They’re related, according to the Intergenerational Foundation:
Social justice, intergenerational transfers, the default age for retirement, these are the sorts of issues the IF wants aired. Today’s report – you can find it here – focuses on the need to persuade older people to downsize homes they no longer need into something smaller.
You’re going to hear a lot more about these themes – I touched on them here – as the youngsters figure out what a raw deal they’re getting from the oldsters.
More here in The Guardian: Housing shortage: are oldsters ‘hoarding’ 25m bedrooms?
I’m one of those oldsters (I’m the same age as you) whose children have moved out, so I’m “hoarding” a couple of bedrooms. I live in an area exactly like the one described in the Guardian article. But I don’t get the point of the article.
Sure, my wife and I could move out and get a smaller place. But then what? The young people who need the bedrooms couldn’t possibly afford the $1.5 million they would have to pay to buy it. What would happen instead would be that somebody with that kind of money would buy it, tear it down, and build something even bigger and more expensive. By moving out we would just be competing with the young people in the lower-priced housing market and driving up the prices there too.
I don’t think that fiddling with the tax system, or whatever the Guardian article was trying to propose, would make the least bit of difference to the absurd housing bubble we have now.
If the bubble burst and house prices collapsed to, say, a third of what they are now, I wouldn’t mind. My house is paid for anyway. But my daughter (one of those youngsters), who just managed to buy a house in Vancouver with a humongous mortgage, would mind a lot. So that isn’t a solution (look at the USA where they accidentally tried that). I don’t have any better solutions, though. Sorry.
You are right: young people can’t afford to buy a house in Vancouver. But we can afford to rent, so maybe whoever buys your house can convert it into rental units.
If we want young people to be able to buy houses (do we?) then prices will need to come down. That would suck for people who just bought, as you say, but it’s the only way. Unfortunately, if housing prices in Vancouver are unsustainable, eventually they will come down. And the longer we wait, the harder the fall will be.
So in the context of Vancouver, the message would be “please move out of your oversized house so that we can convert it into rental units that young people can afford, and so that we can increase the population density. Thank you. :)”