this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
22 points (95.8% liked)

Canada

7200 readers
307 users here now

What's going on Canada?

Communities

🍁 Meta

πŸ—ΊοΈ Provinces / Territories

πŸ™οΈ Cities / Local Communities

πŸ’ SportsHockey

Football (NFL)

  • List of All Teams: unknown

Football (CFL)

  • List of All Teams: unknown

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer

πŸ’» Universities

πŸ’΅ Finance / Shopping

πŸ—£οΈ Politics

🍁 Social and Culture

Rules

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage:

https://lemmy.ca

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
otter@lemmy.ca
22
Freeland touts home savings account, notes limits to addressing housing crisis (www.castanet.net)
submitted 1 year ago by sik0fewl@kbin.social to c/canada@lemmy.ca
9 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland says the uptake of a new savings account for first-time homebuyers is exceeding expectation, though she acknowledged the limits of what it can do to address affordability.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] sbv@sh.itjust.works 15 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corp. has forecast that the country needs 3.5 million more homes by 2030 than the country is currently on track to build.

With the speed of homebuilding not matching population growth, economists at both National Bank and TD Bank warned last week that the high levels of newcomers to Canada threaten to make the housing affordability crisis worse.

The federal government has a bunch of tools to lower demand or increase supply. And their response is to create a TFSA?

[–] BedSharkPal@lemmy.ca 12 points 1 year ago

It's embarrassing. We all know how to fix this issue, but they refuse to do it because people would lose their paper gains.

The only was this gets solved is if renters become a voting block and demand that prices actually go down. How they get driven down is up to some limited debate. But the real hurdle is having people acknowledge that in order to improve affordability, prices have to actually go down.

[–] knapsackinjury@programming.dev 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's so stupid. The problem with the housing market isn't that I don't have a proper account to keep a $200k down payment that is needed.

[–] sbv@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

The TFSA has a limit of $40k and you can "only" save $8k/year. So you wouldn't be able to get an actual down payment in there anyway.

But yeah, point taken. The TFSA is an insufficient response to a real problem.

[–] psvrh@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corp. has forecast that the country needs 3.5 million more homes by 2030 than the country is currently on track to build.

So, and hear me out here, why the hell doesn't the CMHC build public housing like they used to? You know, like before the late 1990s when every level of government just abdicated responsibility for anyone who wasn't already rich.