Czech_pivo
Army.ca Veteran
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I agree.I understand that the problem is complex, my point is simply that even $1.3m is completely outside the realm of possibility for most young people looking to get into the market.
Prices have gone crazy compared to wages, and things are now essentially just current landowners buying other properties. Eventually there won't be enough landowners to prop-up the current prices.
The value of the land is the main culprit, at least in the GTA. Twenty-odd years ago when McGinty created the Greenbelt around the GTA he in essence created a 'fixed amount' of new land available for development. It instantly created a 'upper end' of the land available to build on and drove prices correspondingly higher. At the time I was living north of Georgetown outside of a village called Ballinafad, which fell inside the Greenbelt . Alot of farmers were pissed off because they had 'lost' their retirement package because their land would always remain farmland, whereas, for an example, a friend of theirs living 3km south and 2km east would have just won the lottery, because at that time a 100acre corn/soya bean farm was getting a cool 100m! The price today per acre for the few remaining farms in Halton Hills within the Greenbelt that have not yet sold off are now going for well over 1.5-2m/acre.
When you look at the GTA or better yet GTHA (Greater Toronto Hamilton Area), you need to compare this to our version of NYC or London (UK) or Paris or Tokyo. Traditional home ownership (based on our existing definition of a house/land) is beyond the reach of everyday people in virtually all of those cities. Its the same situation in Montreal and Vancouver as well. Land is at a high premium due to government restrictions (such as the Greenbelt for Toronto) and geographic restrictions (such as water/ocean/mountains for Montreal/Vancouver). But, people want to live here (for the most part) because that is where the economic opportunities are.
If the Feds and the Provincial government went to a place like depressed place like Chatham Ontario and bought up 3-4 farms (call it 500acres in total), on the outskirts of town, at current prices for land zoned as farmland, nothing else - valued at 23,0004/acre - for a total of say 12$m - and then sold that land directly to individuals at say a price of 20,000$ a lot (size of 60ft X 120ft - which would be an 'executive' lot in the GTA) to have a home built on it for say 150$/sqft for a 2000sqft house, so all in for 320,000$ a house/lot - do you know they would be able to sell off all of the lots?
And if they did, how many of those people would live in the new house for say 1-2yrs and then try and sell it for 400k, or 500k or 650k? Which in turn would do nothing but encourage others in those same houses to do the same, so that in 3yrs time all of the homes in that newly developed area are selling at between 5-600k?