Somewhere buried in these threads there's a quote from the 1890s or early 1900s where the writer talked of Victoria real estate holdings growing in value by (I think it was) a few hundred percent over just a few years, and how such increases were evidence that the real estate market was solid and there was no speculative bubble, because a speculative bubble would involve much larger gains than that.
Anyway, I can't find it. My point is, real estate in Victoria was always something that you expected to make money on. Today we want to suppose that our parents, grandparents, great grandparents etc. never had to deal with big changes re: housing, population growth, etc. It's another one of those revisionist things. Change in today's Victoria tends to be very gradual, but we like to portray it as extreme and unprecedented. Change in today's Victoria pales in comparison to the major changes that Victorians took for granted in the 1960s/1970s. The dramatic changes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries are in an altogether different league.
By 1891 the city had tripled in size, with real estate values climbing from $2,749,075 to $17,700,000 during the ten year period.
http://parkscanadahi...s/mrs/354-1.pdf
The average house price jumped from ~$10,000 to ~$70,000 in less than ten years during the 1960s/1970s:
https://www.vreb.org...cs/GRAA2010.pdf
...
Ideally we'd have 50s or 60s style building booms keeping costs down.
For the record I have a house and I like the appreciation on a greedy personal level
Our ordinary working class parents or grandparents or great grandparents bought houses for a few thousand (or even a few hundred) dollars and eventually sold them for tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. Never once did I ever hear any of them depict themselves as being greedy for doing it. To make a significant gain over time was merely their straightforward expectation as straightforward people. "Real estate never goes down," as we've heard so many times.
(not arguing, just throwing stuff out there)
Edited by aastra, 31 January 2020 - 01:37 PM.