Should home prices go down? ’No,’ says Canada’s new housing minister

When asked by reporters if he thinks home prices need to go down, he told reporters: “No, I think that we need to deliver more supply, make sure the market is stable.”
Robertson said his work as housing minister will focus on building up supply of affordable housing in Canada.
“We need to be delivering more affordable housing. The Government of Canada has not been building affordable housing since the ’90s and we’ve created a huge shortage across Canada,” he said.

He sure did say a lot more than "No" didn't he Global News?

Keeping prices high is consistent with the policy the LPC proposed during the election.
The consolation prize of "more affordable housing" is unclear. Affordable means different things to different people, and I haven't seen an explanation of who will get access to it.
As someone who is trying to figure out how to afford a home, this isn't the answer I wanted to hear.
- Keeping prices high is consistent with the policy the LPC proposed during the election.
  Which policy exactly is consistent with keeping prices high?
  The consolation prize of “more affordable housing” is unclear. Affordable means different things to different people, and I haven’t seen an explanation of who will get access to it.
  Well if what we have currently is "unaffordable" I think it is safe to assume that "Affordable housing" means less than market.
  Who do you believe will get access to it?
  As someone who is trying to figure out how to afford a home, this isn’t the answer I wanted to hear.
  As someone who has never had a hope of owning a home in their lifetime, you can get in line behind the people without a place to live and wait with the rest of the middle class.
Should home prices go down? "No...we need to...make sure the market is...huge" says Canada's new housing minister
- What is your plan to fix the housing crisis that does not include building houses?

Probably the answer is in the sense that the government's focus should not be where the prices should be but whether there are sufficient homes people can house themselves in.

Journalists across the country and the world right now are grilling everything Carney and his team are doing, trying to catch them in a lie or something despite just being elected this past month. To be fair it's their job to ask hard-hitting questions that people want answered but I find their questions' focus frequently misplaced (e.g. asking Carney about stuff Trump talks about).

Probably the answer is in the sense that the government's focus should not be where the prices should be but whether there are sufficient homes people can house themselves in.
Government policy moved prices up to where they are, so all three levels of government need to remedy the problem.
The thing these conversations rarely mention is that a lot of retirement savings are tied up in homes. As long as young Canadians are being gouged for rent, it's harder to put money aside for retirement.
- Right but only some are the government targeting a price (e.g. the lower downpayment for mortgages under $1.5million), but the bid to build housing does not have a similar target or parameter for housing prices on the market, since ostensibly the crown corp built housing will be a mix of market rate apartments and condo units, below market rate apartments, and supportive housing.

The scary part is even on the surface, a meaningful reduction in housing prices would have pretty rough consequences for us economically. We've spent 40 years building our entire financial system to the point where the majority of the median citizen's net worth is in their home's equity. Seeing any short term devaluation of housing in a significant way would effectively be reducing the median citizens ability to retire.

Probably the best we can hope for is price stagnation and modest but consistent decreases in housing prices while we decouple our economy from the false growth of real estate.

Everyone needs one house. When you sell your house, you have to buy (or rent) another one. If the value of your house drops by the same amount as everyone else's, then you lost nothing.
In fact, you probably gained because if you plan to buy a more expensive house, you have to pay less.
The only people for whom the fall of housing prices would be negative are those that plan on having less houses. That is, you have multiple, and want to sell some.
The median citizen is no real state investor.
- If you still have a mortgage on your home, you’ve lost a lot because you may no longer have equity to cover your mortgage. Which, probably not a huge deal if you actually plan to live in it and not treat it like a medium-term investment. But there can be a tangible loss there.
- This concept is simply false.
  If my house price fell by 50%, I would owe more on my mortgage than the house is worth.
  This would affect me negatively in multiple ways, not the least of which may mean me losing my home as the bank would not want to renew my mortgage.
  I agree that housing prices need to fall, and actually by more than 50% but it needs to happen over time or it will literally crash the entire economy.
That and make wages catch up with inflation. Deflation causes all sorts of problems but driving wages up just makes people wealthier.
We'll just have to get used to bigger numbers.
- That'll take decades in a lot of areas.
  In the meantime, you're gonna have a lot of angry young Canadians spending lots of money on rent, and failing to save for retirement.
- Indeed - stagnate prices and drive wage increases until the ratio is back down.
Eh. A lot of that gain has come since 2019. It's unrealized. Many homeowners bought before the run up and are gonna make bank when younger Canadians try to get into the market.
The longer prices stay inflated, the more of a problem we'll have.