Links - 26th June 2024 (2 - Housing in Canada)

The Housing Market Isn’t Racist. Blame Your Parents Instead - "There’s no shortage of bad advice on how to fix Canada’s housing market. Proposals guaranteed to make our current housing shortage much, much worse are in ready supply from a variety of sources. But what if time is short and you need to access all the bad ideas in one convenient location? Then make haste for the Office of the Federal Housing Advocate (FHA). The FHA was created by the Justin Trudeau government in 2022 to offer guidance on federal housing policy. Former professional accordion player Marie-Josée Houle is the first and only person to hold this position. And over the past two years she has established her office as Ottawa’s one-stop-shop for the worst possible advice on housing issues.  Houle’s primary obsession is with “financialization”. Her complaint being that the housing market is an actual “market” in which suppliers seek to make a living offering housing to people who demand it. The FHA instead wants to ban profit-making in housing provision. Her ultimate goal... is to ensure most of the new housing units Canada needs over the next few years are built on a “nonmarket” basis. Given the realities of home construction and public finances, it is a complete fantasy. The FHA also wants to make it nearly impossible for landlords to evict tenants for any reason, including non-payment of rent, as well as to impose nationwide rent control and grant homeless squatters property rights over public parks. All this is driven by the FHA’s oft-repeated claim that housing is a government-guaranteed human right in Canada. It isn’t. Another of Houle’s dangerous and alarming assertions is that Canada’s housing market is rife with racism, which must also be countered in dramatic fashion. A report her office produced in 2022, The Uneven Racialized Impacts of Financialization, states that “The violence of evictions and forced displacements stemming from the ongoing housing crisis in Black, Indigenous and other racialized communities exemplifies the severe consequences of the financialization of housing.” To rectify alleged housing market racism, the FHA report demands a variety of draconian policies, including a public takeover of privately-owned apartment buildings and a federal ban on lending by banks and pension funds to for-profit housing providers. The impact of such measures on housing supply would be devastating. Like the rest of the FHA’s output, the claim that Canada’s housing market is inherently racist is delivered with maximum conviction, volume and outrage. Convincing evidence is harder to come by. The report mentioned above focuses mainly on American data and is peppered with vague statements such as “it might be hypothesized” and “in the opinion of the report’s authors.” The central accusation that housing racism is pervasive in Canada is supported only by the facile observation that low-income areas of Toronto are more prone to evictions, and that certain racial groups are more likely to live in low-income areas. Ergo, Toronto’s housing market must be controlled by racists... Despite the federal Liberals’ best efforts at fostering racial discord, however, Statcan’s results generally reveal the many ways in which our country is not racist, and how it largely continues to be defined by the concepts of equal opportunity and merit... “The large homeownership disparities observed among different population groups in their 20s were primarily attributed to differences in their tendency to live in the parental home,” the report observes. Chinese-Canadians were more likely to live at home with their parents as young adults. This meant they spent less on rent during those years and had more resources to buy a home later in life when they finally moved out. On the other hand, blacks and Latin Americans were more likely to leave the parental home early, more likely to jump into the rental market sooner and thus more likely to spend a greater share of their income on rent as young adults. This meant they had less money to put down for a home as they reached middle age... Japanese, Korean, South Asian and Chinese men all earned substantially more than white men... Among women, whites were outearned by a majority of racial groups, including Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Filipino, South Asia and Arab... Asian-heritage Canadians appearing at the top of a racially-constructed leaderboard is also apparent when the subject is poverty rather than income or housing... Educational outcomes in Canada also vary widely by race ... “almost 21% of the Black group consisted of one-parent families, compared with 9% among the White group.” The lowest rates of single-parent families (South Asian at 4.5 percent, Filipino at 5.4 percent) were associated with very low rates for poverty... black Canadian families have a lone-parenthood rate nearly three-times greater than for the rest of the population... [In the US] the poverty rate of black married-couple families is consistently below the national poverty rate by a substantial margin. Black married-couple families also substantially outperform white single-mother families... what it would mean for Canada’s housing market if chartered banks and pension funds were banned from lending to “financialized landlords”, as the FHA demands. Beyond the damage done to conventional mortgage markets, such a policy would bring to a halt the short-term and bridge financing arrangements that facilitate almost all large-scale housing construction in this country. New and ongoing building projects would cease immediately. A similar result would arise from any government mandate to acquire rental housing from landlords “whose business model threatens housing security.” Who would invest in new apartment buildings once a government declares its intention to seize them? Adopting any of the FHA’s policy prescriptions regarding the private supply of housing would have a catastrophic impact on Canada’s housing market. It would also do nothing to alter the observed reality of racial variation across owners and renters, since racism has nothing to do with these gaps in the first place... While governments can always make things worse, there is very little any politician can do to lessen the observed gaps between racial groups described above. This is because these gaps are mainly the result of individual, freely-made choices in youth and adulthood. Many of the differences, covering such things as going to school, leaving home and finding a partner, have deep cultural roots that are resistant to easy policy adjustments. There may be some salutary benefit to reminding all young adults about the myriad benefits of getting and staying married.. (Although a federal program extolling two-parent households seems highly unlikely under the current Liberal administration.) But any broader solutions necessarily lie in the evolution of what Kearney calls “cultural-norms”, far beyond government control. What is considered racism today is primarily a problem at the family level. And that requires a family-based solution."  City wins years-long fight to build supportive housing project in Willowdale - “The City of Toronto is ringing in the new year with a win on housing after the Ontario Land Tribunal sided with the city on a planned supportive housing development in Willowdale. The 60-unit development, meant for people leaving homelessness, was long contested by a group of community members. The Bayview Cummer Neighbourhood Association, LiVante Holdings (Cummer) Inc. and a local group called Voices of Willowdale submitted an appeal to the tribunal. It said the development could not exist at 175 Cummer Ave. on the same property as Willowdale Manor, a four-storey Toronto Community Housing Corporation (TCHC) apartment building, housing approximately 600 seniors. The appellants argued in a three-day hearing held in November that the addition of modular housing to the site would "fundamentally change the character" of the property. They also argued it would make it harder for residents or visitors of Willowdale Manor to find parking and enjoy local green space… The city's Planning and Housing Committee unanimously approved a plan to build modular housing on the property early in 2021 under Toronto's Modular Housing Initiative. Since then, it's been a rocky road to even get shovels in the ground. The lawyer representing Willowdale residents opposed to the project says the community's needs are not being met. "Our clients at the hearing said they would be 100 per cent behind this if it had the same parameters of the site right next door at Willowdale Manor," said legal counsel Eric Gillespie. Gillespie said the appellants were told during the hearing that approximately 1,800 seniors are experiencing homelessness in Toronto. He wants assurances that they would be given priority at the new supportive housing complex.”  
Damn greedy developers and landlords keeping housing in short supply! 70 per cent of new housing demand in Ontario last year came from newcomers: analysis - "Some 70 per cent of the demand for housing in Ontario over the last year came from newcomers to Canada, an analysis of data from expert Mike Moffatt shows, raising questions about how governments are preparing to accommodate surging population growth as the country grapples with an affordability crisis largely driven by rising home prices.  But Immigration Minister Marc Miller pushed back against suggestions the federal government was solely responsible for the surge in immigration to Canada and suggested Ontario has failed to lay the necessary groundwork to welcome newcomers." First Nations of Canada Building Housing, High-Rises, Battery Plant - "Ground has already been broken on one of these projects, 11 towers with 6,000 homes being built by the Squamish Nation on a 12-acre piece of land near downtown Vancouver, Canada's most expensive real-estate market. The Squamish people were forced off of this land in the early 20th century and finally won back their ancestral territory about 20 years ago.  Because the development, named Sen̓áḵw, is on Squamish Nation reserve land, it's not subject to the same governmental land-use regulations as land elsewhere in the city, allowing for a speedier approval and construction process. The first three towers are set to be completed in November 2025, and the rest of the development is scheduled to be done in about eight years. Mindy Wight, the CEO of the Squamish development group building Sen̓áḵw, called it "the creation of a modern Squamish village" in an interview with Business Insider.  Wight sees Sen̓áḵw and other Indigenous developments as particularly innovative ways to solve the region's housing crisis.  "While the Nation benefits from generating wealth and prosperity for its members, it's actually solving some of those challenges that are facing Vancouver," Wight said.  She noted that about 20% of the units will be designated as affordable housing, and 250 units will be reserved for Nation members... In a separate effort, three First Nations — the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples — came together to create a partnership to develop six different pieces of land in Vancouver and the surrounding area. The value of the land alone, which has been acquired by the Nations over the past decade, now exceeds $4 billion, according to Brennan Cook, the vice president of the MST Development Corporation, the real-estate company representing the three First Nations.  "What they're doing here is groundbreaking, it really hasn't been done elsewhere," Cook said.  In two major projects in Vancouver, the MST Development Corporation joined with the Canadian federal government to buy two large pieces of land in the city that will be developed into entirely new communities, with schools, libraries, day-care centers, public space, and thousands of units of housing.  One 90-acre planned development, called Jericho Lands, will house up to 18,000 people — more than doubling the area's current population. The project is moving along — the Vancouver City Council unanimously approved its policy statement in January, greenlighting the creation of more finalized plans. The other development, Heather Street Lands, a 21-acre site in central Vancouver, will have about 2,600 homes.  The Nations want the developments to be an investment that reaps returns over time, so it will offer 99-year leases to homeowners, rather than selling off any of its property... But the pre-construction approval process has been slow because the land isn't First Nations reserve land and is subject to all of the government's land-use regulations. Heather Lands has been underway for a decade already and the project still isn't done with the municipal approvals process. Jericho Lands is expected to take between 20 and 30 years to complete... The housing developments have faced pushback from some community members. Sen̓áḵw survived a legal challenge last fall when a British Columbia Supreme Court judge rejected a claim that the local community wasn't sufficiently engaged in the planning process.  Some of the development's critics have attempted to weaponize Native American philosophy against it. In one case, Gordon Price, a former Vancouver city councilor, argued that the First Nations cannot call themselves "land defenders" when they're building concrete high-rises. "There's a big gap between that and an Indigenous way of building," Price, who is not a member of the First Nations, told CBC Vancouver last year.  Supporters reject Price's argument, noting that building housing and sustainable communities are in the best interests of both the First Nations and the broader city... "Canadians aren't used to seeing Indigenous people occupy places that are socially, economically or geographically valuable, like Sen̓áḵw," the Indigenous writer Michelle Cyca wrote recently in MacLean's. "It's remarkable because it's a restoration of our authority and presence in the heart of a Canadian city."... "If a city wanted to get serious about land acknowledgments, and facilitate development, and house a tribe on its historic lands, that would be pretty incredible to do it in a way that's positive for everybody," Armlovich said." pagliacci the hated 🌝 on X - "this is so funny. rich liberals in Vancouver who have been protesting for land be returned to Indigenous people are now upset because one of the city's last plots of underdeveloped land was sold to local tribes and they're razing it to build an ultra-high density condo project."
City of Vancouver formally declares city is on unceded Aboriginal territory
Jericho Lands: Poll finds nearly 72% of Vancouverites oppose MST proposal for 60 towers up to 49-storeys, 3X Hong Kong density. But alternatives find strong support. - "The poll also found that 75.6 per cent of respondents said the Jericho Lands high-rise tower proposal, which is majority-owned by the MST Development Corporation, a partnership of the xʷməθkʷəy̓ əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) First Nations, should not be treated differently because it is indigenous-owned and should be considered in the same way as any other developer in Vancouver"
Corporate greed strikes again!
Clearly using the land to create missing middle housing will result in more housing being available than if the land is used for condos
Apparently this is not "environmentally sustainable", even though the left keep telling us density is better for the environment
In practice, the left only give "indigenous people" carte blanche when they push the left wing agenda Canada's First Nations are building the densest neighborhood in the country by reclaiming their ancestral land and defying NIMBYs : CanadaHousing2 - "I would not buy this ever. This would be indigenous ground and therefore none of the legal protections are there if something goes wrong. 99 year lease sounds great until the band leadership changes their mind and kick you off. You would have no legal recourse. The lease means nothing to the Canadian courts. The principals that allow them to ignore zoning and the NIMBY laws also allow them to screw you over on the lease whenever they feel like it."
Canada's First Nations are building the densest neighborhood in the country by reclaiming their ancestral land and defying NIMBYs : CanadaHousing2 - "Yup. Ipperwash. Sauble Beach. Christian Island. There are plenty of examples." The consequences of Canada's housing-based inequality are immeasurable - “One of the indirect yet powerful ways in which these housing affordability challenges have manifested themselves is in the form of delayed family formation and declining fertility rates. The interrelationship between housing prices and family planning is somewhat intuitive. Housing costs—particularly in high-cost localities—are a major household expenditure and therefore necessarily influence our short- and long-term expectations including when to start a family and how many children that families ultimately ought to have… Unlike most peer jurisdictions, babies in Canada have become, in the words of demographer Lyman Stone, a “luxury good.” His research finds that higher-income Canadian families tend to have both higher desired and actual fertility rates… a household must now be among the top 10 percent of household income to even qualify for a mortgage in the City of Toronto… Canadian women tell consistently pollsters that there’s a gap between their desired and actual fertility rates. They’d actually prefer to have a number of children approximating the replacement rate, but there are different impediments standing in their way including high housing costs.”"
Time to bring in even more immigrants to replace the population, which will increase housing prices even more, which will… Grocery Compare on X - "Been watching LTB hearings. One 'new' thing? Tenants routinely ask the adjudicator if they can 'order' the landlord NOT to submit the #LTB court order PDF to https://t.co/idsSKHAisP Not singlekey or equifax. https://t.co/JP1hauNPyN is FINALLY working. #ODSP #FixTheLTB" Meme - "Your Profile Pic When Landlord Says Indians Only *Justin Trudeau in blackface with 2 Sikhs*" Birgit Umaigba-Omoruyi 🇳🇬🇨🇦 on X - "Landlords should not be allowed to boldly specify the race of tenants they want to rent. The ongoing rental discrimination in Ontario is disgusting. Landlords are posting ads with "Indian only," and we are not doing anything to condemn it. I am so disgusted, and so should you."
Justice_Queen ⚖️ 🔰🪬 on X - "Many South Asian LL are continually putting up ads saying "Indian only", does not even stop there - it has to be a certain part of India. Anti-black racism is rampant amongst south asians. South Asians rarely check their privilege & many justify this racism. So gross!" Something we don't talk enough about- the rise of discriminatory rental ads in Canada. How is this legal? : CanadaHousing2 - "Two friends can share- vegetarian- females... No eggs"
"Only Vegetarian. no smoke,no drink, no meat,no Egg.and any other kind of Meat... Punjabi,hindi speaking preferred."
""1 master bedroom available for Gujarati boys or Girls"
Time for white men to reflect on how they can be anti-racist, feminist allies GOLDSTEIN: Trudeau bets the house on housing with our money - "The flurry of housing announcements by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in recent days just proves that nothing is ever new in politics. When governments are in trouble at the polls, they start throwing our money at the wall, hoping enough of it sticks to boost their sagging political fortunes. The problem is that this is the worst way to tackle a genuine affordability crisis in housing, because it’s a breeding ground for future government spending scandals. Every year, the federal auditor general produces report after report on government misspending in various and sundry government departments, leaving beleaguered taxpayers scratching their heads and asking themselves one basic question. That is, “How could spending on this program possibly have gotten so out of hand while no one did anything about it?” Well, the answer is that this is how it starts. It starts with the prime minister and his cabinet ministers spreading out across the land like an army of Lady Bountifuls, throwing billions of our dollars at us... behind the scenes, public servants are now scrambling to get the housing money out the door as fast as humanly possible, because the next election has to be held on or before Oct. 20, 2025 and their Liberal political masters are desperate to get it out there, visibly building more housing, before the writ drops. This is the perfect storm within a government for wasting money and the Liberals have hardly been the only offenders over the years." RBC urges Canada to prioritize construction skills in immigrants to tackle housing crisis - "RBC says there is an urgent need for the industry to embrace new approaches to enhance home production efficiency per worker. One solution is to promote wider adoption of prefabricated housing, where entire homes or sections are built in factories. This method can enhance efficiency, shorten timelines, and offer cost predictability. According to RBC, Canada is not progressing in this sector as quickly as other countries. “Canada lags in the development of this industry compared to world leaders Sweden (where prefabricated elements are found in 84 per cent of detached homes), Germany (20 per cent) and Japan (15 per cent),” RBC said in its report. Another strategy is to create a catalogue of pre-approved building designs, simplifying and accelerating the homebuilding process. This approach could be particularly beneficial for affordable housing and could help increase the stock of environmentally friendly homes. Projects using pre-approved designs should receive expedited approval — something the federal government announced they would be launching in 2024... Federal Housing Minister Sean Fraser told reporters that the federal government would be creating just such a catalogue of pre-approved home designs , borrowing from a post-war housing initiative that led to the rapid construction of so-called “Strawberry box” houses or “victory homes.” “In many instances, these homes were being built in a period of about 36 hours, and we intend to take these lessons from our history books and bring them into the 21st century” Let’s chuck the vacant-home tax - The Globe and Mail - "Mayor Olivia Chow is asking residents for forgiveness and promising to improve the system for next year. A better idea would be to chuck the whole thing. Based on this year’s fiasco, the tax may simply be more trouble than it is worth. Determining whether thousands and thousands of homes are vacant or occupied is proving to be an endlessly awkward and costly task. It is by no means clear that the city has a fix.  As a matter of principle, the tax is unsavoury. People should be able to do more or less what they wish with properties they own. If they want to leave them vacant for a while as they wait for a better selling price or get ready to move here from another city or whatever reason, that should be their right.  Like taxes on speculation and foreign ownership, the vacant-home tax places the blame for our home-grown housing crisis on shadowy forces like real-estate chisellers and overseas buyers. Let’s not forget that many investors in Toronto’s housing market rent out their condos and other properties, thus providing more rental housing and helping ease, not worsen, the housing crisis. Homes that stand vacant are only a sliver of the housing-shortage problem in any case. Toronto would be wise to look for solutions elsewhere."
Political posturing is easier than addressing the root causes Why you can’t afford a home, explained in 10 charts - The Globe and Mail - "It’s not as simple as supply and demand. A host of factors are driving up home prices to eye-popping levels"
Amusingly, every single factor here, with the exception of interest rates, is a very simple supply or demand issue Canada’s housing crisis poised to worsen without major reforms, RBC report says - The Globe and Mail - "Canada’s housing affordability crisis will hit even more alarming levels in the coming years without a bold set of policy reforms to boost supply, the economics department at Royal Bank of Canada said Monday in a report.  The country needs to complete roughly 320,000 housing units annually from now until 2030, simply to meet the new demand that will arise over that period, according to RBC estimates. This would amount to an increase of nearly 50 per cent from recent completion levels – and it would require a record pace of construction.  If anything, Canada is moving in the wrong direction. There were around 240,000 housing unit starts in 2023, down from roughly 271,000 in 2021, according to figures from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. This doesn’t bode well for completions over the rest of the decade... the RBC report said the construction industry is bumping up against capacity pressures and that prices for building materials have soared over the past few years, which could hinder the affordability push. For example, one-fifth of construction workers have reached retirement age or will hit that point in the next decade. The report said that home-building skills should be prioritized in the immigration system, perhaps by awarding more points to candidates with needed qualifications, while “ambitious targets” should be set for trade school enrolments... Governments should incentivize developers to use prefabricated components that are built off-site, which could speed up completion times for projects, the RBC report said. It noted that restrictions should be eased on the use of cost-effective materials, such as mass timber, and that development charges could be reduced or deferred for purpose-built rental construction. Such charges could be waived for affordable housing projects... a separate RBC report said it was the “toughest time ever” to afford a home in Canada, based on ownership costs as a proportion of median household income... The housing crisis is having wide-ranging effects on the economy. For instance, Mr. Hogue noted that some employers in Vancouver are having trouble recruiting workers to the area because of high housing prices.  “The crisis now affects middle-income Canadians and extends beyond major cities,” the report said. “It strikes at the core of the Canadian dream of owning a home and is creating intense inter-generational tensions.”"
Left wingers protest the building of anything that isn't "affordable housing" (i.e. priced so low that it must be built at a loss), oppose "urban sprawl" (i.e. building in areas where NIMBYs aren't able to block new construction), want high development fees thinking that they stiff evil developers and demand the government build houses (when the record of public projects is poor and the debt is already ridiculous), so good luck Meme - "*Justin Trudeau* "MAKING HOUSING MORE AFFORDABLE. RENDRE LE LOGEMENT PLUS ABORDABLE"
2017 AVG$ = 496k
*Justin Trudeau* "MAKING HOUSING AFFORDABLE. RENDRE LE LOGEMENT ABORDABLE"
2022 AVG$ = 816k" Canada's New Housing Plan Won't Help, But Slowing Immigration Will: BMO - "the Government of Canada (GoC) released its latest budget, including billions in spending on new housing stimulus. BMO provided a list of the recent changes, noting they’ll have a limited impact, given most of the measures are demand stimulus. However, they do see affordability improving soon—due to new limits on immigration. They reiterated that Canada doesn’t have a problem building, it has a problem with policy stimulating demand...   A new Tenant Protection Fund will also seek to provide legal assistance.    He sees the measures potentially acting as a “deck stacked against landlords,” helping to prevent more quality rental supply. He cites increasing incentives such as taxes, landlord-tenant board backlogs, non-payment risk, and market conditions.”"
He points out that many measures are oversteps by the federal government since they are provincial issues. What's new? Toronto neighbourhood's fight to stop tiny building is why nobody can afford a home - "An application with the City's Committee of Adjustment (CoA) sought to bring a three-storey, eight-unit apartment building and a two-storey, two-unit laneway suite to 91 Barton Avenue, with a massing that would have largely conformed with the heights of surrounding homes. While the address is located less than 500 metres from two different subway stations and is thus ripe for density, the site of the proposed building is nestled within one of Toronto's many wealthy enclaves of single-family housing collectively known as the "yellowbelt," where any mention of multi-unit buildings can quickly rile up the locals.  That was exactly the case for the 91 Barton proposal, with almost 40 letters filed in opposition to the project in advance of the April 17 CoA decision."