Nearly 20 per cent of GTA homeowners under 35 own more than one property, survey finds | The Star - "those who have second properties are often ones that got into the market early. They have been able to use equity from their previously purchased property — which has since gone up in value — to buy another home, often, a bigger home and sometimes outside of the city. Many keep their first property to rent out as a source of income"
Doug Ford's housing task force calls for more density, less public consultation - "Ontario should aim to build 1.5 million new homes in the next decade by increasing density in urban and suburban areas and by drastically overhauling how cities approve housing projects, says a new report commissioned by Premier Doug Ford's government. The Housing Affordability Task Force makes 55 recommendations aimed at reining in home prices by dramatically boosting the supply of housing. The cost of buying the average home in Ontario has nearly tripled over the past 10 years... The task force's proposed changes would lessen the power that cities have over housing developments by giving the province the authority to impose standards related to zoning, density and urban design...
Some of the report's key recommendations:
Increase density in neighbourhoods zoned exclusively for single-family homes.
Repeal municipal policies that focus on preserving a neighbourhood's character.
Set uniform provincial standards for urban design, including building shadows and setbacks.
Limit the time spent consulting the public on housing developments.
Legislate timelines for development approvals, and if the municipality misses the deadline, the project gets an automatic green light...
"A shortage of land isn't the cause of the problem," the report continues. "Land is available, both inside the existing built-up areas and on undeveloped land outside greenbelts. We need to make better use of land." The task force highlights that Toronto has just one-quarter the population density of such major global cities as New York and London... Municipalities that fail to meet the province's housing growth targets and approval timelines should have their provincial funding reduced... The report recommends significant loosening of zoning restrictions in neighbourhoods that currently allow only detached or semi-detached houses. If put in place, the change would automatically allow secondary suites, garden suites, laneway houses and multi-tenant housing in residential neighbourhoods. The report also urges the automatic approval of up to four housing units on any residential lot. The task force takes particular aim at "not in my backyard" opposition to development. "NIMBYism is a large and constant obstacle to providing housing everywhere," the report says. "We cannot allow opposition and politicization of individual housing projects to prevent us from meeting the needs of all Ontarians." Planning has become politicized "because local councillors depend on the votes of residents who want to keep the status quo," the report says. It notes that pushback from existing residents keeps new residents out of neighbourhoods, delays development approvals and increases housing costs."
Some people complain about poor subway coverage. With a quarter the population density, it's no surprise
The NIMBYs will just blame foreigners - xenophobia is good when you personally benefit
Opinion: B.C. court ruling that taxing foreign homebuyers is not racist clears way for federal action - "B.C. Appeal Court Justice Barbara Fisher has confirmed, in a unanimous decision of the three-judge panel, that the province’s 20 per cent tax on foreign buyers of residential property rose out of the valid “view that foreign nationals significantly contributed to the escalation of prices of housing” in Metro Vancouver. She stated the tax “was neither a stereotype nor a continuation of racist policies from the past.” The judges rejected the extensive argument by Chinese national Jing Li, a temporary resident of Canada represented by the late lawyer Joe Arvay, that the tax perpetuates “prejudice, stereotyping, or disadvantages on Chinese people.” While Fisher concluded that, indeed, “a higher proportion of foreign buyers were from China,” she said the tax is constitutional because it does not differentiate based on country of origin... Canada has been one of the slowest jurisdictions in the world to impose limits on foreign ownership of real estate... The most recent data from the Canadian Housing Statistics Program shows that non-residents own five per cent of the housing stock in Metro Vancouver. That figure rises to 7.5 per cent in the city of Vancouver and Richmond. And it jumps again for newly built condos, of which 19 per cent in the city of Vancouver and 24 per cent in Richmond are owned by non-Canadians... There are several other policy areas Yan hopes politicians to promise to address in the federal election expected this fall. They include curbing “property speculation” by both foreign and domestic investors, stopping the rapid “flipping” of homes for a quick profit and increasing food security by protecting farmland, which is vulnerable to foreign ownership and to being misused for mansions and non-agricultural purposes... B.C.’s original foreign-buyers tax, the judge noted, was supported by 89 per cent of Asian-Canadian residents of Metro Vancouver."
It is sexier to bash foreigners than to remove red tape and bulldoze through NIMBYs and other people who are afraid of change and want everything to stay the same
I'm sure preventing farmland from being turned into housing will lower prices
Foreign Investors Aren’t Behind the Housing Crisis… But They Are its Scapegoat - "foreign buyers represented less than 5% of our 5,000-plus sales in 2020... The imbalance of supply and demand in the Toronto rental market has been exacerbated by the return of large numbers of foreign students and the resumption of immigration as borders re-open. That has made the role of foreign investor/landlords — albeit limited — all the more critical. They are long-term investors whose financial presence has allowed condo developers to increase the number of rental units available to all Canadians... According to data from the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA), the benchmark price of a condo apartment in the GTA increased $323,900 between January 2015 and July 2021. Price growth in the GTA market seemed little affected by the foreign buyers tax. BC, where we recently launched BakerWest, provides another real-life example of the inefficacy of using demand-side tools to fix supply-side challenges. BC introduced a 15% tax on foreign buyers in 2016 with a view to making houses more affordable to “local” buyers. Nevertheless, according to data from the BC Real Estate Association (BCREA), it has had little impact on affordability in the intervening years... Returning to the condo sector, a CMHC study issued in May determined that “the share of non-resident ownership in condominium apartments remains low and stable.” In Toronto it was 2.6%, Montreal 1.8%, and in Vancouver and Halifax just 1.3%. Assessing the real estate market in its totality, a 2019 CHMC report, determined that properties with at least one non-resident owner represented just 6.2% of the BC market, 3.3% of Ontario, and 6.2% of Nova Scotia. Simply put: Foreign investors are hardly the market dominating disruptors that politicians would have Canadians believe. And the longer we focus on villainizing them, the longer we delay dealing with the real issue: increasing housing supply."
Foreign buyers are not the problem politicians would have you believe | The Star - "It is also worth noting that both China and India, the countries of origin for newcomers and investors alike, have toughened their capital export rules, making it more difficult to get money out of those countries. The other political position worth challenging is the proposed ban on “blind bids.” “Bidding blind” is a long-established practice governed by clear rules. Each party submits their best offer with no information other than the number of competing bidders. In other jurisdictions like Australia and New Zealand, where open auctions are the rule, there has been the same rate of house-price appreciation as Canada."
The theory of immigrants and foreign investors driving Canada's property market is about to be tested - "“This idea that foreigners are the reason for our housing prices going up, is going to be tested out right now. There are no flights, and so the rich investors that went away for the winter, they’ve not come back. Yet, I see the market for single-detached houses is roaring right now,” said a real estate agent in Toronto whose clients are mostly high networth Iranians."
Toronto’s plan for affordable housing? Tax new homes more | The Star - " the City of Toronto will consider a proposal to expand the creation of below-market housing — known as inclusionary zoning — that puts the burden entirely on new home buyers. If this proposal is accepted, the building of new housing may move elsewhere, defeating the goal of building affordable housing, exacerbating the GTA’s housing supply challenge and putting at risk economic activity that development creates and our region needs as we recover from the pandemic. Or, if housing does get built, purchasers of market-rate units will be on the hook for another $61,000 in costs. Why is housing affordability such a challenge in the City of Toronto in the first place? There are two reasons. The first is that housing supply is not able to keep up with demand. New supply is severely limited by restrictive zoning and is slow to come to market due to an overly bureaucratic approval process. Second, a full 25 per cent of the cost of a new housing unit in the GTA consists of government fees, taxes and charges. These costs on new development are passed on to the new home buyer, in the same way that increases in the cost of steel or labour are reflected in the price of a new car. The City of Toronto adds costs onto new projects in the form of parkland charges, development charges, planning fees, section 37 charges, property taxes and municipal land transfer taxes. Of the roughly $186,000 in taxes and fees added to the cost of a new one-bedroom condominium in Toronto, the city takes 43 per cent. The city’s inclusionary zoning proposal, if approved, will add yet more costs for new home owners — on average, $61,000 more per one-bedroom unit. Inclusionary zoning rules were established by the province as a means to encourage denser and hopefully more affordable housing around major transit station areas"
Extravagant fees crush legal basement apartments | The Star - "They hired an architect at considerable expense to prepare plans to add a rear addition so that the house would have four dwelling units with two side walkouts, a rear deck and a new detached garage. That’s when the trouble began. After spending a great deal of money on architectural drawings, and another $5,000 to the city to apply for building permits, Ben was told that his application triggered four additional fees:
A development charge of $80,000 (that is not a misprint).
An education development charge of $4,500 which goes to the Toronto Catholic District School Board.
A parkland fee of $72,000 based on property value. and
A road damage deposit of $2,400.
Ben calculated the total fees payable to the city, including the $5,000 permit fee, at $161,684 just to add two units, all of which is payable before a shovel goes into the ground or any interior work begins. Seeking a less expensive alternative, Ben discovered that if the house was enlarged by adding just one unit, the only charge payable would be a parkland levy of slightly more than $64,500...
It’s no secret that Toronto has a severe housing shortage. High demand in all price ranges has been setting record sales levels while inventory of houses for sale is very tight, according to the Toronto Real Estate Board.This past pay May, The Star reported that 82,414 Toronto households were waiting for affordable housing in 2015, with average wait times of almost 10 years."
Ahh... regulation!
Ontario has less housing stock for its residents than any other province in Canada - "Canada's average isn't all that great either, having the lowest number of housing units per 1,000 citizens of any G7 country"
What Makes A Basement Apartment "Legal?" - "I know a thing or two about real estate, right?Fourteen years in the industry, hard-working lad, top agent in the brokerage, and memory like an elephant... So what if I told you that I have absolutely, positively, zero idea what makes a basement apartment legal in the City of Toronto?...
I don’t know what must take place for a basement apartment to be legal, but I do know the following:
1) It costs a lot.
2) It takes a ton of time.
3) Many areas of government are involved.
4) It rarely goes well on the first attempt.
5) Very few people even bother trying.
This might be the only place in life where we can tell our kids, “It’s not worth even trying.”...
The City of Toronto is turning a blind eye to illegal basement apartments. Why? Because we have a housing crisis.And if the city were to shut down 100,000 illegal basement apartments tomorrow, we’d all be worse off... You might find an illegal unit that could become legal by simply widening the bedroom window (digging out, installing a new sill, affixing a new window), adding a couple of smoke detectors and CO2 detectors, putting a fire extinguisher in the hall closet, and filling out the requisite paperwork.Or, you could go to all that trouble, only to have the unit inspected, find out you have to spend massive amounts of money, and in the process, have put a target on your back by alerting the City of Toronto to your unit.Are the illegal basement apartments in the city better left as our collective dirty little secrets?"
Globe editorial: Vancouver has a plan for the future of Canadian cities - The Globe and Mail - "In Vancouver, like other Canadian cities, low-density zoning for single-family houses means a lot of land is seriously underutilized. More than 50 per cent of Vancouver’s land is devoted to just 15 per cent of the city’s housing. The draft plan has ideas to increase development near rapid transit and shopping areas, but it is the proposal to allow more types of housing in neighbourhoods of detached single-family homes that likely will make the biggest difference in the decades ahead."
Busting the myth of Canada's million or more vacant homes - "Many believe investors and those owning multiple homes contribute to worsening housing affordability by keeping dwellings empty that could house tenants or new millennial owners... it turns out that the percentage of vacant homes is actually low, and even lower in high-demand urban areas. Furthermore, some dwellings are temporarily vacant for a reason, for example, transitioning from one occupant to the next... Even if no one resided there on census day, did it remain unoccupied for a week, a month or the entire year? And what about the several hundred thousand cottages scattered across Canada that might be labelled unoccupied on census day, but were certainly not vacant. Jens von Bergmann, who has previously taught at the University of Calgary, said some dwellings labelled as unoccupied by CensusMapper might actually be occupied, just not by the usual residents. For example, residences used as temporary housing for students or workers are not vacant, but are considered unoccupied by the usual residents... A breakdown by the structural type of housing and city (Census subdivision) revealed the vacancy rate was much lower than eight per cent in urban Canada. Consider that while the overall vacancy rate in the City of Toronto was 4.6 per cent, census enumerators in 2016 identified a mere 2.2 per cent of the 276,630 single-detached dwellings as vacant. Even lower shares of single-detached homes were found to be empty in Montreal and Calgary, at 1.8 and 1.4 per cent, respectively... Even the empty dwelling counts by the enumerators are likely to be exaggerated because of how the census defines an apartment in a duplex, which is one of two dwellings located one above the other. If an owner decided to absorb the secondary suite into the primary dwelling or decided against renting the secondary suite, census enumerators may still count the secondary suite as vacant. Hence, the highest share of vacant dwellings is for apartments or flats in duplexes. A small percentage of dwellings will always be unoccupied or vacant. For example, a private rental home between successive tenants, a dwelling undergoing renovations or owners being temporarily away for work will cause dwellings to be unoccupied. Striving for 100 per cent of the dwellings to be occupied all the time is neither practical nor useful. The supply skeptics, however, continue to lobby the governments against building more homes."
Want cheaper housing in Toronto? Then stop fighting every attempt to add more neighbours to your neighbourhood | The Star - "In deepest Cabbagetown, the Hampton Mansions building has stood among the gingerbread Victorian homes for 110-years, and it hasn’t destroyed the neighbourhood. Calling the building “Mansions” is not unlike the aspirational naming conventions of condo buildings today that give the impression of luxury, even when few truly are. No, the Hampton Mansions were built as a three-storey middle class apartment building, one that was turned into the affordable “Three Streets Housing Co-op” in 1981, back when our various levels of government actually built and funded affordable housing in a big way. With its stately balconies and wrought iron fire escapes, it’s a landmark and often a stop on historic walking tours, yet it’s near-impossible to build more Hampton Mansions in neighbourhoods across Toronto due to restrictive zoning. During a housing crisis, this is an absurd reality, but it’s supported by many homeowners and their councillors who are content with keeping more people out. Still, the city of Toronto is looking at ways to get more density into neighbourhoods, part of the “Expanding Housing Options in Neighbourhoods” initiative. This includes housing that is known as the “missing middle” — the “middle” size between detached houses and larger apartment buildings, including duplexes, triplexes, laneway houses and lowrise walk-up apartments... These aren’t skyscrapers plunked into the middle of lowrise neighbourhoods, but with the amount of opposition they receive you’d be forgiven for thinking they are. The resistance across Toronto is frustrating and, frankly, embarrassing from people who claim to know better. In Harbord Village, wealthy residents have been opposing the conversion of a two-storey building, used as a synagogue, art centre and office space in its 100-year history, into a seven-unit apartment. Just seven units and a block from the Bloor subway and a few more from the Spadina streetcar. They’ve even set up a GoFundMe to raise money to cover the legal and administrative costs of opposing these apartments. If seven apartments can’t fit in here, where can they fit in Toronto? This neighbourhood, along with the adjacent areas like the Annex, are thought of as progressive enclaves but they are extremely conservative on housing issues. Some residents will say they oppose this or similar projects because they’re “luxury” — there’s that word again — but would they really be supportive if it was truly affordable? Nearby, the new development at Honest Ed’s, a site that includes affordable units, was reduced by about 200 units altogether after objections from neighbourhood residents. That’s several hundred people who will now be unable to live in the neighbourhood because people with houses and backyards didn’t want them nearby. Up in Deer Park a proposal to turn two single-family homes into a 12-unit, three-storey tall condo is being opposed by neighbours, objections that are being seriously entertained by the local councillor. Never mind that the site is a few minutes’ walk to the St. Clair streetcar and Yonge subway, or that houses like this are routinely replaced with monster homes of similar or even greater scale with little formal objection. All of this is insidious, selfish misanthropy. For people who fashion themselves as progressive, they often say “we support housing” but not here, or not this kind, or another in a long list of reasons why the objectionable project is an exception to their otherwise benevolent, pro-housing view. It becomes comical, like reading from a script, and it happens in Toronto, Vancouver, San Francisco and anywhere else there is pressure for new housing and rich homeowners who demand exclusivity to their neighbourhoods. With so many neighbourhoods off limits to even this kind gentle density, a lot of building gets forced into relatively few places. These are often along main streets and in clusters like Liberty Village or Yonge and Eglinton. Here’s something else for so-called progressives to think about: many of the places where new housing is allowed, affordable or not, is along busy transportation corridors with high pollution and noise levels. Is that progressive? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come across older, subsidized apartment buildings or co-ops wedged in along busy corridors with heavy traffic or diesel train exhaust belching out next door. The least desirable scraps of land — that’s where people think new housing belongs. Opposition to the missing middle comes from the comfortable, people who bought because they had the money or back when it was much cheaper, and they will show up in droves and with resources and righteous indignation at meetings to oppose it."
Some of the entirely manmade reasons you can't afford a house in Canada - "According to the most recent Demographia rankings of housing unaffordability, Canadians were more priced out of their own markets than Americans, Brits or even Singaporeans. This has only been exacerbated by a late-pandemic real estate surge that has sent prices skyrocketing even in secondary markets. Canada seems like a weird place to have a housing unaffordability crisis: We have virtually unlimited land and plenty of trees and gypsum mines with which to build them...
only 10 per cent of the Vancouver housing market is owned by non-residents. However, given that only a small fraction of a city’s housing market will come up for sale in a typical year, even a moderate amount of outside cash thrown into the mix can tip the scales into the realm of $1 million teardowns. Stock prices, for instance, are routinely sent into the stratosphere by buyers bidding up a small fraction of a company’s available shares. “While many downplay this factor (“it’s only X% of the buyers!”), Economics 101 will tell you that the marginal buyer sets the price,” wrote BMO Chief Economist Douglas Porter in a 2016 report. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to characterize foreign capital as the singular factor blowing up the price of Canadian real estate. New Zealand, for instance, maintains an outright ban on any foreign ownership of an existing property within the country. This means that if you’re a non-resident who wants to live amongst Kiwis (such as Canadian-born director James Cameron), you’ve got to be prepared to build your own home. Despite this, New Zealand housing prices have still managed to rise an eye-watering 24 per cent over the last 12 months. In recent years, the B.C. government has also taken some major legislative action aimed at discouraging foreign buyers: A 20 per cent foreign buyers’ tax and a two per cent speculation and vacancy tax to punish the owners of empty homes. This has cooled the West Coast housing market, but it didn’t stop Vancouver housing prices from rising 11.4 per cent in 2020. The moral? Foreign buyers can absolutely blow out a real estate market, but banishing them isn’t a panacea to achieving housing affordability.
Canadian cities are actively rigged to prevent new supply. For several years, a team at the University of British Columbia has been working to catalogue the zoning laws across Metro Vancouver. Their findings reveal a region that is almost exclusively geared towards single family homes. In the vast majority of the 3,000 square kilometres that make up Metro Vancouver, it is illegal to build anything more dense than a duplex. In a city that talks endlessly about its affordability crisis, even building a laneway home comes up against a Kafkaesque nightmare of red tape. It’s a similar situation in Toronto, where the majority of neighbourhoods explicitly ban anything except “detached housing.” San Francisco, one of the most expensive housing markets in the United States, has a density problem that is visible from space. Aerial photos of the city reveal a small core of high-rises in the downtown surrounded by a gray sea of two storey homes. Like with any other market, houses become expensive if governments limit their supply. If your municipal government suddenly started restricting the number of beets that could be sold in local grocery stores, the price of borscht would explode overnight. And right now, Canada’s per-capita supply of housing units is lower than in any other G7 country. Canada’s high rate of migration helps to increase supply pressures, but it’s no excuse for such an acute housing shortage given that, proportionally, our rate of in-migration is lower than Germany, the U.K. and even Switzerland. In an email to the National Post, Leo Spalteholz, a B.C. real estate analyst, called municipal restrictions on new supply the “#1 cause of high prices.” They’re also the most insidious. When urbanites such as Margaret Atwood go all-out to oppose even the construction of low-rise condo units in their vicinity, the ultimate result is cities where the housing supply is kept artificially stifled.
It keeps getting more expensive to build a house. Every green ordinance or code upgrade imposes additional costs on the price of building a home. The B.C. Step Code — a 2017 law which contains an escalating series of requirements intended to bring homes to net-zero emissions — will add an estimated $50,000 to the price of a new home at its highest level. A recent Building Industry and Land Association report found that the costs to approve and develop a home in the Greater Toronto area had increased as much as 878 per cent since 2004. B.C. introduced a land transfer tax as a luxury tax in 1987, back when the average B.C. home price was less than $200,000. Now, with the average Vancouver home price topping out at $1,359,516, the provincial government demands $25,190.32 before the new owners even move in. And a latticework of local regulations help drive up the price of construction. Vancouver now mandates a minimum number of electric vehicle charging stations for new builds, and any building project working near trolleybus wires must hire a certified “Trolley Overhead Safety Watcher” at $90 an hour to supervise the wires."
Multi-storey underground basements for Toronto’s rich? That’ll only dig us all deeper into our climate change hole - "Though iceberg houses are uncommon (according to a spokesperson from the Building Industry and Land Development Association), residents of Hoggs Hollow, represented by Robinson, are angry about one iceberg development in particular: a project that according to Robinson will boast “an extended underground basement that includes a multi-car garage and sports court.”... “The biggest issue is that Toronto has created a situation where it’s easier on a given piece of land to build one 3,000-square-foot house than it is to build three or four 1,000-square-foot houses. So each of the homes that isn’t being built here [in the city] is being built farther out where people are dependent on cars... “NIMBYism in Toronto, and sprawl in the greater Golden Horseshoe are two sides of the same coin. If you care about protecting farmland, natural heritage and tackling climate change, you have got to show up in support of intensification in your neighbourhood.”"
This suggests that people who lobby against development (i.e. NIMBYs) just don't want things to change
Signs are depicting Toronto development proposals as literal monsters to fight housing - "Toronto is in a housing crisis, and real estate industry experts keep stressing that the best way to escape is through actually getting shovels in the ground and building up the supply of homes. But for every developer championing a new build, there's usually at least one community group fighting to stop it... one community organization known as Save Our Junction, passing out lawn signs in the West Junction neighbourhood that show a tall building anthropomorphized to snuff out a helpless single-family home like a discarded cigarette... Its website claims to be against what the organization describes (in all caps for effect) as "DESTRUCTIVE DEVELOPMENT," claiming that building mid-rise housing in their neighbourhood "reduces the quality of life for residents" and "is NOT the answer to the affordable housing crisis," neglecting to offer any alternative solutions in its place. It's clear from their justification that the organization's main concern is that their own neighbourhood is on the verge of (gasp) change to support more residents. And they're using imagery of scary monsters to try and fight any solutions to the housing crisis that encroach on their exclusive, privileged way of life... Hertel says that planners make evidence-based decisions, and "all evidence points to intensification is a good thing." He points out that "It's not just good for people who are in the building industry," with benefits for current and future residents. Though the Save Our Junction website claims it wants to educate people on "provincial urban intensification dogma versus reality of dwindling urban population," Hertel contends that "The data is very clear that Toronto is hemorrhaging population in its low-density development popularized as the yellow belt." "The fewer people there are in the neighbourhood, the shops and public services that draw people to that neighbourhood in the first place begin to lose their viability"... It's also worth noting that while the community organization is using an image of a tower crushing a house, the developments planned throughout this area are predominantly mid-rise. This monster imagery and mischaracterization of height are not new tactics specific to The Junction at all, seen with another recent example characterizing an 18-storey development as a monster threatening to destroy neighbouring buildings. The above example falsely categorizes the proposed building as a skyscraper to rally dissent and obscures the details of the project, which actually maintains a low-rise presence on the streetscape residents claim is under threat. And it isn't just a Toronto phenomenon either, like this case out of East Culver City in the U.S. Sometimes the monster has teeth, and sometimes it's Bigfoot, but the message is always more or less the same. Big buildings = bad, status quo = good. Needs of the wider community be damned."
One common NIMBY trope is that development is bad because it helps developers. That's cutting off your nose to spite your face. Apparently win-win solutions are bad if people you don't like benefit and others should suffer just to prevent your enemies winning
Adam Zivo: Toronto goes to war with the province to keep housing prices high - "new supply is often obstructed by municipal politicians and bureaucrats who, subjugated by “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) activism, reflexively oppose new developments. In 2019, the Ontario Progressive Conservatives moved to overcome this obstacle by putting out a new plan, titled “A Place to Grow” (APTG), which was supported by existing legislation, that forces municipalities to densify areas around transit infrastructure, whether they like it or not. However, Toronto’s city planners appear to be undermining the APTG, preferring to protect rich homeowners at the expense of new buyers. The APTG mandates that municipalities densify “major transit station areas” (MTSAs), which is defined as areas within a 10-minute walk of a transit station. Not only is there strong market demand there, it’s more economical and better for the environment when cities maximize the use of transit infrastructure by building up around transit hubs. Encircling subway stations with low-density housing (especially single-family detached homes) is wasteful — but that’s an outcome zoning laws often artificially impose... city planners are deliberately trying to undermine the provincial government’s densification mandate, preventing new housing from being built and contributing to Toronto’s affordability crisis (and, by extension, to higher housing prices in nearby regions)... It takes audacity to publish a report filled with satellite screenshots of ultra low-density housing and argue that it is simply impossible to build there. Tragically, that is what happens under Toronto’s ridiculous zoning laws, which privilege well-off, low-density neighbourhoods (hotbeds of NIMBY-ism) by restricting new developments within them. As noted in a series of tweets by Alex Bozikovic, the Globe and Mail’s architecture critic, Toronto’s city planners are arguing that it is impossible to meet the province’s minimum density targets because they are incompatible with the maximum development allowed under the city’s current zoning bylaws. But why should Toronto’s zoning bylaws be obeyed here? If said bylaws are incompatible with provincially mandated density targets, they should be adjusted to conform to provincial law. That is the entire point of these provincial targets — to force change within municipal regulations to unlock more housing supply... Toronto’s city planners appear to have deliberately drawn the borders of some MTSAs to exclude affluent, low-density neighbourhoods from further development. The issues with the OPT are so egregious that even Toronto Coun. Kristyn Wong-Tam, a well-known NIMBY, said that the lower density requested by city planners is “shocking.”"
Supply is the only cause and solution to Canada's housing woes — it's time to be bold - "the pace of housing construction has picked up, as evidenced by the increase in the number of housing starts. But one cannot ignore that the high number of starts has only reached the same level observed decades ago when Canada’s population was nearly half of what it is today. A recently released Bank of Canada report focused on what drives housing prices and why housing in some cities is becoming increasingly more expensive than the rest. The report also offers further proof that prices are inherently tied to the pace of new housing construction. Nuno Paixão, a senior economist at the central bank’s Financial Stability Department, compared the increase in housing prices in various cities and concluded that prices rose faster in cities where the housing supply was inadequate... Paixão adopts a unique approach to studying the interaction between demand and supply by contrasting housing prices in a city with that of the larger region it sits in. For example, during boom times, prices rose across the western region, yet prices in Vancouver increased much higher and faster than in Winnipeg. Similarly, the drop in prices in Vancouver was more pronounced than in Winnipeg when regional housing prices declined... a one per cent increase in housing prices in a typical (median) city was associated with an increase in housing supply of 2.2 per cent. However, huge differences exist in how cities respond to price increases. A one per cent increase in housing prices is associated with a 0.63 per cent increase in supply in Vancouver and 4.34 per cent in Winnipeg. The report, therefore, demonstrates that Winnipeg is responding to increased demand with more supply than Vancouver. Not building enough housing impacts prices. Again, a one per cent increase in housing demand is likely to increase housing prices by 1.57 per cent in Vancouver and 0.23 per cent in Winnipeg. A comparison across all cities in the study revealed that housing prices rose much faster over time in cities with relatively lower supply. The report concluded “that cities in Canada with more inelastic housing supply (elasticity below median) faced a higher house price growth during this period than the cities with more elastic supply.”"
