4 Comments

I think this whole fiasco just underlines that many of our leading politicians are as dumb as fence-posts. They don't look at evidence and they don't listen to experts---they make decisions simply based on ideology. And if they can shove their fingers in the eyes of another party---well, who cares if it screws up life for ordinary people!

Expand full comment

The piece highlights something I'd never really thought about until recently: all those housing costs are going up because SOMEBODY is willing to pay them. The other side of income inequality - the upside, not the .1% but the whole 10%, really are living lives that Boomers never saw, for the middle class of their youth. (The 1960s had approximately zero "Destination Weddings" for people on wage cheques.)

Russil, maybe you can locate a chart I saw going by on social media a month or two back. It charts the $ contribution that parents make to a first-home purchase, by income decile. The ten bars barely go up from a few hundred to a few thousand, maybe $10-20K for the next-to-top income decile..and then explodes, the top 10% are contributing over $100K on average.

And every person-under-40 I know who is well-housed at present, got that kind of help from the Bank of Mom and Dad. But my comment is about the top 10%, maybe top 20%, in general: they are not just rich enough to be housed, they can get an urge for a home office and basically put a million North Americans out of homes because they can afford to just move up any time they get a yen for more space.

Those who like to go on about things being "broken" are not talking about the class buying all those $70K pickups with hoods the height of my shoulder, nor filling up those jets off to Africa and Asia every year. And they can make housing more expensive any time they please by just getting interested in it, instead of Africa or the E-F150.

Expand full comment
author
Nov 1·edited Nov 1Author

Afraid I couldn't find the chart you're referring to, but I did find a couple interesting charts.

From the UK: the number of first-time homebuyers receiving parental help has risen significantly over time (from 25% in 2005 to over 50% in 2020). https://x.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1746506304649081301

Home ownership rates: income matters, but parental home ownership also matters. https://x.com/JohnPasalis/status/1726652228247970065

Expand full comment

Couldn't either, but a lot of numbers in this article. Toronto and Vancouver with the biggest "gifts", as you'd expect.

https://betterdwelling.com/nearly-30-of-canadian-first-time-home-buyers-received-gifts-for-a-down-payment/

Expand full comment