But where will these new people stay? There is not enough housing being built for people, you are going to see people come here only to leave when they realize that they can't afford the housing for their families there.
Net migration is probably pretty high in Canada right now and will increase once people figure out that there is not enough density or proper housing for them.
Check out these two top threads thread at canadahousing subreddit:
I am waiting to see what the cabinet shuffle looks like, but we are probably going to run some billboard campaigns or do some fundraising soon to address the housing crisis if the government is not tackling this properly. If you are Canadian or have interest in this space on addressing these social issues, hit me up.
Housing is relatively affordable outside of Ontario and BC. Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton, Quebec City, Winnepeg, Halifax, Saskatoon, Regina, and St Johns are all major metro areas where homes are less than half the price of the GTA and Vancouver metro.
The obvious fix for Ontario and BC to make housing more affordable is to allow people to build more where people want to live by relaxing zoning requirements. In 80%+ of Vancouver and 60%+ of Toronto it's literally illegal to build anything besides detached single family homes. Little of the remaining land zoned for more dense development is suitable for development. There are some smaller changes like streamlining permitting, not exempting 100% of capital gains and incentivizing speculation, and a vacancy tax to discourage speculation that would help. The problem is any changes to make housing more affordable are politically unpopular, almost 70% of Canadians are homeowners and in the short term benefit from the status quo. Also younger people are ~20% less likely to vote.
> Housing is relatively affordable outside of Ontario and BC. Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton, Quebec City, Winnepeg, Halifax, Saskatoon, Regina, and St Johns are all major metro areas where homes are less than half the price of the GTA and Vancouver metro.
This is not the right way to think about it. Yes these cities are cheaper than GTA/GVA, but that has always been the case. And this metric only matters if you are earning GTA/GVA incomes and looking for something cheaper than these mega cities to buy in, which arguably only affects a tiny percent of the population.
The right comparison is how these cities’ house prices compare to themselves of 3, 5, 10 years ago versus their average household income over the same time periods.
When you look at that, which is a much more relevant metric of affordability, you will find there is essentially no city in this country that hasn’t been absolutely obliterated on affordability over the last decade.
7-10 years ago it was a GTA/GVA affordability issue. Now it a story of every podunk 2 horse town from coast to coast. Why? Because of interest rates! The BoC, like most central banks, left rates too low for too long and then massively overreacted to COVID.
Why would an immigrant care how much housing prices were in a city 3, 5, or 10 years ago? That has absolutely nothing to do with how affordable it is right now.
Issue is not just housing. Our health services and infra is crumbling. 401 near Yonge st is jammed nearly 24 hours (yes!!!). We literally have no more space for cars. We have switch to the 407 for as much travel as we can (and it is crazy expensive and silly given how much tax I pay as a techie).
The ERs in GTA are just always clogged. I've had to deal with multiple instances of 10+ hour waits in the ER. When they were not addressed in time, one such incident got worse, and ended up in a 10 day serious hospital stay (love the logic on that one).
Getting an appointment with any sort of specialist is also a gauntlet.
I'm an immigrant and it was surreal hearing the new Toronto mayor talk about how much she accomplished as an immigrant to Canada. It was indeed possible when she and I came to this country. It is a fantasy today. GTA has become a terrible place to live in a very short time period.
Immigration is a double edged swords. It's one way to grow an economy rapidly, but you can't really do it without proper 10-20 year ahead planning. Not a real surprise, since most politicians are concerned with short term wins.
> Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton, Quebec City, Winnepeg, Halifax, Saskatoon, Regina, and St Johns
Yeah, all of these cities also have long, harsh winters.
FWIW I'm a Canadian who lived in California on work visas for several years and relocated to Australia in 2011, where I'm now a citizen. I've never regretted leaving Canada.
Banana belt, what on earth are you taking about? Hogtown sure. Maybe even “the big smoke”, and not because of the current wildfires. But banana belt? First time I’ve heard it
> "The 'banana belt' or Carolinian Canada is a region in Ontario found south of a line which runs approximately from Grand Bend to Toronto." -- http://erintown.blogspot.com/
Canadian here, lived in Toronto for about a decade.
There are many names that Canadians from outside Toronto call Toronto...few repeatable in polite company...but I have never heard this Banana Belt term either.
Not compared to most places in Canada its not. Toronto I would say is between 2C to -10C on average during the winter, -20C in the extreme. Cities like Regina and Saskatoon for example have winters in the range of -20C to -40C on average, and extremes can reach -55C. Its like comparing Alaska and NYC.
Price has also been going up in the cities you called “relatively affordable”
I live in the middle of nowhere and when renewing my annual lease my rent went 10% up
It is expensive for most people who live here
And Calgary prices have shooted up due to people leaving BC and ON. Not as expensive as BC or ON but nevertheless local people are feeling the changes.
I live in Montreal and prices for new condos are nearly 1M, rent has been steadily increasing and wages are pretty low.
To make matters worse, enjoy not having any road infrastructure, dealing with construction and traffic, paying the highest tax in country and dealing with an incompetent government who is more concerned about replacing stop signs that say "STOP" with "ARRÊT" instead of focusing on healthcare, education and employment.
I'm not sure why everyone thinks we live in a paradise. Montreal is only "hip" if you are 18 and want to go clubbing at night. The allure of "Jazz Fest" drops off quickly.
> The obvious fix for Ontario and BC to make housing more affordable is to allow people to build more where people want to live by relaxing zoning requirements.
The market has proven totally unable to solve the housing crisis and your solution is to relax regulation and incentivize builders to make more profits. The price of units and homes is already too high, incentives will just get us more market rate or above housing.
Here's another option: start to decommodify housing by building good, mixed income public housing. Vienna and Singapore have two different models that could work here.
Billboards have run before (“Can’t afford a home? Have you tried having rich parents?”, etc). A protest was organized but very few showed up. None of this work when the ruling class is benefiting from the lack of housing.
You need something more attention grabbing. Something Titan-like that the media will run with for days. Something like what started the Arab spring or similar movements. Not advocating for self-immolation, but it has to be dramatic enough to wake people up.
There are too many incumbents benefiting from the status quo that it’ll take a monumental effort to turn things around.
If the primary issue is the wealthy controlling housing then why is the brand new Toronto mayor, a representative of the working class party (NDP), have zero stuff about reforming housing policy like zoning and height limits, or anything about anti-NIMBYism? Basically the stuff that's very obviously been holding back development forever.
Chow would probably be at the front of any Arab Spring type protest in Toronto championing housing.
Yet her whole website is the same shit we've been sold as solutions since the 1970s: city wide rent control that has repeatedly resulted in a long term reduction in housing supply, a small set of new gov built skyscrapers that will take a decade to build and come in at twice the cost of budget, doubling down on disincentivizing renting properties by 2xing the amount of legal worries property renters have to go through when dealing with bad tenants, some weak stuff about city spending $100M to buy homes off the market so they don't get renovated (so basically 10 homes), etc, etc.
Is the NDP the party of the wealthy elite in Toronto? Over valuing protecting a small amount of exclusive neighbourhoods with old Victorian homes at the expense of the rest of the (very large and varied) city and only ever allowing expensive skyscrapers to be built?
The answer to that might be yes. But it's hard to disconnect those critiques from the language and policies of municipal politics here in Toronto... and almost every major western city. Which always sounds the same, while conventiently blaming someone else.
> If the primary issue is the wealthy controlling housing then why is the brand new Toronto mayor, a representative of the working class party (NDP), have zero stuff about reforming housing policy like zoning and height limits, or anything about anti-NIMBYism? Basically the stuff that's very obviously been holding back development forever.
I have no idea what you're complaining about. All of the policies you want are what she is promising. And has done.
She made it so that you can now build four story, four unit multiplexes. It's right there on the website you linked. This already happened a few months ago.
And she says "Olivia would streamline, coordinate and simplify the approval process for housing so we can get more built, faster."
And she wants to put a wealth tax on those expensive homes you don't like.
You can complain that the city could move faster. But, all of the things you want are what she is doing.
> Olivia would streamline, coordinate and simplify the approval process for housing so we can get more built, faster
Those are generic sentences without substance. Of course the city wants to be efficient. But unless I hear specifics I'm extremely skeptical.
> She made it so that you can now build four story, four unit multiplexes
Good, but city approval for heights is probably the most boring and lowest hanging of my complaints. Zoning reform and NIMBYism is 90% of what reduces supply and kills off meaningful development.
This is a multi-decade crisis, it's not a minor policy debate in city council.
Even if they can get approval for a 4 story multiplex the fact 90% are building skyscrapers instead of other (legal) arrangements happen because it's the only one people are willing to risk $$$ on. It's extremely risky to run a development project in the city, because a) where you can build is severely capped so you have to build as high as possible and b) if you're going to navigate all of roadblocks and NIMBY backed lawyering you better be getting a property who's ROI can fund teams of lawyers and support years of development, often well before any construction start.
If we actually want to solve the housing crisis we literally need to start razing whole blocks of single family homes, industrial areas, old office buildings, etc and build high density housing.
This is radical stuff. Nothing about what Chow is proposing is anywhere close to addressing the crisis.
Four unit multiplexes is a joke. No city with a population above 100k should have any restriction on height or density of any kind. With the cost of acquiring a house and the permitting BS, I'm sure very few of these multiplexes will be profitable to build.
Why would you expect anything different? Left-NIMBYism is a real - and unfortunate - thing, especially among older members of the left, and Chow's been in politics for 30 years.
I'm a pretty boring social democrat in most regards, so saying this as someone who generally holds fairly leftist views on many things: the leftist ideology, very roughly speaking, believes that government intervention results in better results for the common man than a capitalist market left to its own devices; this gestures directly towards price controls, zoning laws, every kind of regulation, and socialized housing. Leftists are deeply skeptical of market-based solutions; even basic economic principles like supply-and-demand are viewed with skepticism by association with Economics as a field, which tends to be viewed (not totally or necessarily wrongly) as a false science that's more of an ideological tool of capitalists than anything. They view profit-making and companies that seek to make profit - like developers - as fundamentally impure and in need of reining in. And because of decades of urban sprawl in North America, they associate development with environmental destruction, even though, ironically, one important way we could help save the environment is by densifying the hell out of our cities. And don't get me started on fears of gentrification - although there we're beginning to blur the line between "progressives" and leftists, but those lines are already pretty blurred.
I know enough left-NIMBYs to know that their intentions are pure - it's not a case of ladder-kickers. Just a particularly bad strain of thought that's - like you said - pretty widespread in municipal politics. Probably because NIMBYism transcends ideology in a way - there's different kinds of NIMBYism across the spectrum, always with the same outcome, and many voters will happily cross party lines to keep their neighbourhood just the way it is, thank you very much.
Happily, in my experience younger urbanists - even the left-wing ones - tend to (though don't always) recognize the excesses of left-NIMBYism.
I suppose I should've said they not intentional ladder-kickers; quite the opposite: they genuinely believe that their policies, and only their policies, will actually lead to more affordable housing.
This is in comparison to more conventional NIMBYs, who don't really care - they feel entitled to "preserve neighbourhood character", say things like "city's full, don't move here", that sort of thing.
People are living longer and healthier and more independantly, which means they want to stay in their city homes in their 60s - 80s. What do you want to do, put them in warehouses? Plus there is a lot of immigration, but we need that.
There is an ongoing process of densification, it can be faster but it can't be done too quickly, it's not fair to blot out people's views or destroy neighbourhoods or destroy every remnant of past eras.
With these dynamics it's no surprise that city housing is so expensive, and I don't think it comes down to one factor like interest rates or greedy people, so that billboard is just political pandering. What would your attention-getting measure ask for?
I get the impression a lot of people are complaining they can't afford a family home basically in a prime-ish city location. Can't blame them for wanting that, but an option could be to move outside the cities. Properties are quite affordable, and there are some good transit corridors and decent towns (and advantages of living in the country), though better commuting options will always be welcome.
This is what I've done, an hour outside a city, I'm on a forested acre with a lake, with beautiful views year-round. I'm far from house poor so I can afford to travel all winter or do overnights in any city.
To enable this, I would push for better commuting, with more hubs and extended service so it's super easy to get to downtowns. But resolving scarcity of talent in the trades would also be key.
I've seen first hand refugees come to Canada from Ukraine, realize that this country is in their words "not a country where you can have an easy life" and within 6 months figure out a way to get to the states.
I could've been making a great salary in Canada as a new grad but it just didn't make sense to stay when I could make 1.5x more in the US (and in USD!).
Please, correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds to me like this person is assuming all software developers are (military age) men. I'm not aware of other restrictions on people being able to leave Ukraine.
Quite a lot of folks in Ukraine aren't exactly known for strictly complying with every regulation. There's undoubtedly a huge number of military age men that left regardless, especially among software devs.
Yes, home prices are drastically lower in most of the states than in Canada. Taxes are also lower, and pay is higher. Just compare home prices in Niagara Falls New York, where you can get what Canadians would consider a great house for literally 100k, and Niagara Falls Ontario where you're looking at 600k-900k. Or compare White Rock BC where a house will run you 3 million, to Blaine Washington where you can get a house for 300k.
That’s what I’ve been thinking about. Probably there are many people who take the opposite route, states first then Canada. I only know a few cases though.
As Canada gets more young citizens without building, their home ownership has continued plummeting. [1]
Once there is a critical mass of single-issue pro-housing voters, we can expect to see a huge tsunami of pro-housing bills get passed for this politically lucrative issue.
As of now, old homeowners are the electoral majority. So, pro-housing politics is a losing strategy. But you can only sustain it so long in a nation with at ton of younger owned-home-started immigrants.
To add to my reply, it appears that - rather than "plummeting" since 2011 - homeownership went up even more recently and actually peaked in 2019:
> About two in three Canadians lived in an owner-occupied home in 2022. Since 2017, the home ownership rate in Canada has fluctuated and in 2019, it peaked at approximately 68.6 percent. In 2022, this figure was slightly lower, at 66.5 percent.
2/3 of Canadians living in a home their family owns is still far from a situation where a critical mass of voters are demanding pro-renter housing policies.
Even those living at home with parents will be benefiting from the status quo when they eventually inherit their parent's property.
Canada is acute, but this is the same issue in many countries right now. The older, voting generation has voted, every time, to maximise their personal wellbeing at the expense of the younger generations. Because they comprise such a large voting bloc, and they're diligent voters, and they can buy political influence, policies remain catered towards them. I agree that the only solution here is through democracy, and that means demographic changes. In the next 1-2 decades, home owners will be in the minority in many countries. That's when things will get very interesting, politically. In New Zealand, for example, the younger, disenfranchised demographics have been chewed up and spat on their entire lives. We're talking everyone born after 1980. They harbour hate. The political swings are going to be wild. I think there will be enormous land value taxes levied.
I don't think so, but democracy is actually pretty new. It wasn't until the 60s in America where one could confidently argue that every man and woman could vote without major impediment. In 1920 women are guaranteed the right to vote by the Nineteenth Amendment. There was also a lot of war happening.
So could previous generations have done the same? Their generation just wasn't large enough. Then along came this crazy baby boom and suddenly there was this all-powerful voting bloc which has shaped the world.
No, previous generations tended to preserve the social contract of not fucking over their grandkids so they could go out to eat more and take more vacations in retirement.
Before they were called boomers they were called "generation me". It should hardly be a surprise that this is what generation me would do in old age.
Your chart shows home ownership recently peaked at 69% in 2011.
The current 66% is (a) not that big a change and (b) still high compared to historical averages so it's not so much "plummeting" as it is "reverting to the mean".
(which means we'll just continue to uphold the status quo like we always have)
Another part of the problem is that those who down own but rent have seen rents increase (in many but perhaps not all of the major cities) to the highest proportion of income in history and often are as high as a mortgage payment. So now there’s no real savings to be had by renting, and no ability to save to get into the housing market later (prices in some markets were increasing on average by tens of thousands of dollars per month through COVID - galloping away from even the most diligently saving renter trying to get to a down payment. So it seems there’s an owner class and a renter class, and both are financially strapped, and it is near impossible to move from renter to owner.
This is a direct result of insufficient supply and skyrocketing values (thanks to interest rates being too low for too long).
There are 2k+ houses for sale in Nova Scotia under 200k right now. Canada is more than the GTA area. Actually as I know the same thing happened in the US at the turn of the century. People arriving to the country finding prices high in New York ventured further, settling in Ohio, for example. Ohio has the highest hungarian population out of all states, due to this.
People always adapt, and overcome. It's really not up to the "state" to solve middle-class housing issues. It's not the soviet union.
In defense of the Soviet Union, these zoning laws don't come from there. They come from the US, as an effort in the early 20th century to keep undesirable people (jews, blacks, chinese, etc.) away from precious whites.
True, and I didn't mean to imply that Euclidean zoning was invented by the Soviets. Rather, the Soviets, having a planned economy and authoritarian system, planned urban development: they decided how housing would be built, where, and what type. Their choice gave them big apartment blocks, but it was because the State mandated this, not because any developers or private landowners wanted them.
In the US and Canada, it's very similar, though a bit different: the State has decided that only ridiculously inefficient single-family housing is allowed to be built.
Both of them are situations where the State has forced limits on what kind of housing is allowed, but the type of housing is obviously diametrically different. A better system is one where the State sets very few limits on housing, only very practical ones (no 50-story towers next to the airport, for instance), and lets landowners do what they want with their land, within reason.
Thr job market, and for that matter the internet quality, in most of those Nova Scotian locations is not going to support anything except the kindest full-remote position. Those houses are for sale at that rate because they were too bad to get swept up in the wave of transplants the province has been seeing basically since the pandemic started.
My family purchased a home in the province in 2007 for less than 100k. We had to repair the foundation and roof of our house multiple times, and the previous owner used seven layers of wallpaper instead of installing insulation. Cheap homes have their own problems, and two pensions was the only reason we could afford to fix it.
$260k for a multifamily home is pretty reasonable, in my books. The eternal issue though, is convincing new Canadians that there exists a life outside of the GTA and Vancouver.
It sounds fine in theory but leaving Vancouver to go to St John's for affordable housing is not really an option for any one with family here. I may as well go to Thailand for affordable housing, it is more affordable and flights are the same price. People have obligations with family and they want to be close to their friends.
It's not like Europe where you can do 60 minutes from a big city and prices fall off a cliff. In bc you have to go four hours drive from Vancouver to find cheapish housing (Hope it's the spot) and that's not a commutable distance. The complete lack of public transport makes it worse but the sheer scale of it is the biggest problem.
If I was going to start again there is no way I would choose Vancouver but people get stuck in cities for many reasons but the biggest one is either relationship commitments or where the work is.
I always heard such good things about Quebec City. Quality of life looks excellent. Thanks for sharing the housing price update. It sounds pretty good. As I recall, there are a bunch of good tech jobs there also due to UniSoft and friends.
Given that Edmonton's population is 26% immigrants, that's simply false. The main problem is that these cities are very small, so even though as a percentage they absorb a lot of immigrants, they can't make that much of a dent overall.
This is the more controversial opinion, so it would be on you to list those cities.
Many places don't necessarily have expensive housing in absolute dollars for someone making top money, but that doesn't mean they don't have housing issues
Sudbury, North Bay, Sault St Marie, Quebec City, St. John's, Cornwall, Timmins... The list goes on.
All are safe, welcoming cities, all are relatively affordable. No they don't have an NHL team, yes they get cold in the winter. This is a cold country!
With maybe the exception of Quebec City and St Johns which I'd like to visit, not to disparage those cities, but they are... small, extremely isolated, and yes cold but I think that's the least of the issue, and I say that being from Winnipeg.
The cold is a real issue, but it's an extreme issue if you have the other two qualities, all 3 present in Winnipeg too because it's like 9 hours from any other city over 300k. I remember bussing to school every day, and walking one block would make my face feel like it was on fire, then I'd get home later and it would be dark, nobody really wants to do much except drink because there isn't much else. Sprawl and the same terrible zoning as anywhere else made it so only copy/pasted franchises would go up in the commercial areas, always along a major roadway with giant parking lots. I revisit once or twice a year, and it's deeply upsetting.
I pass through many towns like North Bay on road trips, and I have nothing against them inherently, but I think they're only suitable for the same people who just have no interest in being around many other people and bailed from Toronto as soon as their work went remote (I don't personally care for TO as much as Van). That, or people who just literally need any place to set up shop and support a family, but it's crazy to me that the major cities are essentially saying to a majority of young people who are renting their basement suites and have been for a decade, "It's cute that you want to stay where you've already built your community, but we own this and you get to pay my mortgage"
Billboards are your plan? 70% of Canadians are happy with the situation. Even more of those who actually vote.
If this was actually a problem then it would have been solved. It's not that hard to build houses.
Personally I'd like to buy a house and convert it to an unreasonable number of apartments with a common kitchen. If you happen to hookup a kitchen in your apartment how would I know?
That ratio is declining by the day as more and more join the renting class. Olivia Chow’s victory in Toronto is testament to that. She ran on increasing the vacancy tax, making evictions more difficult, building 25k rental homes, etc. No wonder why the old guard like Ford and Tory tried everything to steer people away from her. But she still won. Speaks volumes of the changes in the demographics. It’s no longer 70% that are happy with the housing crisis I can tell you this much.
You assume all homeowners are happy with the situation. That is definitely not the case. Many looking to upsize or thinking about housing for their kids are not pleased with the rising prices. And this crowd is growing too.
That doesn't really capture it though. Anyone who lives in a home which is occupied by the owner counts in this figure. So if someone in their 20s is unable to afford to live on their own and has to live with their parents, they will count towards this homeowner statistic.
I already bought a home (it is a starter home) and it is nice seeing my home price increase but I can never upgrade (well .. I can but it would be financial suicide to). I think some Canadian home owners get that but your point is actually totally valid. The Home Affordability issue just targets renters.
I think the right billboard should cover our shit roads and transit, and our healthcare/ER. That affects everyone (and seniors the most!)
In better accommodations than the "berry picking talent", "retail talent", "warehouse talent" or "trucking talent" that was fashionable to bring in in previous years.
>government expects free market will solve the housing
I nearly choked on my milk reading this. When in the recent period has housing ever followed the rules of supply and demand? The government policy makers, nimbys and banks are constantly doing everything possible to prevent the bubble from popping and to limit supply to ensure thier nest eggs keep appreciating regardless.
If housing actually had liberated free market, without government or nimby interference, we wouldn't have a housing crisis.
Same in Europe. Nobody wants the unsustainable housing bubble to pop, because everyone , from the voters to policy makers, are heavily invested into it with the idea that it must always go up no matter what. We've basically chosen going full steam ahead towards the iceberg because "line must go up".
Net migration is probably pretty high in Canada right now and will increase once people figure out that there is not enough density or proper housing for them.
Check out these two top threads thread at canadahousing subreddit:
[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/canadahousing/comments/13jl3gf/came...
[2]https://www.reddit.com/r/canadahousing/comments/147p0tx/onta...
I am waiting to see what the cabinet shuffle looks like, but we are probably going to run some billboard campaigns or do some fundraising soon to address the housing crisis if the government is not tackling this properly. If you are Canadian or have interest in this space on addressing these social issues, hit me up.