Biggest of them all: interest. On a $1M mortgage, you’ll almost pay $2M as interest over 30 years even at 7%.

Historically interest was never as low as during the pandemic. And most people bought houses using mortgages. The average “cost” of owning a house is much more than the selling price, even before you account for the upkeep.

In many places, this can be substracted from taxes, effectively slashing 35-40% of the cost where I live. So does almost all renovation costs (not upgrades though, just repairs).

Also, where I live 7% wasn't the case in past 20 years, and even now its rather 1.5% + whatever bank puts on.

The mortgage interest is one of the few costs that people (sometimes) account for. Usually with a hand-waving "my mortgage payment is lower or about the same as my rent payment" - which ignores that a rent payment covers everything whereas the mortgage payment only covers principal, interest (and sometimes insurance and property tax, if escrowed).

I just shudder to think about all my trips to Home Depot over the last 20 years of owning a home.

I never did those when I was renting. Yes, I didn't get to renovate or pick my paint colours. And yes my money paid down someone else's mortgage. But I suspect if you add it all up...

You should add it all up. Some of the things you purchased at Home Depot can be counted in the cost basis of the home and reduce your capital gains tax if you later sell it.

For most U.S. taxpayers selling a home, the capital gains exclusion on one's primary residence ($500,000 filing jointly) obviates such bookkeeping.

No capital gains at all on primary residences here in Canada.

For better or for worse.

Really? Really? So if you bought a shack in Vancouver twenty years ago for a song and now it's worth the entire symphony orchestra you can sell it with no taxes?

No wonder prices up there have gone bonkers even by US standards.

Yeah 0. None other than land transfer tax which is very little. And if anybody suggested putting in a sane G7 standard tax policy around this, the baby boomers would come rip their head off and parade it around on a pitchfork.

Non-primary residence of course gets fully taxed.

It's ... actually a reasonable policy, in some way. It can be quite annoying in the USA when you (if single) have more capital gains than you get "for free" ($250k which sounds like a lot, but if you bought in CA 20 years ago and are now moving, that can get eaten up quickly - a $300k house in 2004 would be almost $500k today from inflation alone) you pay tax.

Then if the house you bought with the proceeds drops in value and you have to sell, you can't claim a deduction for the capital loss.

Of course all capital gains taxes whatsoever have the hidden inflation problem, where you get taxed on the inflation caused by ...

In my opinion all these policies which encourage housing inflation are just the result of western neo-liberal economies trying to cover over their abdication of reasonable retirement/pension policies.

Trudeau was on record a couple weeks ago basically saying "we can't let housing prices fall. if housing prices fall, people won't be able to retire" which is a fucked up admission that there's no way to "retire" without passing debt onto the next generation.

It's not going to end well. It either falls apart in crisis / housing bubble pop, or we end up with some kind of neo-feudalist future slowly developing over the next 100-200 years.

> yes my money paid down someone else's mortgage.

which is a bit of a non-sequitur - who cares what your rent is paying towards? The landlord could be smoking weed with your rent money and you'd not be affected (financially).