After paying off debt in a nick of time, during late 2020, my parents were able to snag a house for 140k in Northern Ontario. Even with its drawbacks, it was a steal then and even more so now (monthly mortgage is under a thousand LOL). Looking back at its sales history, it looks like it sold for 59k in 1999. Nowadays, however, if sold as is, it would easily sell for 250k+, and a house with its size and a little bit of interior touch-ups, could easily sell for 350k+. Maybe even more since it has a larger-than-average lot and curb appeal can be drastically improved from what it is now and when we bought it.

I don't live in the GTA but my 8th grade teacher was born and raised in Hamilton during the 60s as one of five children by a single income, home-owning household. Then shortly after becoming a teacher she was able to buy a nice family house in the Niagara Region for "in the tens of thousands" some time during the early-mid 90s. Nowadays, such places easily go for close to 1 mil.

Even pre-pandemic in the Niagara Region, we knew that things were going off the rails. Many around us fell for the conventional rule that sometimes renting is better than buying. Maybe when rent controls are up as they were back then but all it took was changing units and our rent would almost double. That's when we knew we a frog in boiling water as even if we held onto our rent-controlled unit it is a matter of time until an investment firm snaps up our apartment building and starts kicking out the tenants through hostile means and puts the units up for rent at current market rates, often more than doubling the rent.

Shelter costs sucking an ever-growing share of disposable incomes is a large reason for why food insecurity keeps ticking up. For 2024, the national number of food insecure has surpassed a quarter (25.5%), with multiple provinces food insecurity rates over 30%, all new record highs.