this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2025
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And it has the same problem as every other current solution.
Yes coops can keep prices from rising over time, but they do nothing to make units affordable up front.
Where the fuck are you going to get the capital to build/buy enough units to make it do anything?
The entire government budget looks tiny compared to the current value of the real estate market. The government couldn't even realistically fund building or purchasing 1-2% of the units in the country as coops, let alone enough units to make a difference in the market.
There are other better policies.
No, it doesn't.
In Canada, housing coops get grants and tax exemptions to get major capital projects done, even more to start one. Governments like coops because they ease social housing burden.
The reason they aren't more popular is that a developer can't extract nearly as much profit from building them vs private builds.
I know this because I ran the board of a co-op for almost a decade.
You aren't disagreeing with me.
If nobody wants to fund them, they won't exist, and as I mentioned the government can't fund them itself.
So... Useless idea.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
CMHC already has programs available to fully fund non-market housing initiatives as long as you can meet certain requirements. One of the biggest issues is that nearly everybody sees housing as an investment and not simply a shelter so if there's no money in it then they aren't interested.
Go grab the total amount they have funding for, then grab the number for the total value of the Canadian housing market.
Then tell me again that their programs are anything but PR bullshit so they can pretend they're doing something.
It's not that people see it as an investment, it's that the government allows it to be an investment. It doesn't have to be that way. They could fix it overnight with a new tax policy. It would just destroy the retirement plans of millions of people because the government let this go on too long. We'd have affordable housing overnight though.
How do you eat an elephant?
You don't fix a breaking dam with scotch tape.
You put in the effort to fix it properly, or you let the fucking thing collapse and deal with the consequences.
This is where we're at for housing.
How do you fix a breaking dam?
Certainly not with a bunch of small patches.
You bring in the big guns and move the fucking earth.
How does that apply to the housing market? You bring out financial policy that makes homes worthless as investments, even for regular home owners, and destroy the asset value of homes almost completely.
One policy could literally drop housing prices by 80% by itself, it just can't get passed by out government because voters don't actually want affordable housing. The vast majority of Voters are invested in the market and have no interest in throwing away hundreds of thousands of dollars to make things affordable for others.
We made real estate a tax haven for Boomers who refused to save. No politician will touch that model until the Boomers are all dead.
It really doesn't have to do with Boomers, just home owners in general. Politicians won't touch it until home ownership rates drop to a point where they aren't the majority of voters anymore.
1-2% of the new housing investment can be a heck of a lot more than 1-2% of the bedrooms if you arent building the median oversized single detached.
There are already more bedrooms in Canada than people by quite a margin, and that doesn't even take into account that most couples share a room.
It's fairly easy to do the math, stats Canada has released numbers of units by bedroom count a few times. You just do a little multiplication and realize there are 50 million bedrooms for 45 million people.
The problem is not supply, it's demand. Theoretically demand could be overcome with supply, but realistically it cannot.
The easiest way to fix this whole mess is to reduce demand. It could literally be done overnight with tax policy. It would crash a good portion of the economy, and wipe out the retirement plans of millions of people, but it would result in affordable housing immediately.
it will lead to Canada as a failed state. 80% of all the wealth of Canada is tied up in real estate.
It definitely wouldn't lead to a "failed state" situation.
Wealth tied up in real estate is almost entirely unproductive. Losing it would cause some downstream problems for certain things and specific real estate based holding companies but it's definitely not the end of the economy or anything.
If my house was worth 50% less tomorrow morning, not much would change for me except I'd need to start adjusting my long term plans for retirement. I wouldn't (just barely) even be underwater on my mortgage.