Toronto's Housing Market Has Completely Fallen Off a Cliff : r/TorontoRealEstate - "Nope. Housing availability does this more. Which is on provinces and construction companies and corporate greed being uncontrolled. The feds play a part for sure, but we need immigration. The fault lays with the provinces for not approving affordable homes and allowing giant detached homes for prioritization. Its on construction companies and investors for only prioritizing building larger and larger homes no one can afford, regardless of immigration. The Feds under harper who dismantled the Fed. Housing oversight board whos job was to ensure enough housing was built vs population growth. The need for people to blame all of their problems on the feds while overlooking everything else has gotta fucking stop"
"Here's the Bank of Canada explicitly calling out insane immigration rates putting upward pressure on housing prices.
Here's the Bank of Canada's Monetary Policy Report calling out rapid and sudden population growth making housing more expensive.
Here's the Wallstreet Journal talking about the BoC and weighing on the ridiculous negative effects in regards to our housing situation based off the immigration policies of the federal Liberals.
'The fault lays with the provinces for not approving affordable homes and allowing giant detached homes for prioritization.'
Here's a report directly referencing that development charges (municipal fees) have gone up by almost 1000% since 2010.
And before the pearl clutching begins - here's the literal CMHC directly stating that these costs are passed down to the consumer."
Toronto's Housing Market Has Completely Fallen Off a Cliff : r/TorontoRealEstate - "Stats Canada disagrees with you.
These results suggest that increased immigration and NPR inflows could create greater pressure on rental markets in larger municipalities and on ownership markets in smaller ones
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/36-28-0001/2025005/article/00003-eng.htm"
Ontario is falling behind in new housing construction - "Residential construction in Ontario has been trending downward in the post-pandemic period. Understanding this decline requires a closer look at the composition of new housing. Much of Ontario’s recent construction, especially in cities like Toronto, has focused on multi-family dwellings, predominantly mid- and high-rise condominium and rental buildings. With weakening investor interest, tighter financing conditions and increased construction costs, the pipeline for such projects has become considerably thinner. In contrast, construction of single-family homes in Alberta’s major cities has been relatively strong. In fact, by October of last year, Edmonton had started work on more single-family homes in 2024 than Toronto, a city more than three times its size."
Clearly, we need to push for densification everywhere
Is this Normal in GTA? : r/toronto - "I’m in my early 30s, moving from Winnipeg to the Toronto area for work at the airport. Just looking for a simple room or studio to rent. But yo… is this normal? • Landlords asking my ethnicity like it’s a dating profile. • One literally said they prefer vegetarians (bro, I just want a lease, not a salad). • They want a detailed credit report, never had to hand over my financial diary back in Winnipeg. • And some ads straight-up say certain ethnicities preferred… or not allowed. So many ads straight up violate local & federal laws lol I’m excited to move to Toronto, but wow… house hunting here feels like I accidentally joined a weird reality show. Please just any good rental buildings near the airport that would be a great help"
"Look for buildings with professional landlords: Capreit Cando, Metcap, etc. Their indifference is a dual edged sword: they don't care about you enough to ask about race and religion. Downside, they also don't care when you complain."
Corporations should be banned from owning residential property
Abandoned silos, record rents, why are empty buildings everywhere while we scramble for housing? : r/SavingsCanada - "People need to stop using the word luxury. All new builds are exactly that, new. They will command the price of today's land value, today's labour costs, today's material costs. Adding some stainless steel appliances or better flooring is an irrelevant cost compared to everything else. You can't build new homes for cheap, building is expensive. Unless we fundamentally change the way we build, the only way to pay less is to get less or live in a worse location."
Canada shows Australia how to solve housing crisis - "Canada experienced an unprecedented immigration boom after the pandemic, which caused a record housing shortage... Canada’s housing shortage and rental crisis are easing. Indeed, slower population growth has driven eight consecutive monthly declines in Canadian asking rents, which are tracking 3.3% below a year earlier... There are clear lessons here for Australia, where policymakers and the media continue to paint the housing crisis as a “supply issue”... NHSAC’s sensitivity analysis showed that if Australia’s population grew by just 15% less than forecast over the next five years, then the projected 79,000 housing shortage would turn into a 40,000 surplus."
This is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen : r/canadahousing
Of course, actually talking about the article would get you banned on the sub, since you're not allowed to talk about immigration
Condo that won’t sell: It’s about size, not location - "The slowdown we’re seeing right now is being driven largely by small units — what I’ll call “micro condos,” those under 600 square feet. In contrast, larger, family-sized condos — those between 1,200 and 1,600 square feet — are holding up better. We can see this clearly in the data. Micro condos in the Toronto area currently have just under nine months of inventory. That means if no new listings came online, it would take 9 months to sell what’s currently on the market. Family-sized condos have only about five months of inventory. In other words, there’s nearly twice as much supply relative to demand in the micro segment. This oversupply is also showing up in prices. Over the past two years, small condos have seen their average price fall by 13 per cent. Family-sized units, by comparison, are down just 8 per cent."
The fact that larger units are also down suggests that blaming investors for everything is stupid
Condo that won’t sell: It’s about size, not location : r/toronto - "The city of Toronto has so many regulations on building that the city is effectively centrally planned. The housing crisis is mostly a massive failure of local government not the private sector. Look at this picture of Yonge in Toronto. Market forces aren't the reason high rises are clustered around subway stops but after 50m it's endless detached homes. That's a policy decision. Developers in Toronto know how to build mid-rise buildings, it's just the city has made it effectively impossible. Development charges have gone up over 500% in the last 15 years. The city is literally disincentivizing building housing to prevent a minor property tax increase. That's not the actions of a city that actually cares about the housing crisis. Toronto wants to blame developers for their housing problems while doing everything possible to make building housing difficult. This is not to say private developers are faultless, but all the major problems in building housing stem from the city. A public developer will face all the same issues as a private developer. The only potential benefit is they may have the political power to force the city to stop being so obstructionist."
Rents easing across most major markets but many tenants not feeling relief: CMHC - "Canada's housing agency says advertised rents in some major cities are easing due to factors such as increased supply and slower immigration... average asking rents for a two-bedroom purpose-built apartment were down year-over-year in four of seven markets... Vacancy rates are expected to rise in most major cities this year amid slower population growth and sluggish job markets, CMHC said."
Weird how greater supply and lower demand reduce "greed"
From Toronto to Vancouver to Ottawa: The housing slowdown Is spreading - "Canada’s housing market is facing a structural challenge with immediate and long-term consequences: housing starts in the country’s largest urban centres are slowing sharply, with no signs of a near-term recovery. The Greater Toronto Area (GTA) was the first to see significant declines, followed by Metro Vancouver and now Ottawa. The pattern is clear, and unless action is taken, other major markets are not immune and could follow suit. This is not a temporary pause or a market correction. It’s a systemic malaise — the kind that has every indication of deepening in the months ahead. At a time when Canada needs to double housing starts to meet demand, the numbers in many urban centres are moving in the opposite direction, undermining the ability for overall national progression. In Q1 2025, new and pre-construction home sales were down 89% in the GTA, 77% in Metro Vancouver, and 51% in Ottawa compared to the same period in 2022. Given the lag between sales and construction starts, housing starts are falling and will continue to do so. The outlook for new housing supply in these markets is exceptionally weak for the foreseeable future. The problem is not a lack of demand. Population growth continues, and the need for housing is acute. The issue is that delivering new homes, particularly in Canada’s largest cities, has become financially unviable. Elevated interest rates, escalating construction costs, and multiple layers of taxes and fees have pushed project viability beyond the breaking point. Developers and rental housing providers face a simple reality: they can’t deliver homes at a price the market can absorb. This slowdown carries significant economic implications. The housing sector is one of Canada’s largest employers, with over 90% of materials sourced domestically, and is a critical driver of GDP. In the GTA alone, 41,000 jobs and more than $6 billion in annual tax revenues for all three levels of government are at risk. Similar threats loom over Vancouver and Ottawa, while Calgary, Edmonton, and Montreal remain vulnerable should current market conditions persist."
Clearly, they just need to be less greedy and lose money building housing
The article doesn't even mention the shortfall in housing supply, which alone would be a reason to support building
A skeptic's take on the housing crisis: 'The developer is the good guy' - "“It turns out that the issue here is not the building, it’s the land under the building,” he argues. When a city allows for additional density, that changes the financial value of the dirt on the proposed building site. Thus, he reports, “If you go from allowing a one-storey building to allowing a 10-storey building, you get a 1,000-percent increase in the price of the land.” “So the market is really a market-per-square-foot of the building,” he explains, “and by adding density, it doesn’t change the value of that square foot. What it does change is the value of the land underneath that building.” “As the authorized use of land is increased,” Patrick elaborates, “the value of the land is going up and up and up, and it, unfortunately, goes up more or less in measure to what the market is allowing for that built price.” The increase in land values created by up-zoning and densification are not going to the municipality, Patrick suggests. “That’s what’s so tragic about it, about the whole thing,” he contends, “the policy makers are saying (and I think many of them actually believe it), that this will help the community and it’s actually harming the community. It’s really helping the land speculators.” And Patrick makes clear: The land speculator is different than the developer. “The developer is the good guy,” he says, chuckling. “They build a building. The building has social value. What doesn’t appear to have social value is the land, and the speculation part of it, which is preventing us from adjudicating land rights to the benefit of the community.”... Basically, we’re doing the wrong thing, Patrick concludes: “We’re going in and giving away land rights, hoping that that will lead to affordability. We shouldn’t do that, because it doesn’t work. But what we can do is give away land rights, insisting on affordability.”"
Meme - "The Bank of Canada says population correlates with increasing rent prices and decreasing vacancy rates"
"Chart 3-A: Strong population growth is supporting inflation in rental prices"
Weird. I thought it was supply restrictions, greedy landlords and the financialisation of housing. Why is the Bank of Canada so ignorant? They should have "zero tolerance for racism or xenophobia" because "Immigration is not the problem", "Debating immigration is a major distraction" and this is "dogwhistling"
Vancouver and Toronto outpace New York in home unaffordability. Here’s why - The Globe and Mail - "For years, some have argued that Toronto and Vancouver’s high housing costs are natural for “world-class cities.” But that logic collapses when New York and Boston – true global hubs – are more affordable. Being world-class isn’t just about demand – it’s about wages to match. In Canada, incomes in Toronto and Vancouver lag far behind the soaring cost of home ownership... Canada’s housing affordability began to diverge from that of the U.S. around 2007-08. In response to the global financial crisis, the U.S. slashed interest rates to near zero to stimulate the economy. Canada, though far less affected by the crisis, adopted a broadly similar approach... Monetary policy is only part of the story. The cities topping the unaffordability list – Toronto, Vancouver and Los Angeles – share two traits: sustained population growth and restrictive zoning. Crucially, population growth alone doesn’t make housing unaffordable. Texas and Florida have seen some of the fastest growth in North America, yet their cities remain relatively affordable. The difference lies in regulation. Over the past decades, cities such as Toronto and Vancouver have imposed restrictive zoning and municipal red tape that choked supply. When housing can’t respond to demand, prices surge and affordability collapses."
Ottawa’s 'non-market' housing policies won’t work - "Mark Carney has a PhD in economics from Oxford but it seems he was in the stream where they didn’t cover prices, markets, scarcity or capitalism. The PMO news release describing Build Canada Homes — once you get past the obligatory bits for this government about “super-charging” and “catalyzing” — seems almost proudly un-economic. “Build Canada Homes will focus primarily on non-market housing.” The plan is to build “deeply affordable and community housing for low-income households.” And by using public lands, BCH will “take land costs out of the equation.” There’s a lot to de-catalyze in there. “Deeply affordable” presumably means really cheap. But the housing itself is going to be high-quality and BCH will prioritize “low-carbon materials, low-carbon technologies and efficient design” and “maximize Canadian resources.” I’m not exactly sure what that last bit means but you can be sure it will cost. In fact, an explicit goal is to “build an entirely new Canadian housing industry” (no hubris here!) with “high-paying jobs” across the country. There’s also going to be substantial overtime. The press release says — twice in the same paragraph — that Canada’s new housing industry will build “365 days a year.” Even on the Christian-settler holiday known as Christmas? On the other hand, frenzied building doesn’t start right away: for the time being BCH will “incubate” within government, “leveraging existing resources and expertise within the government’s housing toolkit.” They do a lot of “leveraging” in Ottawa: there are five different mentions of “leveraging” in the one release. And that’s a cute use of “toolkit” in the context, no? I’m guessing Ottawa’s housing toolkit doesn’t include such useful things as a wrench or a hammer. But if all the new housing is to be high-quality and sustainable, disdain foreign inputs and (you just know) be required to comply with all sorts of other federal rules and regulations, it will be expensive. When was the last time Ottawa did anything on-time and under-budget? D-Day? The housing will be “deeply affordable” to the people who will live in it only if it’s given away or permanently subsidized. But taxpayers will pay premium prices to make those gifts possible. By the way, will there be a lottery for the largesse? Or will distribution be subject to the usual rules about diversity, inclusivity and “majorities need not apply”? As for the bit about taking land costs “out of the equation” by using public land the government already owns, that’s just plug-ignorant. It’s a Lecture-One lesson in economics that accounting costs aren’t what really matter, “opportunity costs” are. The tracts of urban land the federal government is sitting on have substantial opportunity costs. Any number of private developers would make big offers to take them off the government’s hands... At the heart of economics is the idea that prices give you information about what things are worth. The more prices you deliberately ignore, the more decisions you make that don’t take the value of alternatives into account. It’s a good recipe for bad choices. At the heart of many economists’ approach to public policy is the motto: “Hard heads, soft hearts,” which was the title of a 1988 book by Princeton economist Alan Blinder — sub-head: “Tough-minded economics for a just society.” The homeless people who beg at red lights, offer to wash your windshield or populate the tent cities that are making the country’s downtowns increasingly unlivable usually seem to have much more serious problems than just absence of decent indoor accommodation. Housing problems — not being able to make the rent or mortgage payment — may have started their slide. But giving them a key to a spanking new all-Canadian sustainable modular home on which they pay nominal rent almost certainly won’t be enough to get them back to employability and solvency."
Jesse Kline: Carney's statist plan to fix the government-caused housing crisis - "Nearly six months after promising to “build twice as many homes every year,” on Sunday, Prime Minister Mark Carney followed the path laid out by virtually every other left-leaning politician in the country by launching a new government bureaucracy intended to increase the stock of affordable (read: socialized) housing throughout the country. You’ll be forgiven if you’ve heard this one before. Promising affordable housing is a favourite pastime of the federal Liberals, largely because most of the impediments to building new homes fall outside Ottawa’s jurisdiction. It’s far easier to spend gobs of taxpayer money and create giant new bureaucracies than to actually deal with the reasons why Canada’s housing supply has failed to meet demand. In 2017, the Liberals launched a $40-billion “National Housing Strategy” (NHS), which has since more than doubled in size, with the goal of building 125,000 new public housing units, refurbishing 300,000 and cutting homelessness in half within a decade. In the lead-up to the 2021 election , the government set aside an additional $2.5 billion to create 35,000 affordable units. And the 2024 budget and fall economic statement earmarked an extra $8.3 billion for various affordable-housing initiatives. How successful were these strategies? The proliferation of homeless encampments in our major cities clearly show that, eight years into its 10-year plan, the Ottawa isn’t anywhere close to cutting homelessness in half. Indeed, a report last year from Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada found that the homeless population increased by 20 per cent between 2018 and 2022. Counting the number of homeless people is notoriously hard. Quantifying the affordable housing stock should be relatively easy. But unfortunately, even that is too much to ask of this country. According to a 2024 report from the Canadian Housing Evidence Collaborative, “There is no official estimate of the size (absolute or proportion of total) for Canada’s social or non-market housing stock.” The government will brag that the NHS has “supported or committed to the creation of 134,707 new units and the repair of 272,169 units,” but how many of those have actually been completed is far less clear. Enter Mark Carney with his “ bold new approach ” to solving the housing affordability crisis: spending “unprecedented” amounts of money to fix the problem that the previously unprecedented amount of taxpayer-looted wealth failed to address. His government is launching a new federal bureaucracy — unimaginatively called Build Canada Homes (BCH) — with $13 billion in initial funding. At the outset, BCH intends to build 4,000 new affordable homes on federal land in Dartmouth, N.S., Longueuil, Que., Winnipeg, Edmonton, Ottawa and Toronto. But construction isn’t supposed to even get underway until sometime next year, and it could be years before any of those homes are occupied. To spearhead the new department, Carney tapped Ana Bailão , a former Toronto city councillor who was on the board of Toronto Community Housing and chaired the planning and housing committee. While the prime minister hailed her as a “seasoned leader with deep experience in affordable housing,” her track record on the file is less than stellar. According to data from the Low-end of Market Rental Housing Monitor , Toronto’s stock of non-market housing actually decreased during Bailão’s tenure on city council, from 77,742 units in 2010 to 72,143 in 2022. Even according to the city’s own numbers , half way through its 10-year plan to build 65,000 rent-controlled homes between 2020 and 2030, it has only completed 1,242. The city maintains a running tally of its progress toward its affordable-housing target, which shows that the vast majority of projects are stuck in the pre-planning and application-review stages. And herein lies the problem: even purpose-built government housing initiatives do not have the inertia necessary to cut through the mounds of red tape that municipalities have built up over the years. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre identified this problem long ago, promising to use the federal purse strings to coax cities into relaxing zoning rules and reducing bureaucratic overhead. By hiring a former city planner who presided over an ever-worsening real estate market to head the new housing department, Carney is virtually ensuring that it will be business as usual for Canada’s overbearing city councils. Worse still, this week’s announcement does nothing to increase the supply of market housing — the type that productive members of society aren’t forced to subsidize through their tax dollars. Based on promises made during the election, that plan is still to come, but it will also involve the BCH acting “as a developer” and require significant amounts of public funding. Carney has clearly failed to learn the No. 1 lesson of the past 10 years of Liberal rule: you can’t solve problems by throwing truckloads of money at them. If the $82-billion NHS failed to bring house prices and homelessness under control, it’s hard to see how the $13-billion BCH is going to fare any better."
Time to blame "Conservative" provincial governments
The left wing answer is always to spend even more money. Words speak louder than actions or results
But of course left wingers claim Carney is really a Conservative
Public backlash to 'gigantic' multiplex homes in Burnaby, B.C., has council scaling back - "Public outrage over the size of new multiplex homes popping up all over Burnaby, B.C., has convinced city councillors to rein in the rules around what can be built. Multiplex homes in the city will be smaller — and have more on-site parking — as a result. Burnab y, a city of about 250,000 residents just east of Vancouver, introduced multiplex housing in July last year, when the province mandated most B.C. municipalities to allow between four and six homes on single-family lots... O’Meara said he’s worried for people’s property values due to the visual impact on the neighbouring properties. Former B.C. MLA and Burnaby resident Kathy Corrigan said it’s true that she’s a “NIMBY” — “not in my backyard.” “I definitely don’t want it in my backyard towering over … four storeys high. No, I don’t want it in my neighbourhood,” she said."
Damn greedy investors and corporations keeping housing expensive!
Toronto neighbours fear huge tower may give them cancer and collapse their homes - "A local neighbourhood group is concerned about an approved plan to construct a 42-storey tower in their area, raising a long list of fears about the new development in an open letter shared earlier this month. The group, which calls itself "Concerned Residents of Willowdale," has various concerns about the planned tower at 2810–2816 Bayview Avenue. Among the group's fears, they claim that the construction of this new tower will put them at risk of a rare type of cancer and even the potential for excavation of the adjacent site to collapse their homes... "This decision overrides zoning laws, ignores health and safety risks, and sets a dangerous precedent for all Toronto neighbourhoods near transit," reads the email."
"Affordable" "Social" housing is a nightmare to live near : r/TorontoRealEstate - "I want to point this out for those who have never experienced it and think we should house our homeless/vulnerable population in cities. It's just not that simple, these people aren't homeless for the lack of a home and the solution to homelessness isn't affordable housing. You cause a nightmare for the whole neighborhood and ruin life for people/businesses in these areas, forcing them to move out and creating a ghetto. The government employees and social workers will make many promises that they will make sure it's good and then they will ignore how bad it gets and call you ignorant or a conservative if you complain.
Take this for an example
"Wildlife Thrift Store is on the corner of Granville and Drake, and its owners are calling for action after they say the staff turnover, stress, and financial costs have reached a boiling point.
“The last three years, our business has spent over $300,000 to cover the recent, mandatory costs of security guards and broken windows. This is a ‘new cost of doing business’ we have been forced to pay in order to keep employees safe and keep up with the ongoing damage to our building,” it wrote on Instagram.
“In 2021, The Howard Johnson Hotel on Granville Street was converted to house those experiencing homelessness, mental health and addiction — the EXACT demographic our business aims to help through regular quarterly donations and has in Vancouver for over 23 years now. All of those dollars 💸 COULD have gone/be going to the charities we benefit.”"
"BC Housing and the BC government bought the 110-room building at 1176 Granville Street for $55 million as part of an affordable housing project. At the time, it was announced that residents would include those who had been displaced by the clearing of the Oppenheimer Park encampment. However, the province had said it would eventually become affordable long-term housing."
Also to note, affordable housing represents a great opportunity for governments to reward backers. Note that the BC NDP is generally paying 1.5-2x or more assessed value for these hotels and is paying around $500k for an old hotel room. Hotel operators donated big to the NDP's campaign and they are getting rewarded. The BC government assessed 1176 Granville at $20 million today and it was assessed at the39M in 2021. That's 55M for 110 rooms ($500k/hotel room in 2021 for rooms built in 1911) and a loss of 35M going by BC assessment $318k/room. Donating to the NDP is the best investment you'll ever make."
Rustad Would Scrap Zoning Reforms, Keep Rent Control : r/britishcolumbia - "The hotels have been artificially limiting supply for years, and that’s a large part of why AirBNB became so popular throughout North America. I remember at a point when travelling in the US that I was saving hundreds of dollars per trip using AirBNB, particularly in California. AirBNB is also what allowed me to move to BC and live cheaply for several months while I (a) wanted to see if I actually wanted to live here, and (b) looked for an apartment once I decided I wanted to stay long term. This was pre-Covid, but at that time the savings of an AirBNB over a hotel in Metro Vancouver was well over $1,000 per month. (Where I stayed would still be allowed under current regulations as it was a spare room in someone’s 2BR condo that they lived in)"
Rustad Would Scrap Zoning Reforms, Keep Rent Control : r/britishcolumbia - "Is it the hotels limiting supply or is it zoning?"
"Zoning. Even small cities need to plan for more accommodations throughout the community wherever commercial services are located. There's enough competition in the industry to take care of the rest."
