Victor Villas

mostly inactive, lemmy.ca is now too tainted with trolls from big instances we’re not willing to defederate

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • But that bureaucracy is what I mean with friction that defines what opting out means. Being invited to immunization and having ease to refuse is still opt in to me.

    refusals to vaccinate are already part of someone’s record

    Maybe I am just unaware but what I understood from what goes into the record is that someone saying “no thanks, vaccines are a lie” is indistinguishable from “the healthcare system wronged my community so I don’t feel safe with this”. If those cases are indeed already distinguishable and I’m just mistaken, then I’ll be gladly corrected because it means that we are already equipped to to make vaccination mandatory, because all we need is to have the due process to accommodate the concerns of the second group.



  • point is subsidizing first time buyers allows for affordability without lowering prices. It in fact, increases prices of starter homes because of the subsidy, but only while the subsidy lasts.

    Exactly, we mostly agree. Demand subsidy is yet another way to enable price increases. It doesn’t really make housing more affordable. So that’s why agree with you that subsidies cost money without solving the problem.

    trailing 5 years home appreciation being 15% (3%/year)

    Now this is good, despite all the hot feelings regarding affordability right now, it is true that in the last two years several markets have observed real estate performing below inflation, which is good. We just need this to last 20 years to go back to a healthier market. In the mean time, subsidies can help the families that cannot wait 20 years to afford housing, so I’m not against demand subsidy - I’m just against the notion that subsidies are good for affordability, they’re not.

    Prices have to decrease, period. We can put some makeup on this and trick homeowners into satisfaction by having some nominal increase without accounting for inflation… but just being real (pun intended), prices have to decrease. Price net of inflation is the number that matters, and it has to go down. Real returns on housing has to be negative, sustained over decades.





  • I guess the difference in outlook is that I don’t really see a realistic increase in purchasing power that won’t also get immediately scooped up by a similar increase in price. All the measures you mentioned also affect prices too. The reason I say “purchasing power” explicitly is to not be misleading in that I’m referring to a hypothetical salary keeping up with inflation - something that also really isn’t the case for a lot of people. Someone whose salary is stagnant will also not see the affordability increase in the scenario I’m describing.


  • Regardless of how smart Carney is, they couldn’t tank the housing market even if they tried. I don’t know why people keep mentioning this as if it was even a possibility. This is the same as people who think someone can just happen to work out too much and end up looking like a monstrous bodybuilder. This is not a thing that is achieved easily enough to consider.

    All of these actions will help improve housing affordability and make homeownership more accessible, but not all of them will lower prices, some of them cause price inflation.

    To be honest I don’t really get what’s the scenario you’re envisioning here. Making homeownership more accessible is lowering prices relative to purchasing power. This is what lowering prices means, and this is what making it affordable means. You can’t say the intent is to make it affordable while not decreasing prices, these are at odds.

    One trick here is using inflation to alter the context of “increase” and “decrease” means. Prices have to decrease in real value (net of inflation), slowly and steadily. In order to keep homeowners in line in their illusion of preserved wealth, prices have to increasing nominally (not counting inflation). So the formula is this: make sure that housing prices climb steadily below inflation for a very, very long time.