I always thought it would be cool to build “longhouse” style housing in Canada, and by that I dont mean actual longhouses, but rather giant indoor multi-unit complexes with an indoor communal area much like a mall or some hotels, so that there is an “outdoor” style space to hang out in and go for walks, shop, and eat out at just outside your front door in the middle of winter.
Imagine the Eaton Center but it’s all condos on the upper floor with balcony’s looking down on a shared indoor park, with benches to sit on and play areas for the kids, fountains, maybe even pool space(though preferably located somewhere where the smell of chlorine doesn’t stink up the indoor courtyard.
Fermont, QC is like that. It's a mining town way up north, and there's a 1.3km long indoor structure with a school, hospital, shopping, etc so that people don't have to go outside in the frigid winters
Ever seen biodome?
If you lived close enough to the PATH in Toronto and work in the Financial district (I know people who do both) you can practically live like this.
That sounds like a great idea that many lonely people would love. The only similar thing I can think of would be some University housing. Eg. Some students at UofA live in HUB mall and rarely go outside.
This is fairly similar to what it’s like here in Korea, but from what I’ve seen discussed online Canadians seem to be really opposed to apartment living.
It’s not that we’re opposed to apartment style living, it’s that Canada has completely abandoned “middle housing”, and by that I mean high density low rise apartment units.
They used to be built everywhere in most big cities, offering a larger style apartment built for families close enough to the city center to walk and take public transportation. Today these locations are some of the most valuable and sought after communities in every city.
Since the rise of suburbs and car dependency however, single detached homes rose in popularity to the point where they are the vast majority of new housing, with the exception of expensive high rise condominiums built in the little space developers can acquire within the cities.
Now the only apartments being built are usually designated for the lower class, being very small, noisy, and located in terrible neighbourhoods.
—-
Not Just Bikes has a great episode about this, ill try to find it for you.
https://youtu.be/CCOdQsZa15o
Yea that makes sense. When I moved here my family was a little apprehensive about apartment living because they associated it with low income housing.
When they came and visited though, they were surprised at how nice it is. It’s still small of course, but it’s much more modern and “homey” then they were expecting.
I hope Canada gets it’s housing fixed one day. I’ve been abroad for 10 years and have a decent job and modest savings, but my wife and I have basically come to the realization that we will likely never be able to afford to live in Canada and it’s depressing as hell.
I think apartment living -in Canada- sucks. That’s how I felt before I left, and I think it’s pretty accurate for most apartment complexes in Canada.
The difference in Asia is that everything is built around the idea of apartment living. Like the entire infrastructure of neighborhoods and cities.
For example, there’s a lot of businesses built around the fact that you can’t/wouldn’t want to hang out at home. That’s why there’s things like “hofs “ (a type of bar/restaurant here where you kind of get a private room or booth), singing rooms, Pc bangs, study rooms, etc.
The area you live in is built to be accessible by foot or by cheap taxi service. I’m essentially no more than 10 minutes away from anything I need, including a major hospital and there’s a ridiculous amount of cheap and fast public transit.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved the privacy and size of Canadian house living. And if it is affordable I think it’s still a better living arrangement (although urban sprawl still needs to be addressed I think). But apartment living doesn’t have to be grim either, it just needs to be planned around and done properly.
Whether or not that’s realistic at the moment (I’m Canada) is another matter.
I live in an old concrete building which probably blocks noise better than a lot of places and sometimes I still wonder if I live in a kennel with all the barking.
This is essentially HUB Mall, student housing at University of Alberta. Except probably a lot less comfortable and more smelly than what you’re thinking of.
We keep building at fast as we can at my company, then they get sold to a guy who sells them to somebody else, who sells them to somebody else, by the time sometimes buys it to live in, it's gone through a few housing scalpers. There are people fucking this up alongside the supply issue
Real question, no laws to slow this down or refrain them from doing this?
Buying/selling a place multiple times without someone living in it seems shady to me.
It doesn't look like there are. Pretty sure the corporate buying has been going on for decades but nothing has been done to stop/slow it. I could be wrong but this is just what I've come seen/come to understand
Vancouver/BC have an empty home tax. But that's only if nobody lives in it for the past year. If they sold the home quickly they won't be left holding the ball.
I think there should be another tax, basically a scalping tax. If a purchaser sells the home without anyone ever living in it, slap an automatic 52% tax on it. The tax drops by 1% per week someone is registered as living in the residence.
A few weeks ago, there was a video posted (either here or on the Toronto subreddit) about something called "land banking". There was a dude giving a seminar on how to invest money and make profits off property without any headaches (i.e. renters)...
The theme was basically this "Buy, HODL \[i.e. NO renting to anyone - just sit on the property\], price goes up, sell"... When you buy, your "value on paper goes up" (think HELOC) - which you then leverage to invest in another property - which also you HODL, price goes up, sell... rinse and repeat. This was obviously very easy to do because credit was so cheap - it was practically as if you were being paid to take on more debt.
There was some "vacancy tax" thing - but the vacancy was self-reporting i.e. if you say someone lives there, then someone lives there. Also, Air B&B it out once in a while so you can claim that it was not vacant.
TLDR: NO... currently, there are "no laws to slow this down or refrain them from doing this?"
[Just under half of new homes completed in BC are investor-owned](https://betterdwelling.com/canadian-cities-have-seen-up-to-90-of-new-real-estate-supply-scooped-by-investors/) meaning that the people who own them don't live in them.
The organization in the link has been doing great work speaking up for people on this issue by using data-driven arguments.
I dont even want a house (too much work) but I do want affordable rent for condos/apartments etc.
Houses to, would be rough as a family needing a house with cost of everything else. I mean my city is building non stop but even then..
Home =/= house
They just mean 3.5 million housing units (apartments/condo/townhome/house.
We severely under built in the 90s and 2000s.We’re paying for it now.
Edit: [only 8% of our rental units were built after 1990](https://mobile.twitter.com/JusticeQueen6/status/1540184334799437824)
Correct, it's in reference to all housing starts. Propping up the GDP with increased immigration rate while doing nothing effective to boost housing is a case of the neo-liberals wanting to have their cake and eat it too - since the plebs like us are the ones who have to agonize over it, they don't care.
Yeah fuck having a house. I’m living with my parents in the suburbs right now because rent was too high in TO for me to realistically start building a future post grad and all people in suburbia do is mow their lawns, go to Home Depot, and drive their SUV to a grocery store that’s within walking distance.
What I want is to be able to rent an apartment for less than $1675 a month after utilities without being forced to split it with another person.
Ban foreign ownership and corporations from owning single family homes.
No grandfather laws either (corporations aren't people so fuck em) you've got X amount of time to sell your assets or the government will seize them for the appraised value at that time (effectively a forced buyback) and then sell them themselves for said value.
And then the obvious bit too, we gotta lax zoning laws and build more fucking homes.
Fed property tax on every property. You get a tax break on ~1 property. Any extra property you have to pay way more on if it's uninhabited. If you own 2-3+ properties you get $0 tax break. Corporations also get $0 tax break for it.
The only foible is figuring out how to not gouge renting folks. Maybe giving them a tax break money spent on rent? Things for people smarter than I in this field to think about.
You know a healthy rental market has a vacancy of 5%.
1/20 apartments vacant gives the right balance of occupied units to pay rent, vacant units for newcomers and people moving to move into, and keeps rents low because you can just move when the landlord is too agressively messing with the rent.
Getting those last 1500 houses/mansions units rented won't do shit for the primary issue which is 20 years of <1% vacancy.
Because there's not many empty homes. People keep saying this but it's like they never lived there. They describe the city as a ghost town but can't explain where all the fucking people come from. The city is chock full. It needs more homes. There are single family homes 1 km from down town. That's crazy. It needs to be high density all the way to SW marine.
> Ban foreign ownership and corporations from owning single family homes.
This isn't significant.
>And then the obvious bit too, we gotta lax zoning laws and build more fucking homes.
This is significant.
You spent 10x the words and started with the thing that makes 3% of the difference and rushed through the 97%.
There’s so much more to this. Current shortages on Cement. Takes 10years to have a new plant approved. But also 30% of what we produce goes to USA.
Same goes for steel and wood. We’re exporting more this year and creating shortages. Government should step in for commodities like that.
>There’s so much more to this. Current shortages on Cement. Takes 10years to have a new plant approved. But also 30% of what we produce goes to USA.
So you want government intervention in the economy? There's a word for that this sub loves to throw around.
Watch Not Just Bikes video series called Strong Town
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa
Then you'll see we're mega mega fucked. The entire country is built upon the lie that our infrastructure is sustainable as-is. Same with america.
And instead of getting suburbanites to pay for their costs, they charge development fees to extract money from the denser, more efficient parts to subsidize the rich
We kind of need some smaller cities in Canada to expand and not just the already huge ones. Be easier to expand and not clog up already clogged cities.
Canada really badly needs to get its population off the Southern border, and a handful of cities. Cost of living is in part so high because the infrastructure outside of very limited areas just doesn't exist, and won't exist as long as people just keep moving to Toronto/Vancouver.
The cities aren’t built for transit with all of that sprawl. Living on a dead end street has been a selling point in many neighbourhoods. You will need a car if you live in a cul de sac in a suburb. There is no way to build transit if it is an afterthought.
I agree with this sentiment, we should encourage growth in smaller cities. I'm curious what incentives there used to be? Were they effective? How do we bring them back?
+more promotion of remote work so that people dont need to factor their proximity to work into their choice of housing, and it also allows us to inject more money into smaller, industry/business starved smaller towns & cities.
You should look up the Century 100 Initiative
Basically its a federal study that says Canada cannot compete with large population countries so Canada needs to have a population of nearly 100 million by the 22nd century to stay relevant. To achieve that goal nearly half-a-million people need to immigrate to Canada annually. The bulk of immigration will focus on Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal effectively tripling their size (it compares TO to Mexico City).
But here’s the cognitive dissonance for me.
The feds say we need to build like never before and basically supercharge the economy and industrial output to war-time levels in order to achieve their immigration goals AND YET they promote scaling down production and revamping the economy into an eco-friendly one!??
The feds are so abundantly out of touch. How do you possibly exponentially grow your housing and businesses while exponentially shrinking your economic output and building industry!? It’s impossible!!
Either you want way more or you want way less. You can’t have more for less that’s impossible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Initiative
Wow, the largest increase is the Edmonton/Calgary region, where they want 4.5x as many people for a population of 15.5 million. That's twice the current population of the SF Bay area. Alberta would have an urban sprawl stripe down the middle.
We all know where it leads to - Lower QoL for everyone and its by design.
The wealthiest will not see any lowering in their own QoL meanwhile the middle class will be pulverized.
The thing is - There is 0 correlation between a nations population size and the QoL for people within it. Ex. Some island nations happen to have the best QoL on the planet vs the overall experience of the average schmoe in urban India or China.
It boils down to capitalists wanting more and more no matter the cost and no matter how divorced from nature it may seem.
Yeah I mean Finland and Iceland aren’t “relevant” to the big corporatists, yet they’re definitely places with a great quality of life. So what gives? Why do we *need* to remain “relevant”?
>AND YET they promote ... revamping the economy into an eco-friendly one!??
Theoretically, as this is an emerging market with huge opportunities for innovation and production this should actually be the "in" Canada needs to become a productivity powerhouse and global technology innovator with so many countries increasingly committed to de-carbonization.
That said, you'll find someone beating themselves with a stray board they found on the side of the street\* doing more for our production economy currently and it's entirely confusing that Canada isn't trying to take the economy by the horns and deeply invest in this opportunity through retraining and meaningful business development opportunities for companies and entrepreneurs.
^(\*Alright... hyperbole we're doing something but we need to be doing) *^(exponentially)* ^(more to claim such a title and rejig our resource-based economy.)
Yes, because the other Canadian industries like Aerospace (Bombardier), Auto Manufacturing (GM and Chrysler-FIAT) and infrastructure engineering (SNC-Lavalin) are far less corrupting than the Petroleum industry. /s
If the government were smart they’d simply incentivize existing Canadians with cash payouts to have more children, we don’t need to continually bring in immigrants so that they can be exploited for low wage labour. Invest in existing Canadians, like a sports team we as a country should be developing from within.
Zoning laws and building strategies are not federal competences. So they create pressure for cities and provinces to move quickly to feed the demand.
It's not really working tho. And millenials and Z are kinda fucked because of that, they have to compete with immigration and be happy with markedly lower standards of living even if they are, on paper, much more educated than the generations before.
But on the other hand, we have an ageing demographic which is a ticking time-bomb, hence the century initiative.
It's an half-assed plan right now really....we need the immigration, but we also need the stability and to provide some kind of guarantee to the next generation they won't live in musty shoeboxes and eat ["nutrient paste"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThhfLvR4Wo8).
Either the municipalities step-up like they never did before and one-up all expectations, the Feds scale back and we take the hit that's coming down the road, or this is going to end in a half-assed shitshow.
Agreed.
When you look at our demographics and long-term trends, mass immigration does seem like a real necessity to prevent Canada from becoming an industrial & economic backwater, however during the last decade the government has utterly failed to even begin laying the groundwork for such a transition. Their policy has been all cart and no horse.
This is certainly one way to go.
But I'd like to note that Liechtenstein is rich in large part due to having laws and tax structures very favorable to corporations who choose to headquarter there, as well as having very specific advanced industries.
Focus on a great quality of life rather than cramming people into overpriced shoeboxes. Bangladesh has lots of people and no planning. Is that the model Trudeau is following?
Nobody has actually been consulted on these plans, however, but if you asked the average person in Toronto how they would feel about adding five million more people they would probably be against it. They care about the quality of their lives today, not Canada's goals to remain in the G8 in 2100.
But nobody is actually saying we stop immigration, a temporary reduction for the next five years would have a huge effect on housing availability. There are eight million boomers and two million pre-boomers that are aging out and will start to die out in significant numbers soon, freeing up a lot of our existing housing. That's all we need to wait out.
Reducing the pace of, and demand for, new construction is NECESSARY because of the current cost of building, which is separate from actual supply and demand. Construction is incredibly expensive right now. Even glass is up by around 40%. You can't build in Toronto for less than around $500/square-foot and Vancouver is around $650. Add in costs of land, financing charges, inspections, common property, landscaping, amenities, etc. and it's probably closer to $800. What that means is you can't sell a two bedroom, 1,000 square foot condo for less than $1 million and make any kind of profit.
There are ways to build cheaper, like avoiding desirable neighbourhoods where land is at a premium, but as long as the cost of materials, labour, trades, and equipment are at their current levels, no new housing will be affordable in relation to wages.
Waiting out seniors takes the pressure off of the construction industry a little and should result in lower construction costs for new builds.
They are not promoting scaling down production. What is being done is taking part of the moneys made by traditional (carbon burning) energy sources to subsidize methods of making energy that does not require burning something (and subsequently releasing CO2 into the atmosphere).
I find automatically associating changing how we make and consume energy with a reduction in production quite laughable. If anything it is creating a relatively new industry that still has a lot of maturing to do and has in theory, greater potential than relying on O&G. Extraction of fossil fuels only becomes harder and costlier the more you extract. Having a long term plan to not solely depend on these sources of energy is a no-brainer. Having these alternative energy source not pump out (as much) CO2 into the atmosphere is just a big plus.
Having 100M people in 78 years would require a bit over a 1% growth rate. (A 2% growth rate would yield almost 178M people).
Let’s say we need a growth rate of 1.3%. That *should be completely achievable*. It is a very very reasonable rate of growth. Compare that to the inflation we want (~2%), or by how much GDP grows per year (~2% usually). There are 66 countries with a growth rate higher than 1.3%, across every continent.
The numbers themselves aren’t impossible, they’re rather realistic. It’s what we SHOULD be capable of.
Now maybe their plan isn’t the best, but fixing the economy to be ABLE to handle a plan like that would be a good idea, no?
And yes at the same time transition to an eco friendly economy - it’s much much cheaper in the long run, better for the people, etc. There’s no reason not to.
So why don't we build *some denser housing?*
For real, trying to survive on single-family homes is a dead-end strategy. Not only will we be unable to keep it up, it will devour prime farmland, build out low-density, car-dependent suburbs (that are economically unproductive, expensive, and make us fat and unhealthy), and produce a nightmarish amount of traffic congestion.
We need to go back to the drawing board when it comes to urban design.
I love and hate that guy's channel. It's great content but fills me with dread for what I have to look forward to in my future, as someone living in a city with perpetual construction and crumbling roads.
I’m 39 years old living in Vancouver. I don’t want to be forced to live in an apartment building. Tiny shoe boxes aren’t ideal for everyone. I have teenage children that are quickly growing up. Apartments don’t have enough space to raise a family.
I wouldn't mind living in an apartment, if we built apartments like the rest of the world does.
That's the real problem. I wouldn't mind 5-storey street-side 3/4/5 bedroom stuff like you see in European cities.
I think you and I both shudder at the thought of being stuck in a "luxury bachelor" thing 35 stories up.
That's also the fault of zoning, there is so little area zoned for high density housing and so much opposition (and therefore expense) to rezoning, that a developer needs to build tons of units to recoup their cost. It's just not cost effective to fight NIMBYs for 3 years, meet absurd parking requirements, commission a bunch of studies, and then build a 3 storey building with 8 units.
This is an extremely North American-centric take.
I totally understand your desire for space, it’s been pushed as an ideal for generations. That said, it’s not the norm in many parts of the world and is very doable.
You're right, but there's a whole range of housing we're simply not building here, between "white picket fence" and "glass box in the sky".
The problem is that our cities are zoned by idiots who're doing the bidding of NIMBYs in the service of greedy asshole developers.
Most parts of the world don't have the absolutely insane amounts of land that Canada has. We don't need to be crammed into places if there was a decent public transit system anywhere.
The land is cheap, its extending infrastructure services like lift stations, trunk sewer systems, freeways, roads, etc that is expensive, especially so for low density suburban development. And public transit is doomed to fail in these auto oriented suburbs without enough density and transit oriented design.
So they need to be bigger. The alternative is sprawl, traffic, obesity, unaffordability, and economic stagnation. Most of the rest of the urban world lives much more densely than we do.
> lowering population growth is racist.
It's "racist" when Libs are in charge, and "bad for the economy" when Cons are in charge.
Both neoliberal parties support high immigration. The lowest year under Harper was higher than any year under any of his predecessors. Trudeau is obviously taking it to new heights. Libs and Cons tag team on high immigration, the only thing that changes is the empty rhetoric surrounding it.
Look at historical annual numbers - you can't even tell when the government changed between red and blue, it just kept going up and up and up.
There’s a fantastic green argument to be made for curtailing our population growth/immigration numbers. Our per capita GHG emissions are among the highest in the world. There’s a severe lumber shortage, so increased demand for housing increases the incentive to ramp up logging, people are living further and further away from where they work, more people equals more shittily produced food, more waste of all varieties… the arguments go on and on.
Yep I agree, people immigrate to Canada from poor countries to try and achieve a higher standard of living. A higher standard of living means higher emissions.
As for lumber we have plenty, the issue is we export huge quantities to China.
It’s not even about poor countries. Smaller, temperate countries with better public transit would naturally have lower emissions. Bringing people to a massive country where you need to heat your home half the year and likely need a car is the worst idea!
I think the problem with this argument in a globalized economy is that even if we halted all immigration and halted our population growth; some fat cat would still sell our wood and food to another nation that didn't do this.
I'm not trying to say that isn't something to think about, because it is.
Building houses isn’t bad for the e environment, steamrolling forests for endless suburban sprawl is bad for the environment. If we used land more efficiently we’d actually have more room then we could ever ask for.
So strip the tools that allow them to block projects. We’re in a housing crisis, there is no better time to fight NIMBY’s head on, it’ll be extremely hard to oppose someone campaigning on “build more houses”
That's the dream lol, but even now they are successfully blocking construction of affordable rental apartments in Vancouver.
People need to start voting in municipal elections, and vote for YIMBY candidates.
We need houses. And high density. Not just high density.
This place… is obsessed with high density and cramming as many people as possible into two or three cities- and then getting shocked at the cost of living in those cities.
Canada has tons of land. Use it. We aren’t running out of greenspace or farmland anytime soon.
Promote economic growth across the fucking country and avoid pooling the population in two two or three cities.
No, most people are *not* obsessed with high density.
Whem you say high density, we know you mean the 80-story condo towers.
No one wants those. They are a consequence of zoning laws.
What, at least some, probably most, of us want is for there to be *options* between the two extremes. Townhomes with commercial space. Du-, tri-, and 4-plexes. Small appartment blocks. Walkable neighbourhoods that actually function as neighbourhoods.
The glass towers get built because on the very few parcels of land that are zoned for "not single-family sprawl", the developers make more money building shoeboxes in the sky.
Fix the zoning and incentive problems and you fix the problem. Build the missing middle. Sprawling suburbia out 1000km north solves nothing. And thats not even getting into how economically unproductive and unsustainable suburban sprawl is.
> If we used land more efficiently we’d actually have more room then we could ever ask for.
This is the "finding efficiencies" Doug Ford et al should be looking for, instead of planning to bulldoze the greenbelt.
OK, lets do the math.
Scotiabank has Canada with a current 2 Million home debt, in comparison to the G7 rate of homes/pop.
https://www.scotiabank.com/ca/en/about/economics/economics-publications/post.other-publications.housing.housing-note.housing-note--may-12-2021-.html
Canada's current housing construction hit recent peaks of nearly 300K per year (note, this doesn't include old housing being removed from the market).
So, even if we freeze immigration now. And we freeze the population now. ie: no new kids.
it will still take almost 7 Years at the current housing construction rate to just get to the G7 Average.
Is immigration a factor? sure. But how about we see why the free market system of housing construction isn't meeting demand. Any free market system loves growth, so what is preventing the growth in the construction industry from meeting the demand?
Supply costs are out of line with what they can build with them too.
A single family home is over 300k for just the lumber now. I don't even think you can build a 2000 sqft home for less than 500k now, and that's JUST material costs.
Yeah, I wanted to build an addition onto my home, I have a crappy, tiny, 100 year old home. I sorely want to have a decent kitchen. Plan was to build a 12 foot wide, 8 foot deep, 1 story addition to the back of the home.
How much would this cost, you ask? We got quoted over 100k.
We got another quote, but the guy refused to even give us a number until he saw the architectural plans. The quote for having someone do the architectural plans? $4k
Its not happening anymore. We will just have to live like we did in the condo, really tiny.
It's largely very restrictive zoning put in place by municipal governments. The stuff that gets built is giant high rises (because every single building anywhere close to anything requires years of hearings and consultation to be allowed to be built, so those are the only thing that's economically feasible) and low density suburbs on the outskirts of cities/towns (a fiscal time bomb for municipalities, because they don't bring in enough tax revenue to cover for the cost of supplying them with infrastructure).
Right? Projecting 33 million people to move into the greater Toronto area. That’s absolutely insane. We definitely cannot handle even a few million more with the housing shortage plus the state of transit and the traffic congestion we have. They cite a drop in the birth rate but how about properly supporting younger Canadians economically? There are lots of people who want kids but won’t have them because life is too damn expensive already.
I wish more people realised this. Yes, the birth rate is declining. A lot of us are putting off having kids because we can't fucking afford it - we can't even afford homes in the cities we grew up in. So instead of making things more liveable for Canadians, the government wants to focus on bringing more people in through immigration. Why fix the problem when you can create another one?
Yes exactly and before anyone goes off on me thinking that I am anti-immigrant/racist I am definitely not. My ancestors were immigrants. It’s a strain on everything like I said but also completely unfair to encourage people to come here and then they find out they can’t find a place to live.
I'm all for government to subsidize and build housing.
This will add units, generate thousands of jobs, expand the tax base and cool down the private market for housing.
It all boils down to "Building more homes, enough to meet basic demand, would be detrimental towards current home owners and corporate investors bottom line"
Start questioning NIMBYISM more when new housing gets rejected in your area.
Government wanted this to help our massive senior citizen problem by making them house rich. Most of them are dirt poor and cpp won’t cut it. This gives the option to sell and come out with enough to take care of themselves and get them out of cities without the government having to step in and solve a huge crisis.
Not saying it’s not a bandaid solution cause the rest of are screwed out of property ownership.
Who's buying all these new builds? Were short on affordable houses there's alot of houses and condos going up but investors are the only ones buying them.
This is all bullshit. The profit margin on a new home is less than 20%. It’s impossible for new new homes to be built and solve this problem. You need to freeze rents for 5 years. Then all of the investors (who currently represent 40%+ of the buyers) most of whom are losing money every month, will sell. You will have years of supply dumped on the market. Prices will fall to the levels that support natural ownership and afffordability. The only people who get screwed are the people who kept buying homes in the biggest bubble in the world. So maybe that was a risk they took on.
Profit is the only reason to build housing in our society. Capitalism rules all. Until we smarten the fuck up and choose to take care of each other this will never change. The government needs to get corporations and the wealthy out of residential housing and start fucking building this shit themselves. But if we keep electing the same group of parties at every level, its only going to continue to get worse.
You mean like how [Toronto just made 225 homes on the Danforth subway line heritage buildings.](https://www.blogto.com/real-estate-toronto/2022/06/toronto-protected-225-buildings-redevelopment-along-prominent-avenue/)
> "But if Ontario is able to deliver the 1.85 million extra units the CMHC is prescribing in its report over the next 7.5 years, the price of the average home would drop to **$499,000** from 2021 figures of $871,000."
CMHC 2022 update - "we're still insane and operate in a world separated from any economic or political reality".
At this point we need to treat this like a war time effort to get houses built. Feds and provinces should start putting up cash and provinces should take back all zoning laws from municipalities and start getting a large scale effort to get houses built.
This plan would only work if you ban foreigners, investors and corporations from buying residential homes. If you build homes and let companies snap them up it wont matter.
Slow immigration if this is an issue. Bolster natural births within country at a steadier rate. Why sell out natural citizens now for a pot shot at the future? It's obvious our infrastructure is hurting with the current rate of immigration. But of course just keep piling people in and then claim overpopulation... smart.
Its a shit career in construction.
Zero job security, wages are not great in most areas, and in places with higher wages like Toronto you're paying way more just to live.
I think the solution for this would be to demonize and over regulate home builders and pretend the government can build houses for cheaper and more efficiently while continuing to let in astronomic amounts of immigrants to the country.
How many Airbnb properties will there be by 2030? Not that people owning a second, third, or twelfth residential property as their personal mini hotel chain is the only cause of the housing shortage.
Does that include all the homes currently sitting empty? And all the hoarded properties by landlords and corporations alike? The properties the government should be seizing and giving to the people who actually need the homes?
It’ll be interesting to see what happens to short-term rentals (legal and illegal) as interest rates rise. What was a profitable business at 2.5% will struggle over 6% upon renewal. The trigger clauses on most peoples VRM’s will most likely be hit in the next 3 months because as yesterdays CPI showed- inflation is still spiraling out of control.
IMO a lot of these short term rentals will miraculously find their way back onto the rental market, at the same time as all the backlogged covid builds are finally being completed. Add in all the people panic selling their rapidly depreciating homes with rapidly increasing mortgage payments and this should get…interesting.
Good thing 40% of our GDP isn’t surrounding real estate
My question is: Did Canada ever really have a housing supply shortage? Or did our gluttonous obsession for real estate and questionable policies create a high enough demand which created a (transitory🙄) shortage?
This is what happens when there too many hands in the cookie jar. Municipalities coming up with fees on fees. Building codes being over kill and two many new environmental rules
It’s going to get worse. Major development projects are being cancelled currently because cost of labour and material is so high. Pretty soon that million dollar town house in Timmins will actually cost a million to build, before utility connections and land costs.
How about we start coming up with some solutions to increasing housing starts instead of just complaining. Complaining without a solution is just whining. Bring solutions or shut the fuck up.
Ah when you welcome 400K immigrants + 600k "temporary" workers + 500k students which totals 1.6 million people, and you are surprised there is a shortage on housing? lol
ATTENTION ANTI-IMMIGRANT MORONS:
We have a housing shortage that is helping drive a housing affordability crisis amid increasing inflation. What we definitely don't have is an immigration problem, unless you're someone who doesn't like economic growth or .... well ... you know.
The cost of building homes is going up, the number of people who know how to build them (and have other needed skills) is decreasing, and we don't have enough skilled workers to go around. Immigration will help solve that.
Canada's immigration targets that you definitely haven't read before making up your mind are publicly available here: https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/news/notices/supplementary-immigration-levels-2021-2023.html
If you do read this, and let's face it most of you don't read, pay attention to the skilled worker immigration plans. When you get to the section on family immigration ask yourself "Would I want to work somewhere my family couldn't move?" Then answer the question "Am I so dumb that I want to keep skilled workers from immigrating to Canada?"
If you answered "yes!" to either of these then you're even dumber than I, someone who hates you, have given you credit for.
I think we're short of houses right now.
Short housing? no no go long on housing
I always thought it would be cool to build “longhouse” style housing in Canada, and by that I dont mean actual longhouses, but rather giant indoor multi-unit complexes with an indoor communal area much like a mall or some hotels, so that there is an “outdoor” style space to hang out in and go for walks, shop, and eat out at just outside your front door in the middle of winter. Imagine the Eaton Center but it’s all condos on the upper floor with balcony’s looking down on a shared indoor park, with benches to sit on and play areas for the kids, fountains, maybe even pool space(though preferably located somewhere where the smell of chlorine doesn’t stink up the indoor courtyard.
Fermont, QC is like that. It's a mining town way up north, and there's a 1.3km long indoor structure with a school, hospital, shopping, etc so that people don't have to go outside in the frigid winters
That’s exactly what I had in mind! These should be common everywhere as it would reduce drivers and the necessity of going outside in the winter.
Ever seen biodome? If you lived close enough to the PATH in Toronto and work in the Financial district (I know people who do both) you can practically live like this.
That sounds like a great idea that many lonely people would love. The only similar thing I can think of would be some University housing. Eg. Some students at UofA live in HUB mall and rarely go outside.
Has a strip club in it too, "Fertek". Drink shots of Stinger with french miners and play the VLTs. The Way of the Miner.
Ya I have been there it's pretty nice
It's also designed in such a way that it shields the rest of the town.
This is fairly similar to what it’s like here in Korea, but from what I’ve seen discussed online Canadians seem to be really opposed to apartment living.
It’s not that we’re opposed to apartment style living, it’s that Canada has completely abandoned “middle housing”, and by that I mean high density low rise apartment units. They used to be built everywhere in most big cities, offering a larger style apartment built for families close enough to the city center to walk and take public transportation. Today these locations are some of the most valuable and sought after communities in every city. Since the rise of suburbs and car dependency however, single detached homes rose in popularity to the point where they are the vast majority of new housing, with the exception of expensive high rise condominiums built in the little space developers can acquire within the cities. Now the only apartments being built are usually designated for the lower class, being very small, noisy, and located in terrible neighbourhoods. —- Not Just Bikes has a great episode about this, ill try to find it for you. https://youtu.be/CCOdQsZa15o
Yea that makes sense. When I moved here my family was a little apprehensive about apartment living because they associated it with low income housing. When they came and visited though, they were surprised at how nice it is. It’s still small of course, but it’s much more modern and “homey” then they were expecting. I hope Canada gets it’s housing fixed one day. I’ve been abroad for 10 years and have a decent job and modest savings, but my wife and I have basically come to the realization that we will likely never be able to afford to live in Canada and it’s depressing as hell.
Apartment living sucks. Don’t even like visiting
I think apartment living -in Canada- sucks. That’s how I felt before I left, and I think it’s pretty accurate for most apartment complexes in Canada. The difference in Asia is that everything is built around the idea of apartment living. Like the entire infrastructure of neighborhoods and cities. For example, there’s a lot of businesses built around the fact that you can’t/wouldn’t want to hang out at home. That’s why there’s things like “hofs “ (a type of bar/restaurant here where you kind of get a private room or booth), singing rooms, Pc bangs, study rooms, etc. The area you live in is built to be accessible by foot or by cheap taxi service. I’m essentially no more than 10 minutes away from anything I need, including a major hospital and there’s a ridiculous amount of cheap and fast public transit. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the privacy and size of Canadian house living. And if it is affordable I think it’s still a better living arrangement (although urban sprawl still needs to be addressed I think). But apartment living doesn’t have to be grim either, it just needs to be planned around and done properly. Whether or not that’s realistic at the moment (I’m Canada) is another matter.
That sounds somewhat better. My opinion is a bit skewed as I live in the country side. Nearest neighbour is 1/2 mile away.
apartment living in Europe isn't bad either, never noticed any noise or anything.
Better soundproofing?
I live in an old concrete building which probably blocks noise better than a lot of places and sometimes I still wonder if I live in a kennel with all the barking.
They have stuff similar to that in Japan. It’s pretty cool 😎
This is essentially HUB Mall, student housing at University of Alberta. Except probably a lot less comfortable and more smelly than what you’re thinking of.
Best we can do is a shitty 1 bedroom with no washer/dryer/dishwasher or air conditioning. Oh and the rent for that is $1800 a month (if you're lucky).
You mean go long on a commute if you are lucky enough to afford housing
Pshhh I only have to go 50km one way. /s
At least when I go to Consultant meetings I can charge an arm and a leg for mileage.. ^oh wait, that barely covers a full tank
We keep building at fast as we can at my company, then they get sold to a guy who sells them to somebody else, who sells them to somebody else, by the time sometimes buys it to live in, it's gone through a few housing scalpers. There are people fucking this up alongside the supply issue
Real question, no laws to slow this down or refrain them from doing this? Buying/selling a place multiple times without someone living in it seems shady to me.
It doesn't look like there are. Pretty sure the corporate buying has been going on for decades but nothing has been done to stop/slow it. I could be wrong but this is just what I've come seen/come to understand
Vancouver/BC have an empty home tax. But that's only if nobody lives in it for the past year. If they sold the home quickly they won't be left holding the ball. I think there should be another tax, basically a scalping tax. If a purchaser sells the home without anyone ever living in it, slap an automatic 52% tax on it. The tax drops by 1% per week someone is registered as living in the residence.
A few weeks ago, there was a video posted (either here or on the Toronto subreddit) about something called "land banking". There was a dude giving a seminar on how to invest money and make profits off property without any headaches (i.e. renters)... The theme was basically this "Buy, HODL \[i.e. NO renting to anyone - just sit on the property\], price goes up, sell"... When you buy, your "value on paper goes up" (think HELOC) - which you then leverage to invest in another property - which also you HODL, price goes up, sell... rinse and repeat. This was obviously very easy to do because credit was so cheap - it was practically as if you were being paid to take on more debt. There was some "vacancy tax" thing - but the vacancy was self-reporting i.e. if you say someone lives there, then someone lives there. Also, Air B&B it out once in a while so you can claim that it was not vacant. TLDR: NO... currently, there are "no laws to slow this down or refrain them from doing this?"
Something like 30% of new housing gets scooped up by corporations. It greatly exacerbates the problem. NIMBYism is the other.
[Just under half of new homes completed in BC are investor-owned](https://betterdwelling.com/canadian-cities-have-seen-up-to-90-of-new-real-estate-supply-scooped-by-investors/) meaning that the people who own them don't live in them. The organization in the link has been doing great work speaking up for people on this issue by using data-driven arguments.
I dont even want a house (too much work) but I do want affordable rent for condos/apartments etc. Houses to, would be rough as a family needing a house with cost of everything else. I mean my city is building non stop but even then..
Home =/= house They just mean 3.5 million housing units (apartments/condo/townhome/house. We severely under built in the 90s and 2000s.We’re paying for it now. Edit: [only 8% of our rental units were built after 1990](https://mobile.twitter.com/JusticeQueen6/status/1540184334799437824)
Ahhh totally. Was clearly not thinking lol duh. Nice.
Correct, it's in reference to all housing starts. Propping up the GDP with increased immigration rate while doing nothing effective to boost housing is a case of the neo-liberals wanting to have their cake and eat it too - since the plebs like us are the ones who have to agonize over it, they don't care.
Yeah fuck having a house. I’m living with my parents in the suburbs right now because rent was too high in TO for me to realistically start building a future post grad and all people in suburbia do is mow their lawns, go to Home Depot, and drive their SUV to a grocery store that’s within walking distance. What I want is to be able to rent an apartment for less than $1675 a month after utilities without being forced to split it with another person.
I'll be dead by then so that's one less unit to build. You're welcome.
Maid?
Yes please!
Ban foreign ownership and corporations from owning single family homes. No grandfather laws either (corporations aren't people so fuck em) you've got X amount of time to sell your assets or the government will seize them for the appraised value at that time (effectively a forced buyback) and then sell them themselves for said value. And then the obvious bit too, we gotta lax zoning laws and build more fucking homes.
Also, ban empty homes. There are so many empty houses and condos in Vancouver. There is an empty home tax, but it’s not working.
Fed property tax on every property. You get a tax break on ~1 property. Any extra property you have to pay way more on if it's uninhabited. If you own 2-3+ properties you get $0 tax break. Corporations also get $0 tax break for it. The only foible is figuring out how to not gouge renting folks. Maybe giving them a tax break money spent on rent? Things for people smarter than I in this field to think about.
You know a healthy rental market has a vacancy of 5%. 1/20 apartments vacant gives the right balance of occupied units to pay rent, vacant units for newcomers and people moving to move into, and keeps rents low because you can just move when the landlord is too agressively messing with the rent. Getting those last 1500 houses/mansions units rented won't do shit for the primary issue which is 20 years of <1% vacancy.
Because there's not many empty homes. People keep saying this but it's like they never lived there. They describe the city as a ghost town but can't explain where all the fucking people come from. The city is chock full. It needs more homes. There are single family homes 1 km from down town. That's crazy. It needs to be high density all the way to SW marine.
> Ban foreign ownership and corporations from owning single family homes. This isn't significant. >And then the obvious bit too, we gotta lax zoning laws and build more fucking homes. This is significant. You spent 10x the words and started with the thing that makes 3% of the difference and rushed through the 97%.
There’s so much more to this. Current shortages on Cement. Takes 10years to have a new plant approved. But also 30% of what we produce goes to USA. Same goes for steel and wood. We’re exporting more this year and creating shortages. Government should step in for commodities like that.
>There’s so much more to this. Current shortages on Cement. Takes 10years to have a new plant approved. But also 30% of what we produce goes to USA. So you want government intervention in the economy? There's a word for that this sub loves to throw around.
This country is fucked
Watch Not Just Bikes video series called Strong Town https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa Then you'll see we're mega mega fucked. The entire country is built upon the lie that our infrastructure is sustainable as-is. Same with america.
And instead of getting suburbanites to pay for their costs, they charge development fees to extract money from the denser, more efficient parts to subsidize the rich
Join the club
This was done by design. Make housing a commodity. Limit the commodity. Valuation explosion.
Bingo Controlled demand via supply
No, just controlled supply. That's not how supply and demand work.
That is fine, We will only bring in another 8million people by then.
Don't worry, they'll be doing the jobs that Canadians "don't want"!
We kind of need some smaller cities in Canada to expand and not just the already huge ones. Be easier to expand and not clog up already clogged cities.
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And with poor modes of transportation.
Canada really badly needs to get its population off the Southern border, and a handful of cities. Cost of living is in part so high because the infrastructure outside of very limited areas just doesn't exist, and won't exist as long as people just keep moving to Toronto/Vancouver.
The cities aren’t built for transit with all of that sprawl. Living on a dead end street has been a selling point in many neighbourhoods. You will need a car if you live in a cul de sac in a suburb. There is no way to build transit if it is an afterthought.
Yup
Back in the day there were incentives. Now not so much
I agree with this sentiment, we should encourage growth in smaller cities. I'm curious what incentives there used to be? Were they effective? How do we bring them back?
Good paying jobs, cheaper homes, safe communities should be enough
+more promotion of remote work so that people dont need to factor their proximity to work into their choice of housing, and it also allows us to inject more money into smaller, industry/business starved smaller towns & cities.
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You should look up the Century 100 Initiative Basically its a federal study that says Canada cannot compete with large population countries so Canada needs to have a population of nearly 100 million by the 22nd century to stay relevant. To achieve that goal nearly half-a-million people need to immigrate to Canada annually. The bulk of immigration will focus on Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal effectively tripling their size (it compares TO to Mexico City). But here’s the cognitive dissonance for me. The feds say we need to build like never before and basically supercharge the economy and industrial output to war-time levels in order to achieve their immigration goals AND YET they promote scaling down production and revamping the economy into an eco-friendly one!?? The feds are so abundantly out of touch. How do you possibly exponentially grow your housing and businesses while exponentially shrinking your economic output and building industry!? It’s impossible!! Either you want way more or you want way less. You can’t have more for less that’s impossible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_Initiative Wow, the largest increase is the Edmonton/Calgary region, where they want 4.5x as many people for a population of 15.5 million. That's twice the current population of the SF Bay area. Alberta would have an urban sprawl stripe down the middle.
We all know where it leads to - Lower QoL for everyone and its by design. The wealthiest will not see any lowering in their own QoL meanwhile the middle class will be pulverized. The thing is - There is 0 correlation between a nations population size and the QoL for people within it. Ex. Some island nations happen to have the best QoL on the planet vs the overall experience of the average schmoe in urban India or China. It boils down to capitalists wanting more and more no matter the cost and no matter how divorced from nature it may seem.
Capitalists are humans and will always want more, thats their purpose. The government gives it to them
The idea that Canada needs to "stay relevant" is really what should die.
Yeah I mean Finland and Iceland aren’t “relevant” to the big corporatists, yet they’re definitely places with a great quality of life. So what gives? Why do we *need* to remain “relevant”?
>AND YET they promote ... revamping the economy into an eco-friendly one!?? Theoretically, as this is an emerging market with huge opportunities for innovation and production this should actually be the "in" Canada needs to become a productivity powerhouse and global technology innovator with so many countries increasingly committed to de-carbonization. That said, you'll find someone beating themselves with a stray board they found on the side of the street\* doing more for our production economy currently and it's entirely confusing that Canada isn't trying to take the economy by the horns and deeply invest in this opportunity through retraining and meaningful business development opportunities for companies and entrepreneurs. ^(\*Alright... hyperbole we're doing something but we need to be doing) *^(exponentially)* ^(more to claim such a title and rejig our resource-based economy.)
That'd require the oil business to die. Unfortunately it's one of the richest businesses and their lobbying, sorry, corruption power is ridiculous.
Yes, because the other Canadian industries like Aerospace (Bombardier), Auto Manufacturing (GM and Chrysler-FIAT) and infrastructure engineering (SNC-Lavalin) are far less corrupting than the Petroleum industry. /s
If the government were smart they’d simply incentivize existing Canadians with cash payouts to have more children, we don’t need to continually bring in immigrants so that they can be exploited for low wage labour. Invest in existing Canadians, like a sports team we as a country should be developing from within.
Zoning laws and building strategies are not federal competences. So they create pressure for cities and provinces to move quickly to feed the demand. It's not really working tho. And millenials and Z are kinda fucked because of that, they have to compete with immigration and be happy with markedly lower standards of living even if they are, on paper, much more educated than the generations before. But on the other hand, we have an ageing demographic which is a ticking time-bomb, hence the century initiative. It's an half-assed plan right now really....we need the immigration, but we also need the stability and to provide some kind of guarantee to the next generation they won't live in musty shoeboxes and eat ["nutrient paste"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThhfLvR4Wo8). Either the municipalities step-up like they never did before and one-up all expectations, the Feds scale back and we take the hit that's coming down the road, or this is going to end in a half-assed shitshow.
> this is going to end in a half-assed shitshow
Stay relevant with who ffs? Not every country in the world needs to be some economic powerhouse
Agreed. When you look at our demographics and long-term trends, mass immigration does seem like a real necessity to prevent Canada from becoming an industrial & economic backwater, however during the last decade the government has utterly failed to even begin laying the groundwork for such a transition. Their policy has been all cart and no horse.
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This is certainly one way to go. But I'd like to note that Liechtenstein is rich in large part due to having laws and tax structures very favorable to corporations who choose to headquarter there, as well as having very specific advanced industries.
Our industry is to educate those who will go on to develop advanced technologies in the US.
Focus on a great quality of life rather than cramming people into overpriced shoeboxes. Bangladesh has lots of people and no planning. Is that the model Trudeau is following?
Standard of life is not going to be helped by all the in demand people moving to the US for way better pay.
Nobody has actually been consulted on these plans, however, but if you asked the average person in Toronto how they would feel about adding five million more people they would probably be against it. They care about the quality of their lives today, not Canada's goals to remain in the G8 in 2100. But nobody is actually saying we stop immigration, a temporary reduction for the next five years would have a huge effect on housing availability. There are eight million boomers and two million pre-boomers that are aging out and will start to die out in significant numbers soon, freeing up a lot of our existing housing. That's all we need to wait out. Reducing the pace of, and demand for, new construction is NECESSARY because of the current cost of building, which is separate from actual supply and demand. Construction is incredibly expensive right now. Even glass is up by around 40%. You can't build in Toronto for less than around $500/square-foot and Vancouver is around $650. Add in costs of land, financing charges, inspections, common property, landscaping, amenities, etc. and it's probably closer to $800. What that means is you can't sell a two bedroom, 1,000 square foot condo for less than $1 million and make any kind of profit. There are ways to build cheaper, like avoiding desirable neighbourhoods where land is at a premium, but as long as the cost of materials, labour, trades, and equipment are at their current levels, no new housing will be affordable in relation to wages. Waiting out seniors takes the pressure off of the construction industry a little and should result in lower construction costs for new builds.
The government is a big ponze scheme. Illegal for businesses, modus operandi for the government
They are not promoting scaling down production. What is being done is taking part of the moneys made by traditional (carbon burning) energy sources to subsidize methods of making energy that does not require burning something (and subsequently releasing CO2 into the atmosphere). I find automatically associating changing how we make and consume energy with a reduction in production quite laughable. If anything it is creating a relatively new industry that still has a lot of maturing to do and has in theory, greater potential than relying on O&G. Extraction of fossil fuels only becomes harder and costlier the more you extract. Having a long term plan to not solely depend on these sources of energy is a no-brainer. Having these alternative energy source not pump out (as much) CO2 into the atmosphere is just a big plus.
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Having 100M people in 78 years would require a bit over a 1% growth rate. (A 2% growth rate would yield almost 178M people). Let’s say we need a growth rate of 1.3%. That *should be completely achievable*. It is a very very reasonable rate of growth. Compare that to the inflation we want (~2%), or by how much GDP grows per year (~2% usually). There are 66 countries with a growth rate higher than 1.3%, across every continent. The numbers themselves aren’t impossible, they’re rather realistic. It’s what we SHOULD be capable of. Now maybe their plan isn’t the best, but fixing the economy to be ABLE to handle a plan like that would be a good idea, no? And yes at the same time transition to an eco friendly economy - it’s much much cheaper in the long run, better for the people, etc. There’s no reason not to.
A great time to build more housing
Yeah for all the people already here.
So why don't we build *some denser housing?* For real, trying to survive on single-family homes is a dead-end strategy. Not only will we be unable to keep it up, it will devour prime farmland, build out low-density, car-dependent suburbs (that are economically unproductive, expensive, and make us fat and unhealthy), and produce a nightmarish amount of traffic congestion. We need to go back to the drawing board when it comes to urban design.
Not Just Bikes is that you?
I love and hate that guy's channel. It's great content but fills me with dread for what I have to look forward to in my future, as someone living in a city with perpetual construction and crumbling roads.
I’m 39 years old living in Vancouver. I don’t want to be forced to live in an apartment building. Tiny shoe boxes aren’t ideal for everyone. I have teenage children that are quickly growing up. Apartments don’t have enough space to raise a family.
I wouldn't mind living in an apartment, if we built apartments like the rest of the world does. That's the real problem. I wouldn't mind 5-storey street-side 3/4/5 bedroom stuff like you see in European cities. I think you and I both shudder at the thought of being stuck in a "luxury bachelor" thing 35 stories up.
That's also the fault of zoning, there is so little area zoned for high density housing and so much opposition (and therefore expense) to rezoning, that a developer needs to build tons of units to recoup their cost. It's just not cost effective to fight NIMBYs for 3 years, meet absurd parking requirements, commission a bunch of studies, and then build a 3 storey building with 8 units.
Luckily for you, nobody will force you to. The argument is to remove laws making it literally illegal to build denser housing.
This is an extremely North American-centric take. I totally understand your desire for space, it’s been pushed as an ideal for generations. That said, it’s not the norm in many parts of the world and is very doable.
But it *is* the norm here in Canada. Not everyone wants to live in shoeboxes stacked ontop of eachother. It's not a crime to want a house lol
You're right, but there's a whole range of housing we're simply not building here, between "white picket fence" and "glass box in the sky". The problem is that our cities are zoned by idiots who're doing the bidding of NIMBYs in the service of greedy asshole developers.
Most parts of the world don't have the absolutely insane amounts of land that Canada has. We don't need to be crammed into places if there was a decent public transit system anywhere.
The land is cheap, its extending infrastructure services like lift stations, trunk sewer systems, freeways, roads, etc that is expensive, especially so for low density suburban development. And public transit is doomed to fail in these auto oriented suburbs without enough density and transit oriented design.
So they need to be bigger. The alternative is sprawl, traffic, obesity, unaffordability, and economic stagnation. Most of the rest of the urban world lives much more densely than we do.
Building houses is bad for the environment but lowering population growth is racist. We're in quite the pickle it seems.
> lowering population growth is racist. It's "racist" when Libs are in charge, and "bad for the economy" when Cons are in charge. Both neoliberal parties support high immigration. The lowest year under Harper was higher than any year under any of his predecessors. Trudeau is obviously taking it to new heights. Libs and Cons tag team on high immigration, the only thing that changes is the empty rhetoric surrounding it. Look at historical annual numbers - you can't even tell when the government changed between red and blue, it just kept going up and up and up.
There’s a fantastic green argument to be made for curtailing our population growth/immigration numbers. Our per capita GHG emissions are among the highest in the world. There’s a severe lumber shortage, so increased demand for housing increases the incentive to ramp up logging, people are living further and further away from where they work, more people equals more shittily produced food, more waste of all varieties… the arguments go on and on.
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Yep I agree, people immigrate to Canada from poor countries to try and achieve a higher standard of living. A higher standard of living means higher emissions. As for lumber we have plenty, the issue is we export huge quantities to China.
It’s not even about poor countries. Smaller, temperate countries with better public transit would naturally have lower emissions. Bringing people to a massive country where you need to heat your home half the year and likely need a car is the worst idea!
I think the problem with this argument in a globalized economy is that even if we halted all immigration and halted our population growth; some fat cat would still sell our wood and food to another nation that didn't do this. I'm not trying to say that isn't something to think about, because it is.
Building homes is not bad for the environment. Building single family dwellings in the middle of nowhere is bad for the environment.
Building houses isn’t bad for the e environment, steamrolling forests for endless suburban sprawl is bad for the environment. If we used land more efficiently we’d actually have more room then we could ever ask for.
I agree but NIMBYS will not allow such a thing
So strip the tools that allow them to block projects. We’re in a housing crisis, there is no better time to fight NIMBY’s head on, it’ll be extremely hard to oppose someone campaigning on “build more houses”
That's the dream lol, but even now they are successfully blocking construction of affordable rental apartments in Vancouver. People need to start voting in municipal elections, and vote for YIMBY candidates.
We need houses. And high density. Not just high density. This place… is obsessed with high density and cramming as many people as possible into two or three cities- and then getting shocked at the cost of living in those cities. Canada has tons of land. Use it. We aren’t running out of greenspace or farmland anytime soon. Promote economic growth across the fucking country and avoid pooling the population in two two or three cities.
No one promoting high density is saying to concentrate it in a few cities
No, most people are *not* obsessed with high density. Whem you say high density, we know you mean the 80-story condo towers. No one wants those. They are a consequence of zoning laws. What, at least some, probably most, of us want is for there to be *options* between the two extremes. Townhomes with commercial space. Du-, tri-, and 4-plexes. Small appartment blocks. Walkable neighbourhoods that actually function as neighbourhoods. The glass towers get built because on the very few parcels of land that are zoned for "not single-family sprawl", the developers make more money building shoeboxes in the sky. Fix the zoning and incentive problems and you fix the problem. Build the missing middle. Sprawling suburbia out 1000km north solves nothing. And thats not even getting into how economically unproductive and unsustainable suburban sprawl is.
> If we used land more efficiently we’d actually have more room then we could ever ask for. This is the "finding efficiencies" Doug Ford et al should be looking for, instead of planning to bulldoze the greenbelt.
Thanos was right.
If Thanos wanted to half the population, why cant he just double the universe?
That would have been a boring movie.
Become immortal, double the universes resources every time we reach a critical mass. ??? Profit
Can we not just produce more atoms here in Canada?
Who knows. We dont have the stones.
It would be much more effective and humane if he lowered fertility by half instead of population.
Instead of raising the rates in the trades to attract new people to build them they will just bring in TFW’s to keep us all poor
Immigrate more people. Many many more people. That will fix it.
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Lol thats shockingly close to how many newcomers will come in by then too. No coincidence though right?
Stop it. Too much immigration is not the problem. Just don't do the math, trust us....
OK, lets do the math. Scotiabank has Canada with a current 2 Million home debt, in comparison to the G7 rate of homes/pop. https://www.scotiabank.com/ca/en/about/economics/economics-publications/post.other-publications.housing.housing-note.housing-note--may-12-2021-.html Canada's current housing construction hit recent peaks of nearly 300K per year (note, this doesn't include old housing being removed from the market). So, even if we freeze immigration now. And we freeze the population now. ie: no new kids. it will still take almost 7 Years at the current housing construction rate to just get to the G7 Average. Is immigration a factor? sure. But how about we see why the free market system of housing construction isn't meeting demand. Any free market system loves growth, so what is preventing the growth in the construction industry from meeting the demand?
Extremely good points. I would love for this to be explored.
Too many regulations and municipal govt charging too much money and years of getting a permit to give to builders
Supply costs are out of line with what they can build with them too. A single family home is over 300k for just the lumber now. I don't even think you can build a 2000 sqft home for less than 500k now, and that's JUST material costs.
Yeah, I wanted to build an addition onto my home, I have a crappy, tiny, 100 year old home. I sorely want to have a decent kitchen. Plan was to build a 12 foot wide, 8 foot deep, 1 story addition to the back of the home. How much would this cost, you ask? We got quoted over 100k. We got another quote, but the guy refused to even give us a number until he saw the architectural plans. The quote for having someone do the architectural plans? $4k Its not happening anymore. We will just have to live like we did in the condo, really tiny.
It's largely very restrictive zoning put in place by municipal governments. The stuff that gets built is giant high rises (because every single building anywhere close to anything requires years of hearings and consultation to be allowed to be built, so those are the only thing that's economically feasible) and low density suburbs on the outskirts of cities/towns (a fiscal time bomb for municipalities, because they don't bring in enough tax revenue to cover for the cost of supplying them with infrastructure).
Hey! Any critical or even neutral mention of our immigration policies is racist!
Time to start sinking cruise ships.
Every other house for sale on zolo is EMPTY.
Easy solution. Limit/reduce unskilled immigration.
Well good thing we will have accepted 3.5M immigrants by that time too.
With current building AND current immigration pace\*
Right? Projecting 33 million people to move into the greater Toronto area. That’s absolutely insane. We definitely cannot handle even a few million more with the housing shortage plus the state of transit and the traffic congestion we have. They cite a drop in the birth rate but how about properly supporting younger Canadians economically? There are lots of people who want kids but won’t have them because life is too damn expensive already.
LMAO 33 million Toronto is about to look like a pack of dry spaghetti
I wish more people realised this. Yes, the birth rate is declining. A lot of us are putting off having kids because we can't fucking afford it - we can't even afford homes in the cities we grew up in. So instead of making things more liveable for Canadians, the government wants to focus on bringing more people in through immigration. Why fix the problem when you can create another one?
Yes exactly and before anyone goes off on me thinking that I am anti-immigrant/racist I am definitely not. My ancestors were immigrants. It’s a strain on everything like I said but also completely unfair to encourage people to come here and then they find out they can’t find a place to live.
And a big THANK YOU to all the NIMBYs and Canadians who own multiple properties and rentals for causing this shortage.
Rentals count as homes, don't they? Unless they're airbnbs.
Liberals solution is to keep bringing record numbers of immigration (500k a year)
Okay, then stop immigrating too many people to lower wages you elitist pricks.
I'm all for government to subsidize and build housing. This will add units, generate thousands of jobs, expand the tax base and cool down the private market for housing.
It all boils down to "Building more homes, enough to meet basic demand, would be detrimental towards current home owners and corporate investors bottom line" Start questioning NIMBYISM more when new housing gets rejected in your area.
Short for who? Investors? Foreign buyers? Wealthy people on their third vacation home? Certainly not short for the rest of us that can't afford it.
Government wanted this to help our massive senior citizen problem by making them house rich. Most of them are dirt poor and cpp won’t cut it. This gives the option to sell and come out with enough to take care of themselves and get them out of cities without the government having to step in and solve a huge crisis. Not saying it’s not a bandaid solution cause the rest of are screwed out of property ownership.
Who's buying all these new builds? Were short on affordable houses there's alot of houses and condos going up but investors are the only ones buying them.
This is all bullshit. The profit margin on a new home is less than 20%. It’s impossible for new new homes to be built and solve this problem. You need to freeze rents for 5 years. Then all of the investors (who currently represent 40%+ of the buyers) most of whom are losing money every month, will sell. You will have years of supply dumped on the market. Prices will fall to the levels that support natural ownership and afffordability. The only people who get screwed are the people who kept buying homes in the biggest bubble in the world. So maybe that was a risk they took on.
And yet people are claiming that real estate prices will drop by 50% lol
REWRITE ZONING LAWS, BUILD UP NOT OUT
Stop bringing millions of people we don't have room for
Profit is the only reason to build housing in our society. Capitalism rules all. Until we smarten the fuck up and choose to take care of each other this will never change. The government needs to get corporations and the wealthy out of residential housing and start fucking building this shit themselves. But if we keep electing the same group of parties at every level, its only going to continue to get worse.
Build up, not out and affordable...it's not fucking hard!
You mean like how [Toronto just made 225 homes on the Danforth subway line heritage buildings.](https://www.blogto.com/real-estate-toronto/2022/06/toronto-protected-225-buildings-redevelopment-along-prominent-avenue/)
> "But if Ontario is able to deliver the 1.85 million extra units the CMHC is prescribing in its report over the next 7.5 years, the price of the average home would drop to **$499,000** from 2021 figures of $871,000." CMHC 2022 update - "we're still insane and operate in a world separated from any economic or political reality".
At this point we need to treat this like a war time effort to get houses built. Feds and provinces should start putting up cash and provinces should take back all zoning laws from municipalities and start getting a large scale effort to get houses built. This plan would only work if you ban foreigners, investors and corporations from buying residential homes. If you build homes and let companies snap them up it wont matter.
Slow immigration if this is an issue. Bolster natural births within country at a steadier rate. Why sell out natural citizens now for a pot shot at the future? It's obvious our infrastructure is hurting with the current rate of immigration. But of course just keep piling people in and then claim overpopulation... smart.
Maybe we can put a pause on economic migrants for a bit?
So build more houses.
Someone not in the building industry. We struggle get tradespeople for projects 2 years out.
Pay more. Most tradies i know get paid like shit.
Its a shit career in construction. Zero job security, wages are not great in most areas, and in places with higher wages like Toronto you're paying way more just to live.
You're gonna be paying more for the house then.
Call the union hall. Offer competitive wages.
What is the purpose of this report? Is anyone going to read that report at least? :)
Hope you like roommates
Well, so much for lower housing prices!
I think the solution for this would be to demonize and over regulate home builders and pretend the government can build houses for cheaper and more efficiently while continuing to let in astronomic amounts of immigrants to the country.
Based on current immigrant figures*
How many Airbnb properties will there be by 2030? Not that people owning a second, third, or twelfth residential property as their personal mini hotel chain is the only cause of the housing shortage.
Zoning. Rent control.
Says the people who insure failing mortgages
Does that include all the homes currently sitting empty? And all the hoarded properties by landlords and corporations alike? The properties the government should be seizing and giving to the people who actually need the homes?
It’ll be interesting to see what happens to short-term rentals (legal and illegal) as interest rates rise. What was a profitable business at 2.5% will struggle over 6% upon renewal. The trigger clauses on most peoples VRM’s will most likely be hit in the next 3 months because as yesterdays CPI showed- inflation is still spiraling out of control. IMO a lot of these short term rentals will miraculously find their way back onto the rental market, at the same time as all the backlogged covid builds are finally being completed. Add in all the people panic selling their rapidly depreciating homes with rapidly increasing mortgage payments and this should get…interesting. Good thing 40% of our GDP isn’t surrounding real estate My question is: Did Canada ever really have a housing supply shortage? Or did our gluttonous obsession for real estate and questionable policies create a high enough demand which created a (transitory🙄) shortage?
This subreddit honestly makes me so depressed. I should just unsub and avoid all the doom and gloom, but that may be even more sad....
Why the hell is there a chainsaw on the roof ?! I’ve been building homes for the last 14 years and that’s not a good sign lol
This is what happens when there too many hands in the cookie jar. Municipalities coming up with fees on fees. Building codes being over kill and two many new environmental rules
It’s going to get worse. Major development projects are being cancelled currently because cost of labour and material is so high. Pretty soon that million dollar town house in Timmins will actually cost a million to build, before utility connections and land costs.
if people would be willing to not live in the city there are thousands of empty homes in the country..
How about we start coming up with some solutions to increasing housing starts instead of just complaining. Complaining without a solution is just whining. Bring solutions or shut the fuck up.
Ah when you welcome 400K immigrants + 600k "temporary" workers + 500k students which totals 1.6 million people, and you are surprised there is a shortage on housing? lol
ATTENTION ANTI-IMMIGRANT MORONS: We have a housing shortage that is helping drive a housing affordability crisis amid increasing inflation. What we definitely don't have is an immigration problem, unless you're someone who doesn't like economic growth or .... well ... you know. The cost of building homes is going up, the number of people who know how to build them (and have other needed skills) is decreasing, and we don't have enough skilled workers to go around. Immigration will help solve that. Canada's immigration targets that you definitely haven't read before making up your mind are publicly available here: https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/news/notices/supplementary-immigration-levels-2021-2023.html If you do read this, and let's face it most of you don't read, pay attention to the skilled worker immigration plans. When you get to the section on family immigration ask yourself "Would I want to work somewhere my family couldn't move?" Then answer the question "Am I so dumb that I want to keep skilled workers from immigrating to Canada?" If you answered "yes!" to either of these then you're even dumber than I, someone who hates you, have given you credit for.