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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23407 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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I bought a condo in a cheaper city this year for $500k. It is a 2 bed 2 bath with about 800sq feet of space

As an non Canadian, what the fuck?

That's about normal, if not low in major US cities. See Zillow

This probably deserves a bit of explanation.

So an important thing to note is that Canada is a resource-intensive economy that refuses to actually exploit our resources; we're kind of dumb that way.

Way back (around 20+ years ago), Canada created a program called the "Temporary Foreign Workers" program, which was intended for seasonal agricultural workers. The thought was that our farmers could not necessarily make enough profit to bother growing their own fruit if they had to deal with pesky things like living wages and human rights, so Canada created a program that was designed for temporary people to show up, do some work, get paid better than they would be back in whatever country they hailed from, but way worse than a Canadian would be in the same position.

Our prime minister twice ago, Harper, decided to expand this program - basically, he upped the number of entries by a fairly large portion (I think it went from about 30000 a year to 60000, but these numbers are off the top of my head). We also started really getting into what would eventually become woke around this point, which culminated in electing a Trudeau in 2015.

A very important thing to note is that Trudeau, for us, is kind of like a Bush or a Kennedy for you Americans - he has a trust fund that is around 0.1% of the size of our entire GDP. The first Trudeau, Pierre, was a very controversial Prime Minister, as he spent like a drunken sailor and invoked the War Measures act after some Quebecois separatists abducted and murdered a MP.

Not wanting to be outdone by his father, Justin Trudeau immediately began spending money at an absolutely unprecedented rate; the amount of debt generated by every other Prime Minister, put together, is less than the amount of debt he generated over his term. He also appointed a large amount of judges who have been pushing a rather expansive view of human rights; namely, that everyone but Canadians are entitled to them. Combined, we ended up in a situation where Trudeau absolutely nuked our economy.

Rather than let the country fall into a recession, Trudeau came up with the bright idea of simply importing enough new voters potential generators of corporate value that the number would still go up. Roughly 20% of the population of the country arrived within the last 5 years. The judges, meanwhile, decided that if the imported workers were non-Canadian, obviously they deserved a full pathway to citizenship - and that even if a person came in as a student then declared himself a refugee when the student visa expired, he still needed to be given a lengthy chance to protest the issue.

Now, one problem with going from a country of 37.5 million to 43 million over such a short timeframe is that houses can physically not be built that fast; the immigrants we pulled in tend to be happier living 10 to a bedroom (not even exaggerating - look up Brampton some time), so a lot of old stock Canadians realized that they could make bank by leveraging their existing property into buying more, then renting it out for exorbitant prices. As a result, our housing costs went up by around 100% over the course of a decade, then did the same again over the next decade. When I graduated university, my friend bought a condo for $300k. That condo is now worth around $750k.

It's hilarious you're shocked by this because (I'm also Canadian) the fact there even exists a <$500k condo period, let alone a 2bed, in 2025 is absolutely insane to me

#JustTorontoThings

I have a bit more sympathy for Canadians given that their country isn't dotted coast-to-coast with small cities and large towns. If you can't affort Toronto or Vancouver, where do you go? Calgary?

Literally anywhere in Canada (OK, maybe not Winnipeg) would be nicer that those two places, so yeah, if you work in O&G you would go to Calgary. Or you realize that Ottawa doesn't give a shit about you anyways (unless you go to Montreal I guess) and just move out to the country somewhere.

That's positively cheap for even the outskirts of London or even 2nd tier UK cities, remember the figure is CAD.

Yeah 500k CAD is cheap unless one is living in a complete shithole. It wasn't expensive even a decade ago...

Sometimes I forget just how urban this site skews. I live in an "expensive" area for my region. My house is a basic, 1300 sq ft, 1950s cape cod on a quarter acre, and it would probably sell for $300k - $350k. If you were willing to drive 20 minutes, that much money would buy you 50% more square footage.

So in my defense, I actually did move to a nearby city around 30 minutes away; the places that I were looking at in my hometown were either incredibly outside my price range (think like, $700k+ for around the same square footage), or were "purpose built rentals" that had been re-appropriated for the market when BC banned AirBnBs (one of the places I toured was $550k, and consisted of a bedroom that was pretty much exactly big enough for a queen sized bed, a tiny living room/kitchen/entryway, and a single bathroom with only a shower - I think it was around 500 square feet).

My friend has a home further outside the cities - her commute down to the city was around 2 hours a day. Her home is bigger than mine, but to be fair, it's also more expensive (she's also working with two incomes, whereas I only have the one).

Some of the most productive cities in the US are space-constrained by bays, mountains, etc and there isn't a "drive 20 minutes" cheaper option. There's "Drive 2 hours each way" cheaper options.

My "starter home" was a 500 sq ft condo, 1br, in a sketchy area, that ran $680k a decade ago. Sigh, urbanity.

In my neighborhood -- a middling NYC suburb -- such a Cape would be half a million. And have taxes to knock your socks off.

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