Housing is the new toilet paper

Hard-wired in our human brains is the tendency to move in herds.  

This can explain a lot of trends, but also makes the future difficult to predict. The pandemic has illustrated that not everything we do all together is rational. 

Who, after all, could have predicted the great toilet paper run of 2020? Sociologists will grapple with this event for some time. Was it the soft comfort afforded to us in a collective moment of fear and dread? Or was it the need to horde something – anything – to give us a sense of control? 

Whatever the reasons, miraculously, we never ran out. We had an ample supply of old-growth timber to keep our bottoms clean. 

As covid-19 vaccines slowly roll out, I would have expected a similar rush to get inoculated, but we're not seeing quite the same urgency.  

In the drive-thru in Regina (a covid hotspot, in case you hadn’t heard), the wait times were often less than an hour. One day they had excess vaccines, so decided to open things up to emergency and other front-line workers (why they weren’t available to them in the first place is a mystery). 

Of course people have their reasons for not lining up. Some are more comfortable waiting for an appointment and some are vaccine hesitant. But so far, anyway, the toilet paper frenzy was bigger than the rush to get vaccines. One must deduce that we’re more concerned about keeping our bottoms clean than risking sickness and death. 

Another recent phenomenon is the pandemic housing boom. While unpredicted, now in hindsight, it makes complete sense. 

Lower interest rates, a need for more space, and more money in our pockets (for the middle/upper class, anyway), has led to yet another unprecedented spike in prices. 

 A quick glance of the headlines in The Globe and Mail on Friday reveal the extent of our obsession: 

The trouble with the bubble: Why Canada’s red-hot housing market is defying the burst. 

What does $700K buy across Canada: Properties priced at the national average, from coast to coast. 

Tax tips for buying, building, renovating or selling a home. 

Home of the Week: From a typical downtown Toronto ‘rental junk’ to joy. 

Notice the implicit condescension toward renting... In today’s society, you haven’t really made it until you own a home. Only then will you will reap the rewards of eternal home maintenance and renovations. 

The housing bust has been predicted so many times in Canada that we now call these people false prophets. Not even the great housing crash of 2009 – the one that decimated Europe and the U.S. – has left us undeterred. 

But it won’t last forever. 

A surprising trend demonstrating our unpredictability is the recent decline in car ownership. In Saskatchewan, car registrations declined 11% from 2014 to 2018, while the population continued to increase. 

The pandemic will surely accentuate this trend. We've driven our car so little this past year, cobwebs began growing under the wheel wells (well, almost). 

As with all things we think will never change – if ever there was a symbol of progress and status in the 20th century, it was the car – eventually they will. But good luck trying to predict when.