Every day young people are buying homes in this city. But they have to start with condos, build equity, and move up. Lots of them don’t want to do that, they want the Oak Bay bungalow and a BMW straight out of university.
Back when your mom and dad bought their rancher that area was the literal sticks, next to cow fields, in a small city on an island the rest of Canada barely knew existed. Times were different, and most people would have thought Victorians were nuts living in such a small backwards place when the big money was in Edmonton and Winnipeg and Toronto. So there was opportunity lost back then, living in cheap little Victoria.
I’d prefer it if our society spent less time feeling sorry for people wanting Step G, from Step A, and instead communicated the realities of homeownership and how to get there (key point: complaining on Twitter doesn’t make an iota of difference). We like to think of Victoria in 1960 as the same desirable place it is today, except (whoa!!) housing was so cheeeeeeap, man! But Victoria then wasn’t what it is today, it was not as desirable and it had little employment. People cut their teeth elsewhere then retired to slow, quiet little Victoria where a pain in the butt ferry had to move you to the mainland if you wanted to get some business done.
That's a twisted way to look at the current situation. There's always been a large segment of the population that has never been able to afford a home even when it was relatively cheap, and now the current housing structure is that you need considerable income and capital just to get your foot in with something small that will take up the bulk of your money, with the understanding that it's not a suitable long-term solution. In a market like this, housing is an investment that rivals most financial assets in returns with far better leverage... the people who have capital always wins, and everyone else is running uphill, tripping over each other trying to catch up. "Schrodinger's Victoria" aside (where we write daily about how terrible the city has become, yet simultaneously justify skyhigh prices by saying it's better than ever), this generation is in an objectively worse position to buy a home.
Edited by Casual Kev, 08 December 2021 - 08:45 PM.