What You Can Do
Incorporate these talking points into discussions about housing:
- In the Canada of 1976, it took a typical full-time income earner 5 years to save up for a 20% down payment. Today, it would take 17 years!
- Young people are often told they'd be able to afford to buy a home if only they stopped spending money on expensive lattes. But you'd have to give up drinking 15 lattes a day, every day, for five years, to save the 20% down payment on an average priced home in Canada. It’s 19 lattes in Ontario; 20 in BC; 24 in the GTA and 26 in Metro Vancouver.
- Statistics Canada’s measure of inflation is not set up to adequately account for the rising cost of housing. In 2021, inflation rose less than 4% while average housing prices increased by 21%. We need our inflation data to stop camouflaging how the primary cost of living – housing – is being driven up.
- Average Canadian home prices would need to fall $341,000 – half of their 2021 value – to make it affordable for a typical young person to carry a mortgage that covers 80% of the value of an average-priced home at current interest rates OR Average full-time earnings would need to increase to $108,000/year – 100% more than current levels.
