@chris I can’t help but think that fixing the pension system would ease house prices as well. With private pensions diminishing, and the public one inadequate, it’s easier to just make the higher payments on a house, forego the RRSP, and hopefully downsize into some retirement cash.

@chris sounds like you’re having Californian problems. lol.

@chris Politicians are advised by bankers to not do anything to start driving price of homes down.

So it is perhaps more realistic to push for rental housing first.

@chris The mortgage crisis of 2008 in USA is something you must not forget.

If you buy a $100,000 house and mortgage for $95,000, and then a sudden influx of new housing drives value of your home down to $90,000, your bank calls in the mortgage because home no longer worth more than the balance on your mortgage. And then double whammy because bank puts your house up for sale and drives house princes down even more causing many more to go underwater and lose their homes.

@chris Part of the issue is that wages have lost to inflation so badly, though, too. In your wage range for the 70s, the current equivalents would be about 57,500 to 115,000. We need more mechanisms for dealing with wealth inequality and wages that have stayed fairly flat.

Also, looking at Stats Can's housing cost to disposable income information, the unaffordability of housing has been increasing since the mid-90s. Given that, it would help to look at the economic and policy changes our governments made starting at that point and find ways to reverse them so we had less corporate control over housing and more social housing (co-op- or public-owned/built) to keep prices in check.

@chris $650k house requires a 250k income to pass mortgage stress test.

I got an old fixer upper for $527.9k in 2021 and just passed the test with an income of $200k at the time.

@chris How about make mortgage payments 100% tax deductible.. Same with rent.