallen Rib
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It'd help us not give them a click if you pasted the actual text of the article so we'd even know what it was actually about, since the URL isn't too informative.
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Sep 22, 2014 02:06
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- Brannock
- Feb 9, 2006
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by exmarx
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Fallen Rib
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Also for like 3-4 years (several years ago) I'd scoff at my friend who kept on telling me about how awful Vancouver was and over the past ~2 years I've just been continually surprised at how much more awful it is than I ever imagined it could be lmfao.
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Sep 22, 2014 02:07
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- namaste friends
- Sep 18, 2004
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by Smythe
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Also for like 3-4 years (several years ago) I'd scoff at my friend who kept on telling me about how awful Vancouver was and over the past ~2 years I've just been continually surprised at how much more awful it is than I ever imagined it could be lmfao.
So what do you love most about this town? The friendly, genuine populace? The weather? The high standard of living? Abundance of career opportunities?
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Sep 22, 2014 02:11
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- namaste friends
- Sep 18, 2004
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by Smythe
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Hahahah I had no loving idea this was still alive.
http://metronews.ca/news/vancouver/1161764/b-c-place-casino-preparations-underway/
I loving love that municipalities are in love with casinos because of the tax revenue that they generate. Great loving idea guys. Like we need to attract more loving scum to this loving town.
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Sep 22, 2014 02:15
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- blah_blah
- Apr 15, 2006
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So what do you love most about this town? The friendly, genuine populace? The weather? The high standard of living? Abundance of career opportunities?
Vancouver is unironically an awesome city except for the cost of living, the housing bubble, and the terrible job market. Those three things are dealbreakers for where I am in my life/career at this point, but I certainly want to come back at some point in the not too distant future.
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Sep 22, 2014 02:21
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- namaste friends
- Sep 18, 2004
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by Smythe
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Vancouver is unironically an awesome city except for the cost of living, the housing bubble, and the terrible job market. Those three things are dealbreakers for where I am in my life/career at this point, but I certainly want to come back at some point in the not too distant future.
A friend of mine from undergrad (originally from the island) once said that Vancouver is a great place to live if it weren't for the people. The best solution would be to take the entire island of Montreal and drop it on top of Vancouver with everyone under it.
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Sep 22, 2014 02:24
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- Adbot
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Apr 25, 2024 21:13
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Sep 20, 2014 00:54
