People Who Don't Buy a House in the Next 2-3 Years Will Likely Never Own a Home
The current real estate slump is our last chance before trillion-dollar landlords take over
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,
I’m originally from Canada — that wretched, culture-free, genocidal, planet-poisoning, child-abusing, anti-democracy snow-nation filled with house-obsessed shopaholics who carry the highest household debt loads on earth. (I’d honestly still love it if it weren’t so hypocritical and holier-than-thou towards Americans!)
The average house price where over half of Canadians live (commutable Vancouver and commutable Toronto) is an absurd, unsustainable, and unjust $1.1+ million.
So naturally, Canada’s real estate pyramid scheme participants are currently freaking out that the markets are cooling in the direction of affordability.
Everyone is chattering about how low prices could go, how long they’ll stay down, and when they’ll start soaring toward the moon again.
Last week on Twitter, I gave my friends some context:
Canadian real estate crashes typically take 20–60% off the peak over 3–6 years, then return to the previous peak over the next 4–6 years.
In other words, Canadian house prices never get anywhere near real value, but that’s what happens when you engineer your nation like a pyramid scheme.
I went on to say that we should expect this timeline to shorten in the years ahead.
Why?
Because, thanks to bailouts and money-printing and private credit creation, trillion-dollar private equity firms are far quicker to recover from market resets than devastated families, and it’s giant financial institutions that are now fueling record demand for houses so they can rent-trap humanity.
You thought American corporations buying 28% of homes and 23% of trailer parks this first quarter was bad?
Wait until house prices are down 30+%, but no one can afford to buy because of high interest rates, and institutional investors go shopping.
We can’t build our way out of this grab for corporate control. It’ll be more like some Canadian cities, where up to 90% of houses sold are monopolized by investors.
So:
Assume no more than three down years.
Assume the bottom won’t go nearly as low as it should.
Assume the recovery will be much quicker than in the past.
Assume you will be outbid by trillionaire cash bidders.
But most of all, assume that this is the last chance the working class will have to own a home in our generation. The reality is that thanks to parasitic institutional financialization, the average house will cost $10 million in our lifetime and homeownership will be out of reach of nearly everyone you know, your children included.
Allowing rent-trapping will go down as one of the biggest corruptions of the twenty-first century, but that’s where most of humanity will find itself — paying crushingly more in rent than they would’ve paid to own in a non-financialized housing market.
With that in mind, what should we do in the next 1–4 years?
Buy if you can
[Obviously, nothing I say is financial advice, blah blah blah. You’re all adults with brains.]
As things cool off, buy a home if you want to and can afford to.
Buy with friends or family if that’s what it takes.
Don’t be a greedy loser and try to time the absolute bottom of the market— just try to find something of relative value that you can happily enjoy for the rest of your lives as a real home and not an investment.
Even though getting a mortgage is a massive and dangerous ripoff, rents will continue to outpace inflation and it will kill you in the long run.
Help others escape from land-lorders
Now that things are cooling off, do the Christian thing and do whatever you can to help your friends and family and loved ones and total Christian strangers buy houses:
Give them a chunky gift for their downpayment.
Lend them more money interest-free.
Hold their mortgage or a piece of their mortgage interest-free.
Help them renovate.
Crowdfund entire home purchases for kingdom contributors.
Do everything you can to help as many Christians as you can.
Remember, if your friends can’t get into the market on this down round, there’s a strong chance they’ll be priced out for decades if not forever, and will burn the rest of their lives trying to stay sheltered while enriching land-lorders. This brave new world will ruin their lives, and it will take a toll on your relationship with them.
A quick personal story
My wife and I recently helped one of Michelle’s old Christian school friends in Ghana. She and her husband have been rent-trapped for their entire adult lives, forking over the majority of their legitimately hard-earned income to a parasite land-lorder.
So we loaned her enough money, interest-free, to build a home from which they can run their business. For the cost of me losing ~15% of that money’s purchasing power due to purposeful theft by inflation, our sister in Christ gains freedom from a vampire house-monopolist and a chance to retain family wealth, educate her kids, grow her business, and make a real contribution in this world. We’re all better for it, and it’s a huge kingdom win!
Do the right thing
We cannot honestly call ourselves good people, moral people, kind people, a nice people, pro-human people, or people of faith if we continue to profit from rent-seeking.
Open your portfolio and divest of all real estate stocks.
Ditch vampirical REITs.
Shut down your community-destroying Airbnb.
Sell all of your rental properties and second homes to owner-occupiers for whatever you have into them. This literally costs you nothing and secures a land-lorder-free future for real working contributors.
If you own land, do what you can to sell plots or build more affordable owner-occupied houses, or sub-divide the land and sell it affordably to young families so they can have a decent shot at a good life.
CHURCHES have a huge opportunity here:
British Christians in Victorian times built almshouses—timeless, beautiful, right-sized homes of stone and brick—to lend to people in need, totally rent-free. Christians raised the cash, build the houses debt-free, and then let the tenants pay their actual costs (heat, power, maintenance, etc) without charging them a cent of usury.
This is the way, brothers and sisters!
There are an estimated 300,000 churches in America right now. Over 100 million regular attendees. We should all be fundraising and building almshouses right now. If every church built an almshouse project for ten families, that’s 12+ million Christians who could escape from usurious land-lorders forever, and use all that wasted rent money to fund the work of the gospel... perhaps by building 200,000 new almshouses every year!
It gets better: Using my handy compounding calculator, if Christians continued this give-receive-give cycle, all 100 million American Christians could be debt-free homeowners in less than 55 years while avoiding a combined $10 trillion in land-lorder rental payments and $400+ billion per year in ongoing mortgage interest to usurious banks thereafter, all of which could be used for the kingdom of heaven instead of the kingdom of darkness.
That first push to build 3 million usury-free almshouse units would also have the added benefit of freeing up 3 million current units, which would drop rent and house prices for everyone else.
What a blessing the church of Jesus could be to those in need of shelter!
Stop voting for corporatists
If you care about progress and poverty and the poor, but vote for Democrats or Republicans in America, Liberals/NDP/Cons in Canada, or Labour/Cons/LibDem in the UK, you are not a serious person.
Or rather, you are not serious about the longest-term widest-spread well-being of your nation.
We need to elect “radical” (read: moral) servant-hearted politicians who work for living people, not anti-human corporations.
People who will introduce a Georgist land value tax to destroy speculators.
People who will introduce a 100% capital gains tax to drive parasites out of human shelter.
People who will ban Airbnb to save communities.
People who will ban interest to despoil the non-contributing rich.
People who will declare affordable shelter an unconditional human right.
Because realistically, unless American/Canadian/British homeowners magically decide to start electing non-corporatists, institutional land-lorders will dominate housing for the rest of our lives.
Church again have a huge role to play:
We’re one of the most organized communities on the planet.
We know our neighbors.
We want to love and serve our communities.
What better way that to ensure everyone has a home they can afford?
We need to encourage and financially support our visionary servant-hearted leaders to start new political parties and run for public service, if only to be a prophetic minority that states the Christian position on the public record, and fires up the imagination of culture to realize what’s possible when people practice joyful faithfulness to the word, will, and way of God.
The beginning of the end
But of course, unless every Christian shares this article with every other Christian they know until hundreds of millions of Christians have read this article, truly taken it to heart, and actually started executing the necessary actions within their local church, none of this will happen on a large enough scale.
High interest rates will keep most people from buying.
Most people are too broke or too stingy to help others.
Most people won’t do the right thing and stop exploiting others.
Certainly no majority will stop voting for corporatists.
That’s what happens when you build an every-man-for-himself-survival-of-the-fittest-dog-eat-dog hyper-individualist civilization.
We’re all alone on the housing front, up against the biggest enemy of affordable housing in the history of human shelter: the god of money, Mammon himself, this time wearing the disguise of international institutional land-lording.
So do what you can to get out of rent-serfdom and into homeownership.
The next ~1–4 years will be the difference between wasting your life on enriching parasites or using that wealth to make a real difference in the world for the kingdom of God.
And you can bet the extractors don’t want the latter.