No quick fix to a broken housing system – If housing is at least twice as expensive as it should be, there are only two short-term solutions: low incomes need to double, or home costs need to be cut in half.

Something the Hill is forgetting about is the undeniable factor of low-density.

50 years of suburbs and a refusal to allow reasonably sized apartments in our largest cities has directly led to this problem. If we can’t build a 4 floor apartment building in Toronto or Edmonton neighborhoods without people rioting, how on earth can we expect to ever lower the price to entry?

Housing is not double the price it should be in the vast majority of Canada

Hyperbole life this doesn’t help the issue

And neither of those solutions can happen quickly. So we need to be realistic about the time horizon to solve housing affordability. It will take decades to achieve the income growth on one hand and to either hold housing prices where they are or see a slow decline downwards. For wage inflation to outpace housing inflation will be very difficult to achieve because of all the challenges of adding housing supply to market. Even when zoning and regulation is revised to make building housing either, there’s the reality that it’s not as appealing for developers to build housing when prices are flat or declining, and construction costs and very high land values mean we can’t build housing for the costs people can afford. I haven’t seen a realistic solution to this short of development of subsidized rental housing.

“cut costs” is code for cutting taxes, which doesn’t make funding infrastructure, non-market, or public services any richer.

Because are they talking about making drywall and concrete and lumber cheaper?? Are they meaning the 50% of total project costs being the price of land will magically be cut in half? 

This is shortsighted and reductive. 

And cutting home costs will cause other problems. So would doubling minimum wage, though that would be fun to see, all those Americanized corporations would fold up like wet newspaper. But that would cause massive job losses.

The first sentence is the most important. No QUICK fix.

I’ve got a bit of a working theory that the current housing issue isn’t a problem in and of itself but rather a symptom of a deeper problem, I just can’t quite pin down the actual root of the issue so much as other symptoms of it.

We’ve got boomers refusing to retire, creating workplace cultures that require 10 years of experience for entry level jobs at entry level pay and have next to zero training budget, racking up HELOC’s, collecting dwellings like they’re Pokémon, filling their homes with trash, refusing to downsize to an appropriately-sized home later in life, aggressively pursuing restrictive covenants, voting and railing against anything and everything that could lead to visible changes in their environment (public transit, bike lanes, zoning that promotes density, etc), largely voting for provincial and federal governments that continue to push failed trickle-down garbage and policies that completely destroy the status quo and publicly funded programs they relied on, completely dismantled anything that looks like institutional knowledge in both the public and private sector in favour of short-term contractors for everything, and in a lot of cases flat-out refusing to participate in the families that they spent a good deal of their 40’s and 50’s pressuring their millennial children to have. They also built algorithmic barriers to entry into financial markets through the creation of things like credit scores and the proliferation of credit cards.

And so now millennials and later are in this position where their parents’ generation has created a downright hostile environment for them to navigate in order to get a career, be paid appropriately within those careers, progress within those careers without constantly job-hopping, they need to spend the disproportionately small amount that they do get paid (compared to their parents generation in the same roles) on anything but necessities, live in the neighbourhoods they need to live in in order to both have those careers and raise the families they were pressured into having, have anything near the level of support their parents had when raising them, and just broadly get anywhere near the same level of quality of life and financial security as their parents had at the same age.

Obviously there are exceptions in both of these scenarios, so please spare me the “well I’m a millennial who’s retiring at 45 with a big house that’s fully paid off”, or “boomers elected Carney”, or “but my dad votes NDP”, and similar replies. Yes, I’m painting these generations with a broad brush, but it’s an accurate depiction of what we actually see playing out in the real world, though not everyone falls neatly into these descriptions.

It goes so far beyond just *housing*, and it’s all connected. What were the factors that caused a generation to decide that every single advantage they had in life needed to be removed? How did we get to a point where the average birth year of people buying homes in 2026 hasn’t changed all that much from the average birth year of people buying homes in 1986? How were so many people convinced that institutional knowledge is a bad thing and that doing next to nothing in-house while outsourcing everything that could possibly be outsourced would be cheaper and lead to better spending power? Why did these people have kids and then push their kids to have kids if they didn’t plan on participating in the same ways their parents did? Why did “fuck you, I got mine because I deserve it and you don’t” become such an accurate blanket way to describe the sentiment that so many of these decisions feel like they’re based on? What was it that broke an entire generation and led them to making these decisions that have created such a financially hostile landscape for their children and beyond? And how do we fix it? Because they’ve also done a very good job ingraining that sentiment into just about every facet of our society.

Cheap housing is old housing.

Unless you have a time machine or want to subsidize housing heavily – political will, consistency, and time is the only solution.

Even if we have everyone land for free and people here only had to pay the cost to build a new build – they will still say it’s unaffordable.