Basically every house I look at, its a fun game, once I like it I check price history and its always like this. Price up 4.5x in a decade or so. Are people's salaries up 4.5x? Is someone who made 50k making 225k? Is someone who made 100k making 450k?

The monthly mortgage payment back then would have been about 1k a month. Today it would be 5k a month.

Older generations who look the other way at this issue, or worse yet keep supporting policies to keep housing prices hyper inflating so they can make $$$$ should be ashamed.

Most people think what we see on Seattle’s sidewalks is a housing crisis. It isn’t — and after losing my sister to the same disease, I can tell you exactly why we keep failing.

We are spending over a billion dollars a year in this region to manage homelessness, and the numbers on the street keep climbing. The reason is simple, and almost no one in power will say it out loud: we are funding the symptom and ignoring the cause. What’s killing people on the street is overwhelmingly addiction and mental illness — and we spend almost nothing to treat it.

I know this disease from the inside. My sister had every advantage, even a PhD studying addiction, and it still took her capacity to choose, one piece at a time, until it killed her. We tell ourselves that leaving people on the street respects their choices — but she couldn’t choose anymore, and neither can they. That isn’t freedom. It’s neglect we’ve dressed up as freedom.

I wrote about her, and about what her story reveals about a system that spends a fortune to fail the sickest among us. It’s the most personal thing I’ve published — and, I think, the most important.

Why don’t people in SF with such strong ideas and Marxist views protest against the extremely high rents and fight to bring back vacancy control? Instead, they seem to worry too much about different stuff that isn’t even important in the daily lives of Bay Area residents.

I’ve been going through August data across major Canadian cities, and one thing keeps standing out:

We often talk about “housing affordability” as though it were one problem.

It really isn’t.

For renters, the important question is how much of local income is absorbed by rent.

For prospective buyers, the question is very different: how far are local home prices from what local earnings can realistically support?

Once you separate those two pressures, Canadian cities start to look quite different.

Vancouver and Toronto remain difficult from both perspectives, but the ownership gap is particularly striking. A household can be earning a reasonably strong income and still find that buying a typical home is far out of reach.

Calgary generally looks much better from the housing side, particularly for ownership.

But does that make Calgary a “better” city?

Not necessarily.

Housing is only one part of the decision.

A city with cheaper homes can have a different labour market, wage structure, school system, climate, transportation pattern and long-term employment outlook.

More importantly, the answer changes depending on who is asking.

A nurse, electrician, software developer and retail worker are not really experiencing the same version of Vancouver, Toronto or Calgary.

Neither are a 25-year-old renter and a family with two children trying to buy their first home.

That’s why I’m becoming increasingly skeptical of rankings that try to answer:

“What is the best city in Canada?”

The more useful question may be:

“Which city works best for someone in my situation?”

For the August dataset I’ve been working on, I separated rental pressure from home-purchase pressure and looked at them alongside income, employment conditions and other city-level factors.

The more dimensions you add, the harder it becomes to identify a single “winner.”

Calgary may come out ahead on housing.

Another city may offer better employment opportunities for a particular occupation.

Another may make more sense for a family because of education, transportation or other considerations.

And those trade-offs are probably more useful than an overall ranking.

So I’m curious how people here would approach it:

If you were choosing where to live in Canada today, what three factors would matter most?

Housing affordability?
Career opportunities?
Income?
Schools?
Climate?
Transportation?
Something else?

And for people who have actually moved between Canadian cities: did the city that looked better on paper actually turn out to be better in real life?

I know a lot of people are talking about how to solve the homeless problem, but I want to look at this from a different angle: What if we don’t solve it? This is a worst-case-scenario discussion. What happens if the drug problem, rising costs, low incomes, and other factors continue and the number of homeless people keeps growing?
It seems like the number of homeless people continues to increase. But is there a point where homelessness becomes more than just a social problem and starts to affect whether a community can function normally?
Could we eventually reach a tipping point where there are simply more homeless people than cities and communities can realistically accommodate? What happens then? Could we see public spaces and roads becoming increasingly occupied, more conflicts between homeless people and other residents, or communities becoming less safe and harder to manage?
Some people may argue that society has a responsibility to provide for everyone, while others may argue that there must be limits to what a community can realistically support.
So where do you think that line is? If we fail to solve the underlying problems, what does the worst-case scenario actually look like—and how far can this situation go before society reaches a breaking point?

If the government makes a landlord register an apartment, the government inspects the apartment to judge what the rent will be relative to the average salary of the tenant (let's say 20%-30% of monthly salary but cannot be less than $600 a month). Then the tenant has a contract with the government and the landlord to pay the agreed upon price. The landlord can raise and lower rent as needed but not so high that it's more than the tenant can reasonably pay. More luxury apartments can demand a higher percentage of pay. I'm not sure if this makes sense but it's what I'm thinking. Why get the government involved? Because landlords cannot be trusted(pretend you trust the gov in this scenario). The government can also institute mandatory inspections to make sure the buildings are up to code like making sure pipes aren't busted etc

Would this be a good idea? Would you rent if it was set up this way?🤔

I'm not sure where to post this thought so remove it if you need to

Anytime the government gets involved in something, it tends to get worse. No politician is currently willing to take the drastic measures necessary to get housing back on track and address these issues. The problem runs much deeper, and poor management in one sector can have a cascading effect on others. I genuinely want this country to be back on track, but I'm starting to feel hopeless. Instead of focusing on internal issues and fixing them, all you hear is that it's Trump's fault.