Don’t blame boomers

Re: Aging-in-place boomers bust real estate market: report, Deborah Stokes, Jan. 26

It seemed to me that Deborah Stokes used the occasion of her story to indulge in a little baby boomer bashing. She portrays us boomers as selfish, wealthy people who won’t let go of our homes and are to blame for yet again disrupting markets. Nice way to speak of your elders. And where are we to go if we sell our homes?

The problem is that today, downsizing living space doesn’t mean we are downsizing the cost of living, so there’s no benefit to moving.

Condos aren’t much cheaper if you want one big enough to swing your grandkids in, and retirement residences with vacancies start at $4,000 or more a month plus meal plan — way, way more expensive than I’m paying to live now.

So this real estate wealth isn’t doing anybody any good — unless we move far away from the GTAH, it is only wealth on paper that will go to our kids one day. Boomers with children and grandchildren would much rather see lower property values so that their kids can afford to buy homes nearby. The big reason that the housing market is so tight was detailed in another story in the same paper: “GTAH needs 30 per cent more housing units a year, report says” — due to poor government processes and planning, not bad boomers. Fred van Velsen, Toronto

Gee, I cannot possibly imagine why older folks don’t want to move into retirement homes that are forced by government diktat to accept Covid-positive residents causing mass deaths and where they will be forcibly cut off from their families.

Whatever are they thinking? Paul Ward, Waterloo, Ont.