this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
62 points (100.0% liked)
Canada
7185 readers
298 users here now
What's going on Canada?
Communities
π Meta
πΊοΈ Provinces / Territories
- Alberta
- British Columbia
- Manitoba
- New Brunswick
- Newfoundland and Labrador
- Northwest Territories
- Nova Scotia
- Nunavut
- Ontario
- Prince Edward Island
- Quebec
- Saskatchewan
- Yukon
ποΈ Cities / Local Communities
- Calgary (AB)
- Edmonton (AB)
- Greater Sudbury (ON)
- Halifax (NS)
- Hamilton (ON)
- Kootenays (BC)
- London (ON)
- Mississauga (ON)
- Montreal (QC)
- Nanaimo (BC)
- Oceanside (BC)
- Ottawa (ON)
- Port Alberni (BC)
- Regina (SK)
- Saskatoon (SK)
- Thunder Bay (ON)
- Toronto (ON)
- Vancouver (BC)
- Vancouver Island (BC)
- Victoria (BC)
- Waterloo (ON)
- Winnipeg (MB)
π Sports
Hockey
- List of All Teams: Post on /c/hockey
- General Community: /c/Hockey
- Calgary Flames
- Edmonton Oilers
- MontrΓ©al Canadiens
- Ottawa Senators
- Toronto Maple Leafs
- Vancouver Canucks
- Winnipeg Jets
Football (NFL)
- List of All Teams:
unknown
Football (CFL)
- List of All Teams:
unknown
Baseball
- List of All Teams:
unknown - Toronto Blue Jays
Basketball
- List of All Teams:
unknown - Toronto Raptors
Soccer
- List of All Teams:
unknown - General Community: /c/CanadaSoccer
- Toronto FC
π» Universities
π΅ Finance / Shopping
- Personal Finance Canada
- BAPCSalesCanada
- Canadian Investor
- Buy Canadian
- Quebec Finance
- Churning Canada
π£οΈ Politics
- Canada Politics
- General:
- By Province:
π Social and Culture
Rules
Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage:
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Houses got stupid expensive because interest rates were too low. People bought houses uses cheap debt without considering the possibility that interest rates would go up, and bought houses they couldn't afford. Interest rates never should have been so low in the first place.
That's a pretty unfair characterization of the situation.
Rates had been low for quite awhile. Will the rate eventually go up? Of course! But people can only guess when.
We're required to consider the possibility of rates going up (the stress test), but I'd thought that for some borrowers we're already past what they were stress tested against.
For many, this period of low rates felt like their last chance to get their foot in the door. Whether rates went up or not, it was looking like the barrier to entry (either price or mortgage eligibility) were going up one way or another. You either wait and risk never being able to buy a home (or at least not in the location you want), or buy and risk rates going up. Might some people lose that gamble? Yeah. Pretty easy to understand why they took it though
Some people definitely got screwed. Others though, who got in at like 0.5% on a variable -rate mortgage and were shocked when it went up... well they could have expected that sometime within the term of the mortgage that was going to be an issue...
Yes and that is part of the problem we are paying for now. We should have never had such low interest rates.
More likely they did consider it, but when the BoC explicitly stated that they would not raise rates...
And the cost of renting was actually exceeding the mortgages, sometimes considerably, and for less quality
Many people bought homes they could afford, that they needed to live in, after passing a very conservative stress test because that was the way you are supposed to buy a home. Nobody expected the interest rates to more than double in a couple of years. Itβs unprecedented. Nobody expected our government to do absolutely nothing about inflation and leave it all to the BoC to fix. You are vilifying and generalizing an entire class of people, most of whom do not fall under the cherry picked description you offered.
Repeat after me: most homeowners are regular people who borrowed responsibly under stringent criteria when they bought their homes.