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Unaffordable housing in Vancouver, long commutes, FIFA’s soccer dad and Swiss cheese

Editor-in-chief Fiona Anderson on the news that caught her eye this week
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This week’s news was saturated with the price of local housing and how it’s unaffordable for many young couples or individuals to buy a home in Vancouver. It’s nothing new. The same was being said twenty years ago.

Now though it seems to have more momentum with Mayor Gregor Robertson and developer Bob Rennie asking for a speculators’ tax, which caught the eye of the South China Morning Post.

There’s no comfort in this, but we’re not alone. Young Australians are facing the same challenges.

But is it so essential to buy a home? Bloomberg seems to think so, estimating that not buying a home can cost $65,000 a year. But that does assume house prices, as well as interest rates, are going to rise. And that assumption is not worth risking high-debt levels for because it may not happen (as pointed out by Steadyhand’s Tom Bradley in his blog). That should be obvious but to many people who have only seen rising house prices it isn’t. Haven’t they read any of the hundreds of market bubble stories?

One answer is to move away from the city, which is why there are so many cars on the road (which has its own problems). To avoid driving you could wait for a driverless car, but one side effect could be motion sickness which passengers often get but drivers usually don’t.

Another answer may come from a story from the BBC which talked about super-commuters, people who travel hundreds of miles to get to work. Apparently 300,000 Lebanese travel three hours by plane to work in the Persian Gulf.

So if you are looking for an affordable house you can commute hundreds of miles from, here’s where you can get the most bang for your buck in the U.S.

Whatever you do, make sure you don’t work too hard to try to save money for that illusive down payment because, not surprisingly, working too many hours actually makes you less productive. In economic terms, there are diminishing returns to increased hours worked to the point it could become zero or negative.

Other news this week was about the FIFA bribery scandal. My favourite story was from the Daily Beast about the soccer dad who brought down FIFA (as an informant after taking some perks himself).

And for the you-needed-to-know-this story of the week: scientists have discovered why Swiss cheese has holes. Can’t say I ever wondered.