Post-secondary education falls to financialized housing.

Note the chaos that the financialization of housing is now causing in the post-secondary educational sector.

By 1993, housing in Canada had been transformed entirely from dwellings in which people reside into financial instruments. A huge finance sector ($7.8 trillion as of 2018) depends on rising house prices and ever-increasing rents to sell, securitize, and trade mortgages and build for-profit rental housing.

Now Ottawa has decided to lessen the "demand" for rental housing by cutting foreign student visas by 35%, which has already begun to wreak havoc in the post-secondary educational sector.

BOC and CMHC are primarily concerned with propping up house prices, not only because so-called homeowners (who in general are mortgaged to the gills to banks) depend on ridiculously inflated house prices for their illusory "net worth," but also because the entire house of cards otherwise known as the finance sector would crash if housing prices crashed.

This includes municipal governments, which are funded by property taxes, which in turn depend on ridiculously overpriced housing.

More sectors will undoubtedly fall to the financialization of housing. Healthcare, healthcare education, trade schools, and K12 education have long since fallen to for-profit housing development, as have all the caring professions from childcare to eldercare, because so much money is sucked out of the productive economy into real estate. Now post-secondary education will be hammered.

Everyone knows the most cost-effective way to house a population is by running housing as a public utility, but with a finance sector and the 66% of Canadians who "own" their own home depending on house prices increasing, not decreasing, getting from financialized to social housing seems at the moment an irresolvable dilemma.

Jan. 28, 2024 Bill Appledorf