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A lot of letters to the editor have been published recently about housing affordability and attempts to identify the root problems and potential fixes.
What has been missed is the core issue: Income, or lack thereof.
Affordability has far more to do with your income than the price of the product.
Governments are telling us it’s a housing affordability crisis when, in fact, it’s an income crisis, i.e. a chronic economic environment of wages not keeping pace with inflation … for 40 years.
If you annually receive a raise, but each year it falls short of actual inflation, your income falls ever so further behind. The net effect over decades is a constant downward drag on wages.
Once we start viewing the problem primarily through this lens, it should redirect our frustration and anger to the root cause, primarily businesses and corporations for their social malfeasance, and governments for allowing them to engage in this social malpractice.
Governments (both Conservative and Liberal) would rather distract us from this and have us look elsewhere than address this egregious, multi-decade-long mishandling of the economy, and their shameless capitulation to put business interests first. Allowing businesses to influence our government — to the degree it does — was the worst thing we could possibly ever have allowed.
And $52,000 might sound like a good income (average salary of a Barrie resident), but from an inflationary perspective, it’s not a lot better than minimum wage.
If you’re in a job for several years, with extensive skills, yet are at that salary, then you’re being significantly short-changed.
It’s also not helpful that inflation on certain items (in this case, housing) is more than double that of general inflation. Even if your wages increase at the annual 20-year average of 2.43 per cent (official government stats), you still fall further and further behind when it comes to housing … but at least you’d have a fighting chance.
Inflation isn’t a problem when your income keeps up with it. If it doesn’t, then that sucking sound you hear is your wealth going to the one per cent and business elite.
Pre-1980, a true middle-class household with children could survive on one income. This is now only possible for professionals, business owners and those in highly specialized industries … people who were formerly referred to as “upper middle class.” A dual-income household is the glaring consequence of the (deliberate) massive erosion of income.
Excessive and relentless government taxation over decades, an abandonment of commitments from governments to provide social housing, allowing the Residential Tenancies Act to run roughshod over small landlords, crushingly huge development charges that make incremental unit creation economically unfeasible, municipal NIMBY-driven bylaws, absurd parking bylaws along with other obtuse and grandiose municipal requirements, unsustainable immigration influxes, REITs, construction costs, and even people’s (questionable) expectations in terms of what type of accommodation they “should” have at whatever point in their lives have all significantly contributed to this nightmare we collectively find ourselves in as a society.
But, ultimately, the erosion of income is at the crux of the problem. And until we start voting for governments that address it primarily from this viewpoint and take business practices and the politicians-for-dollars system head-on, expect more of the same.
Otherwise, any alternate strategies are simply tinkering at the edges.
Steve Dearlove
Barrie
