To match other advanced countries on square feet of land and house per person on average, we’d have to build a lot more smaller houses on a lot smaller lots. The unit counts only tell half the story, and everyone is somehow ignoring that.
For comparison, the UK average house size is only 41% the size of Canada, and the largest European size is Denmark and it’s still only 75% as big as Canada.
Globally, The countries having the worst time housing cost wise, are the ones with the largest average house size.
Yes I’m talking about inequality, but it’s systematic, people who’ve been around longer bought up everything in the major cities and now aren’t sharing.
The amount of privately held land is fixed, but that doesn’t mean someone’s going to pay the same amount. Not at all.
Let me ask you a question, how much would you pay for a car, if you knew that car would sell for more money in 10 years than you paid for it today. No matter how much you spend on the car, it has a 99% chance to go up in value over 10 years. The logical choice is to spend as much money as you can possibly afford, because the more you spend, the more you get back. This is what’s been happening with houses for the last 40 years.
Now tell me how much you’d spend on a car if you knew is was going to lose half of it’s value over the next 10 years, like cars normally do, and you’re going to give me a much lower number.
The tax has to be high enough to make sure you and everyone else always lose money on the house. Then, you’ll only pay for what you need, or maybe splurge a little bit more for some extras, but you wouldn’t go crazy unless you were rich.
Under this plan that Zoomer family can afford my parent’s house, because they’re working and now don’t have to pay income tax. Meanwhile it’s going to be cheaper because there’s more supply of larger houses and less demand for them. My Boomer parents wouldn’t get that tax break because they retired and all that tax is now is a significant drain on their finances unless they downsize. Further into town where those taxes would be even higher because of desirability, those houses will be bought up by developers, and turned into condos, which because the tax is on land only and not the value of the building will have even cheaper per month taxes for the occupants. Good for both my downsizing Boomer parents, and for childless folks who don’t need a full sized house.
That’s interesting about housing sizes - good to know, thank you. It kind of confirms my general sense about those places, but it’s hard to sort stereotypes from reality sometimes.
Australia and the US are the other big-houses places. I suspect it’s down to available lumber and low land values. Maybe car culture too, but the history of that is intertwined with low land values. (Russia and China score lower because they’re just generally poorer)
I’m not really sure what point you’re making with it, though. We could start renting out oversize closets and spare rooms as separate housing, and people do, but that’s not generally regarded as a good solution to the housing crisis, and in fact is fairly illegal. We could start building more smaller houses, and as far as I can anecdotally see are, but that’s still building houses.
The tax has to be high enough to make sure you and everyone else always lose money on the house. Then, you’ll only pay for what you need, or maybe splurge a little bit more for some extras, but you wouldn’t go crazy unless you were rich.
Ah, but you’re not accounting for rental income, or equivalently the rent you won’t pay if you’re buying. People need to live somewhere, legally speaking, and legally speaking will keep paying more until it’s a profitable asset for the owners again.
Illegally speaking we absolutely would have a spike in homelessness, to the point where there might be more permanent Hoovervilles/favillas being built on land that’s not technically set aside for the residents. The appreciation you’re talking about isn’t an economic fluke, it’s driven by fundamentals. Land literally just does become more sought after as the population grows (and the buildings themselves slowly depreciate as they become old, musty and awful).
My Boomer parents wouldn’t get that tax break because they retired
Presumably they get some kind of income, right? They still eat. You mean a tax break just working individuals, then. That’s kind of the same as making the house tax 65+ only, except disabled people and similar will also get swept up.
This is a nitpick since it has nothing to do with our topic, but I would also like to point out that you don’t buy something just because it appreciates, like you implied. Lots of assets do, and they do it in varying percentages that always end up matching the volatility (or actual existential risk if it’s that kind of investment) they experience on the way. The rational move is to buy whichever ones make sense given when you want to actually have your earnings available to spend (investment horizon).
I’d be curious to find out if these stats take into account the prevalence of secondary (or even tertiary) suites, especially the unofficial ones. Officially the place I live in is a single family home, originally designed for a family of 4. My family of 3 lives in about 700sqft and there’s another family of 4 living in about 1000sqft upstairs. Do the stats count us as 1 household? I’ve never been sent a census form to fill out, I don’t have a legally distinct address or seperate utilities. I know many people in similar living arrangements, how are we counted in the statistics?
It’s StatsCan, so a household is defined as all the people living in a single unit together. It usually comes down to, if you share a kitchen with the other people, you’re considered 1 household. If you have separate kitchens, you get a separate census to fill out. Five roommates in a house next to a university would be 1 household for the purposes of the census which is completed every 5 years.
Right, but I guess my point is how would statscan know if a house has 1, 2, 3, or 4 units if they all share the same official address? Tax data? Driver’s licence/service cards? And as for the census, how is it accurate if only one of the households in a multi unit house gets one?
Either way it’s irrelevant to this discussion, because the article you linked didn’t use statscan data:
Most data was curated from a select number of sources: Japan Statistical Yearbook, European Housing 2002, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canadian Home Builders Association, Infometrics, US Census.
As you said it doesn’t really matter. Number of rooms isn’t a census question. Neither is the population.
Census households generally report accurately because the data isn’t reported to anyone else so there’s no downside to being truthful. It’s also correlated with other data to double check the validity.
The discussion is are there enough rooms for everyone? The answer is overwhelmingly yes. Our distribution is just absolutely fucked up.
To match other advanced countries on square feet of land and house per person on average, we’d have to build a lot more smaller houses on a lot smaller lots. The unit counts only tell half the story, and everyone is somehow ignoring that.
https://shrinkthatfootprint.com/how-big-is-a-house/#%3A~%3Atext=The+average+house+size+in%2C2+(1%2C948+ft2).
For comparison, the UK average house size is only 41% the size of Canada, and the largest European size is Denmark and it’s still only 75% as big as Canada.
Globally, The countries having the worst time housing cost wise, are the ones with the largest average house size.
Yes I’m talking about inequality, but it’s systematic, people who’ve been around longer bought up everything in the major cities and now aren’t sharing.
The amount of privately held land is fixed, but that doesn’t mean someone’s going to pay the same amount. Not at all.
Let me ask you a question, how much would you pay for a car, if you knew that car would sell for more money in 10 years than you paid for it today. No matter how much you spend on the car, it has a 99% chance to go up in value over 10 years. The logical choice is to spend as much money as you can possibly afford, because the more you spend, the more you get back. This is what’s been happening with houses for the last 40 years.
Now tell me how much you’d spend on a car if you knew is was going to lose half of it’s value over the next 10 years, like cars normally do, and you’re going to give me a much lower number.
The tax has to be high enough to make sure you and everyone else always lose money on the house. Then, you’ll only pay for what you need, or maybe splurge a little bit more for some extras, but you wouldn’t go crazy unless you were rich.
Under this plan that Zoomer family can afford my parent’s house, because they’re working and now don’t have to pay income tax. Meanwhile it’s going to be cheaper because there’s more supply of larger houses and less demand for them. My Boomer parents wouldn’t get that tax break because they retired and all that tax is now is a significant drain on their finances unless they downsize. Further into town where those taxes would be even higher because of desirability, those houses will be bought up by developers, and turned into condos, which because the tax is on land only and not the value of the building will have even cheaper per month taxes for the occupants. Good for both my downsizing Boomer parents, and for childless folks who don’t need a full sized house.
That’s interesting about housing sizes - good to know, thank you. It kind of confirms my general sense about those places, but it’s hard to sort stereotypes from reality sometimes.
Australia and the US are the other big-houses places. I suspect it’s down to available lumber and low land values. Maybe car culture too, but the history of that is intertwined with low land values. (Russia and China score lower because they’re just generally poorer)
I’m not really sure what point you’re making with it, though. We could start renting out oversize closets and spare rooms as separate housing, and people do, but that’s not generally regarded as a good solution to the housing crisis, and in fact is fairly illegal. We could start building more smaller houses, and as far as I can anecdotally see are, but that’s still building houses.
Ah, but you’re not accounting for rental income, or equivalently the rent you won’t pay if you’re buying. People need to live somewhere, legally speaking, and legally speaking will keep paying more until it’s a profitable asset for the owners again.
Illegally speaking we absolutely would have a spike in homelessness, to the point where there might be more permanent Hoovervilles/favillas being built on land that’s not technically set aside for the residents. The appreciation you’re talking about isn’t an economic fluke, it’s driven by fundamentals. Land literally just does become more sought after as the population grows (and the buildings themselves slowly depreciate as they become old, musty and awful).
Presumably they get some kind of income, right? They still eat. You mean a tax break just working individuals, then. That’s kind of the same as making the house tax 65+ only, except disabled people and similar will also get swept up.
This is a nitpick since it has nothing to do with our topic, but I would also like to point out that you don’t buy something just because it appreciates, like you implied. Lots of assets do, and they do it in varying percentages that always end up matching the volatility (or actual existential risk if it’s that kind of investment) they experience on the way. The rational move is to buy whichever ones make sense given when you want to actually have your earnings available to spend (investment horizon).
I’d be curious to find out if these stats take into account the prevalence of secondary (or even tertiary) suites, especially the unofficial ones. Officially the place I live in is a single family home, originally designed for a family of 4. My family of 3 lives in about 700sqft and there’s another family of 4 living in about 1000sqft upstairs. Do the stats count us as 1 household? I’ve never been sent a census form to fill out, I don’t have a legally distinct address or seperate utilities. I know many people in similar living arrangements, how are we counted in the statistics?
It’s StatsCan, so a household is defined as all the people living in a single unit together. It usually comes down to, if you share a kitchen with the other people, you’re considered 1 household. If you have separate kitchens, you get a separate census to fill out. Five roommates in a house next to a university would be 1 household for the purposes of the census which is completed every 5 years.
Right, but I guess my point is how would statscan know if a house has 1, 2, 3, or 4 units if they all share the same official address? Tax data? Driver’s licence/service cards? And as for the census, how is it accurate if only one of the households in a multi unit house gets one?
Either way it’s irrelevant to this discussion, because the article you linked didn’t use statscan data:
As you said it doesn’t really matter. Number of rooms isn’t a census question. Neither is the population.
Census households generally report accurately because the data isn’t reported to anyone else so there’s no downside to being truthful. It’s also correlated with other data to double check the validity.
The discussion is are there enough rooms for everyone? The answer is overwhelmingly yes. Our distribution is just absolutely fucked up.