Region of Waterloo Official Plan

[tomh009]

This is not sustainable and is not going to end well for many:

It's not as bad as, say, Toronto or Vancouver, but it's still massive house price inflation.

The real problems will start when interest rates go up.  New buyers won't be able to afford (mortgage payments for) as big houses, taking some air out of the balloon.  And existing homeowners with huge mortgages will struggle to make payments.

I bought my first house with a 14% mortgage.  That interest rate equates to monthly payments of more than triple what people are paying today.  Even a single percentage point bump, from 4% to 5%, will make it much harder to afford a $400K+ house.   (That's $330 more in mortgage payments each month -- not many people will have that much buffer in their finances.)