Multiple opinions are constantly offered on how to solve the housing crisis.
Paul Kershaw, UBC Professor, School of Population and Public Health, states Canada is drifting from a meritocracy (albeit an imperfect one, often tilted toward white men) toward a landed aristocracy, where access to secure housing increasingly depends on being born into the right family with great harm being done to younger generations who do not have affluent families.
Because housing market entry increasingly depends on how much housing wealth your family has accumulated – not how hard you work, that’s the textbook definition of a landed aristocracy.
This trend is already driving a sharp divide among younger Canadians. The median net worth of homeowners under 35 is $457,000. For their peers who rent, it’s just $44,000.
To restore affordability for all, he states that future policies need to have home prices stall until earnings catch up.
What that means is reorganizing our economy accordingly, every policy, including our tax policy, our supply policy, our efforts to try and reduce the harmful demand where we are commodifying in ways that are disruptive to the market. If we don’t address home values, the housing problem will remain unsolved.
It appears that unless there is a cultural shift away from the landed aristocracy of housing ownership, government policies will not be successful in solving this crisis.
Lin Gackle
Cochrane, AB
