The metric of house prices vs. income is becoming obsolete. Soon, no one will buy a house with income. The only way to afford it will be with capital gains. If you weren't born into the property-owning class, it will be largely impossible to join it.

When houses go to $1.5M+ people ask "where are all the households with $300K income to afford it?"

But that's not how they afford it. They are harvesting tax free gains from previous homes.

Saving up money from your job to buy a house will be a thing of the past.

I know couples in their 30s with household incomes around $100k that have $1.2M houses. They both bought condos with tiny downpayments 10 years ago, banked $300-400k in gains (x2) so their mortgage is actually fairly small. Their homes paid them a second, tax-free income.

The trouble is that now, increasingly many people can't even get that first home. And even if you can, those big gains from 2015-2018 (and now, 2020) are already baked in.

I'm not saying this is good or bad. I'm just saying that it's inevitable. We had a chance to correct course and we missed it. Even if all housing appreciation stops today it will be generations before homes are as affordable as they were in 2009 let alone the 1980s.

Yes, there are many ways to attack this problem. Make lifetime renting more attractive. Tighten mortgage rules. Build more. I'm just saying we're probably not going to do any of those seriously and even if we do the best case is we slow down a ship that has already sailed.

I'm 30. This is really bad for my generation. But government will be run by the people who have benefited handsomely from this situation for at least the next 25 years. Sorry, but no one is going to help.

Keep advocating for changes to the housing market I guess but I don't see how wealth disparity doesn't skyrocket in the next 20 years largely driven by the invisible line of people who got houses before 2021 and people who didn't.

It's like when defined benefit pensions went away. We tried to compensate with RRSPs but we never replicated the same degree of retirement security for subsequent generations. Life just got that much poorer for everyone below a certain age. It ain't fair but get used to it.

And just like DB pensions there are younger people who have them - public sector workers - but there's really no path to that kind of financial security for anyone else except earning a lot more money. That's how we'll see "normal" people with inherited houses in 2040.