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Comment by screye | Hacker News Reader

As Canada gets more young citizens without building, their home ownership has continued plummeting. [1]

Once there is a critical mass of single-issue pro-housing voters, we can expect to see a huge tsunami of pro-housing bills get passed for this politically lucrative issue.

As of now, old homeowners are the electoral majority. So, pro-housing politics is a losing strategy. But you can only sustain it so long in a nation with at ton of younger owned-home-started immigrants.

[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-canada-home...

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To add to my reply, it appears that - rather than "plummeting" since 2011 - homeownership went up even more recently and actually peaked in 2019:

> About two in three Canadians lived in an owner-occupied home in 2022. Since 2017, the home ownership rate in Canada has fluctuated and in 2019, it peaked at approximately 68.6 percent. In 2022, this figure was slightly lower, at 66.5 percent.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/198969/home-ownership-ra...

> *owner-occupied home*

If I'm living at home with mom and dad, and they own their home, I'm technically living in an owner-occupied home, aren't I?

2/3 of Canadians living in a home their family owns is still far from a situation where a critical mass of voters are demanding pro-renter housing policies.

Even those living at home with parents will be benefiting from the status quo when they eventually inherit their parent's property.

Canada is acute, but this is the same issue in many countries right now. The older, voting generation has voted, every time, to maximise their personal wellbeing at the expense of the younger generations. Because they comprise such a large voting bloc, and they're diligent voters, and they can buy political influence, policies remain catered towards them. I agree that the only solution here is through democracy, and that means demographic changes. In the next 1-2 decades, home owners will be in the minority in many countries. That's when things will get very interesting, politically. In New Zealand, for example, the younger, disenfranchised demographics have been chewed up and spat on their entire lives. We're talking everyone born after 1980. They harbour hate. The political swings are going to be wild. I think there will be enormous land value taxes levied.

> The older, voting generation has voted, every time, to maximise their personal wellbeing at the expense of the younger generations

Did previous generations not do this as well, or is this unique to the boomers?

I don't think so, but democracy is actually pretty new. It wasn't until the 60s in America where one could confidently argue that every man and woman could vote without major impediment. In 1920 women are guaranteed the right to vote by the Nineteenth Amendment. There was also a lot of war happening.

So could previous generations have done the same? Their generation just wasn't large enough. Then along came this crazy baby boom and suddenly there was this all-powerful voting bloc which has shaped the world.

No, previous generations tended to preserve the social contract of not fucking over their grandkids so they could go out to eat more and take more vacations in retirement.

Before they were called boomers they were called "generation me". It should hardly be a surprise that this is what generation me would do in old age.

Your chart shows home ownership recently peaked at 69% in 2011.

The current 66% is (a) not that big a change and (b) still high compared to historical averages so it's not so much "plummeting" as it is "reverting to the mean".

(which means we'll just continue to uphold the status quo like we always have)

Another part of the problem is that those who down own but rent have seen rents increase (in many but perhaps not all of the major cities) to the highest proportion of income in history and often are as high as a mortgage payment. So now there’s no real savings to be had by renting, and no ability to save to get into the housing market later (prices in some markets were increasing on average by tens of thousands of dollars per month through COVID - galloping away from even the most diligently saving renter trying to get to a down payment. So it seems there’s an owner class and a renter class, and both are financially strapped, and it is near impossible to move from renter to owner.

This is a direct result of insufficient supply and skyrocketing values (thanks to interest rates being too low for too long).

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