PelhamToday received the following letter to the editor from reader Tom Crawford in response to THE HOT TAKE | Doing nothing in Niagara real estate is the road to riches.
I think James Culic got it right in his article. However, he left the houses we “commoners” live in out of the story.
I bought a house in Fonthill about 20 years ago and it would probably sell now for three or four times the price I paid for it, whereas general inflation and wages have gone up only about 50% in that same period.
When eventually I sell it, my or somebody else’s grandchildren will pay retroactively for my accommodation costs over all those years – if they can afford to buy it.
In effect, I’ve been living in my house for free but at their expense and it’s not fair.
Our system of using market mechanisms to supply housing to our citizenship works for only the relatively affluent people who own property; we’re in the process of rebuilding essentially a feudal society in spite of our advanced technology that should be benefiting society in general.
Can you imagine paying the mortgage after buying even a modest house in Toronto?
Can you imagine paying the mortgage after buying even a modest house in Toronto?
The whole idea of treating housing as an investment, rather than as simply a cost of accommodations, has become ingrained to such an extent that a lot of people use housing investments as the foundation for their pensions.
Yet when a house sells for an inflated price after a few years nothing is produced, even though it may show up as part of a GDP that looks like it’s growing. The CPP and other pension funds have major investments in real property housings, yet much of the apparent growth in the value of these holdings is phantom growth.
I’m a snowbird with a modest property in Florida. A few years ago everybody and his dog there was investing in real estate, mostly at the expense of making real investments in productive enterprises.
Then 2008 happened and many folks lost all of their investments as property values crashed to a little over a third of their former “paper” value.
The U.S. and Canadian economies were almost crippled by the debacle. Many a Florida family became homeless and lived in their car at a Walmart parking lot. It was rough justice.
Maybe Mr. Culic can summarize all this in a humorous message that will get the attention of our powers that be. Maybe we can give it a familiar label like: “Towards a Just Society”.
Tom Crawford
Fonthill
