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Originally Posted by SFUVancouver
Out of curiosity, let's play along with her line of thinking.
Assuming one starts with zero savings for a down payment, and they save the equivalent of a $4.65 latte a day (call it $141 a month), and they are prepared to chase a high return by investing in a low- to mid-cap REIT like Melcor REIT (~8% dividend), it would only take 22 years to save up the 5% down payment on a $750,000 condo. That is, of course, assuming the cost of said condo is static for the next two-plus decades. Lois Jackson is a financial genius!
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You are just knocking down a straw man, since Jackson never claimed that doing nothing more than saving the equivalent of a latte per day is going to be sufficient to purchase a home. Indeed, what Jackson clearly said is that one will have to "scrimp and save," i.e., give up
many of things, including
but not limited to your daily latte.
To repeat Jackson's quote:
Quote:
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"You're going to have to save, and scrimp, and you're going to have to do without a lot of things, including your lattes and all those other kinds of things."
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Now that's good advice for life in general. The real issue is the connection between Jackson's resistance to densification (which is reflected in the planning policies of all the municipalities across Metro Vancouver to one degree or another) and artificially high housing prices--prices so unnaturally high that even following otherwise sound advice about saving is becoming inadequate.
What's needed, therefore, are well-reasoned critiques of the anti-densification tendencies shared by Jackson and all the city councils across the region--i.e., compelling demonstrations of the causal connection between current municipal policies and the affordability crisis--not willful misreadings of quotes.
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