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Comment by latenightcoding | Hacker News Reader

The prime minister of Canada literally said housing can't come down because it's the retirement plan of a lot of boomers.

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Anyone who wants to see the current state of how the alt-mainstream thinking on this subject is shifting is welcome to indulge in the inventories over at [r/Canada, r/CanadaHousing, r/CanadaHousing2, r/TorontoRealEstate]. Anything that is not related to immigration or housing is essentially treated as a distraction. There is a simmering build up of disillusionment, anti-immigration and perhaps xenophobia that was usually not tolerated/allowed (hence the more spicy off-shoot CanadaHousing2), but the emotions have more or less found a stable equilibrium, and it’s not pretty.

I don’t have answers here, I can just observe the situation and blink.

Canada also has a dearth of startups, or new ways of making wealth. The only two ways are resource extraction and squatting on property. If Canadians can become more used to risk and put some of the pension fund into startups and new technology, things could be different.

It is shocking that the godfather of the modern AI boom taught at University of Toronto and yet Canada is not even in the picture when it comes to AI and it won't ever be.

Which is odd because I don't see a lot of downsizing from any boomer I know, the equity is locked away on the home until they sell.

> the equity is locked away on the home until they sell.

Some people get reverse mortgages so they can spend some of the equity of the home while they still live in it:

https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/...

This is the same tax trick that the obscenely wealthy use with their stock portfolios. It's a "fantastic" way of accessing accrued wealth without paying taxes on it.

I think I would prefer that we investigate this more thoroughly, as well, to reduce some of these tricks that further stratify the haves and the have-nots.

The thing being omissed here is that there's a cost-basic step-up when you die.

So, if the value of the home increased by say 2x the taxes on it are 0 because the cost-basis on it isn't the price your parents bought it for; it's the price when they died and you got it.

This works out a lot better for stocks because when you created the company and gave yourself a million stock units for a total of $1 (not each) and those stocks appreciated to be $300 each that's a ton of capital gains. Except when you die and it's stepped up its not. -- https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/stepupinbasis.asp

What do you propose we "investigate" exactly? There are no tricks here. Everyone with a basic understanding of finance knows exactly how it works. People have always been allowed to borrow money and use their assets as collateral.

Is it? There are several ways to draw against the equity of the house in the U.S. Are these absent in Canada?

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