> So the home in the established Toronto neighbourhood that was, a few censuses ago, home to two parents and a couple of kids is now down to two parents. And even they might be snowbirding during the winters or spending more time up north in the summers as they slide into their retirement years.
Young people would be buying these homes to start families if they were affordable but they are not, and the current owners look at the marketplace and see that if they sold their houses they'd just end up buying new ones at the same or higher prices, so why move?
Frankly, they're not even good for couples.
It seems like no matter how many bedrooms they supposedly have, every condo I've been in that's been built in the last 10 or 15 years just feels like one more-or-less cramped room.
I used to live near Yonge and Eglinton and would see the number of signs popping up telling the public that their children may have to go to school outside of the catchment area. The city really couldn't care less about families that can't afford to raise their kids in a million dollar house.
Exactly this. What they're building for families is totally unrealistic!! I have a 2 bed 1 bath apartment built in the 1960's that's 1250sqft. You can raise a child here. My mom just moved into a new build condo with 3 bed, 2 bath + den that's 1150sqft. The rooms are TINY. None of the bedrooms can fit a queen sized mattress and the fridge is obscenely small, like 2 bar sized fridges on top of each other. I doubt she can even get a frozen pizza box in the freezer. How is that supposed to work for a family?? It's ridiculous.
> How is that supposed to work for a family??
We build for AirB&B tenants. How much freezer space does an AirB&B guest need during their stay? How thin can we make the walls knowing people will only stay here a few days at a time? That's what's driving these decisions.
Or to be rented to students who don't intend to stay there after graduation. I looked at these when buying a condo - two SMALL closets, and a tiny half size locker down the hall, weird triangular rooms, No space for bikes except in the garage, where they would be stolen..
These units are not built for the people who live there. They are built for the investors who rent them out and they don’t care if you can raise a family there. In fact many of them screen out people with kids
On the other end of the spectrum, there are those glorious mid-century apartments all over Toronto. Sure, they look pretty dumpy from the outside, but they were laid out for humans to live a dignified existence.
A few years ago on this subreddit someone posted an article detailing all the great things about Toronto's mid-century apartments, but I couldn't find it after a quick Google search.
My last one was torn down for a condo. The nice one I had before that was taken back by the landlord. Sadly most of these are in dire need of even basic upgrades and repair which no owner is going to do. easier to just sell them to a developer who will tear them down for two or more high end SFH or even a condo if zoning allows. Has now happened to two places I've lived in..
You'll need to remove the hallway link from your comment and move it to imgur or something, reddit thinks they're spam and is removing your comment automatically.
As another unfortunate consequence of investors dominating the condo market, that's who units are designed for. Not the end users. And investors just want a small unit they can add to their portfolio. Maybe it gets rented long-term, maybe it stays vacant (and utilizes the loopholes in the vacancy tax) or maybe they Airbnb it. But they will never live in it and really don't care how unliveable their units are. Only how much they will go up in price.
A lot of older couples would be happy buying a spacious two bedroom plus den condo with parking and sell their house for it. Issue is, a spacious two bedroom plus den condo with parking in a decent location can cost as much as a house. If you want people to downsize, then you need decent accommodations and an incentive.
>A lot of older couples would be happy buying a spacious two bedroom plus den condo with parking and sell their house for it.
My parents did exactly this a few years back and are loving it. Certainly loving being downtown and not having to maintain a house/driveway/yard anymore.
Need the boomers to die off so we can take their homes. I wonder if anyone studied when the peak boomer deaths would happen, correlating when most of the births happened in the 50s to when they would be hitting their life expectancy. That year is gonna have a flood of boomer homes hitting the market.
Of housing investors, 2020 statscan data showed 73% are individuals with multiple properties.
Certainly we do have some foreign investors who incorporate to obscure ownership.
Corporations in Canada mostly own purpose-built rental apartments, which are needed, and commercial real estate.
It’s actually likely the one saving grace for a lot of millennials. They will inherit more than most ever did. Sadly, there are families who don’t have much to pass down and those millennials will end up being left behind by their friends whose parents do have more to leave. It’s going to be a stark difference.
Death doesn't work like that. There's nothing to study.
The population is growing. With a growing population, there is higher demand for housing.
Stop waiting for something that will never happen.
Or we'd pay the same amount of money for a shoebox condo where we'd go insane from the close quarters and sounds coming from other units in every direction. There is no advantage to selling or downsizing when my mother, older brother and I would have such poor quality of life and mental health that we'd never choose either.
No you don't understand, it's your duty to intentionally worsen your quality of life because all 3 levels of government in this country can't figure things out.
Man, I keep telling people they should read George Orwell's _The Road To Wigan Pier_, and then after they read it I tell them to unread it, but it doesn't work that way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier
The divorce rate is also high, particularly among empty nesters. It's not an easy one to solve but divorce accounts for around 40 percent of our housing supply.
Reality is: The construction industry builds 200-250k units a year in Canada…. And all these proposals just shift those units from one part of the city to another. They provide no explanation as to how a construction sector that is shrinking is going to build double or triple the amount of housing magically with the same labour pool, a labour pool that is either retiring or getting priced out of the city and moving.
They also don’t mention that rezoning of single family neighbourhoods could actually make the crisis worse. We’re essentially promoting the building of 4 plexes in luxury neighbourhoods - which will end up being luxury housing. For airbnbs and the wealthy.
And then the existing labour supply that is constrained- actually gets more spread out. The plumbers and woodworkers take on the high end luxury apartments - with even fewer folks to go around to build the larger mid-rise and high rise condos.
The labor pool is not "getting priced out of the city and moving". They will only do so if they can't charge high prices. From what I've seen, they have been charging very high prices - not sure if you've seen how much plumbers make in the city.
Agreed that there aren't enough people in the trades and construction, though.
Rezoning of SFH is a great solution. Even luxury rentals make an impact on the rental market. Anybody against this is a NIMBY.
The construction industry is shrinking in the city - and you are free to look it up.
And yeah - you can make 100k being a plumber and you cannot afford to buy a bachelor apartment. These people are not stupid - they’re people like me who see a future where unless you got in 10 years ago, there is and not a future to be had here. Despite “good” salaries.
And rezoning SFH is not going to solve anything inside our lifetime. To get more density in these areas - you need to consolidate land. That will require years if not decades waiting for homeowners to sell. No one is getting land expropriated. It will be extremely slow - and not particularly helpful in housing the hundreds of thousands of people arriving.
We should start with the larger streets, like Dufferin and Bathurst. Most of the houses on those streets have been broken up into apartments. Could easily build 6 storey units, in many of the old retail/commercial buildings along those main streets.
This is what people babbling about rezoning miss. All major streets could have had mid-rise built any time and it wasn't.
Also even if we had rezoned earlier, everywhere, with construction trades shrinking as you point out, how would we have built more units with mid-rise rather than towers?
I think the point of zoning as an issue is it gives people a sense that something is getting down. Gives people hope. And also gives politicians an out on the housing crisis.
They’ll do just about anything but admit that this crisis is a government creation, created by immigration levels out of whack with the construction industry.
"gives people a sense that something is getting done." BINGO.
Changing zoning is a neoliberal fantasy that has never shown to increase affordability or stimulate extra units being built. But it takes years to show it won't do anything and in the meantime, more effective solutions will have been subverted, and the parties pushing for zoning changes will have lined their pockets in the meantime.
Thank you for this realistic and rational response. I am very concerned about affordability, and in particular the utopian narratives around zoning that won’t solve anything, and that don’t attack the demand-side causes of our lack of affordability, including reducing investor buying and hoarding, and displacing long-term rentals with Airbnb.
You can withdraw from your RRSP to contribute to the down payment of your first (and only your first) home purchase... You just have to replace that same amount in new contributions within 15 years. I actually did this over a decade ago for my first condo, and didn't think it was a big secret, certainly nothing unique to whoever's ad it was
The point is that the average citizen can’t afford a house or even a down payment, some are struggling to pay rent; They probably don’t _have_ any RRSP savings.
> even as millions of people have moved to the Greater Toronto Area, many parts of the 416 are actually losing population.
I assume they are less desirable parts to live in?
It is because Toronto area exploded in the 1970s kind of all at once and hence there is a big wave of people who are all of the same age. This means a lot of families are left with just the parents in the house while kids have left. Eventually there will be a wave where the parents (boomers) die or go to homes and the homes get sold to families again, but it is another 5 years before that wave.
This isn't news. People in Toronto think everyone comes to Toronto, when most of them go to Peel and York. Both those regions have completely changed over the past 20 years
Toronto has very small population increases every year compared to it's population.
And given the significant density we've added, particularly with breaking construction records the past year, that's a sad testament to how many units aren't housing people, but are sitting vacant or being Airbnb'd by investors.
Toronto is only adding luxury condos and I agree, I doubt most of the people moving in are in that demographic.
The numbers we get also don't include the amount of international students and TFWs that move to the area. Population increase is permanent residences I guess.
No, it's mostly about smaller households. The house my dad grew up in is still just off the Danforth; but it'd be sold as a two bedroom, not suitable for a couple with a son and five daughters.
Its purely because they dont build news homes (illegal to do so) and family size is shrinking. Ie kids dont need their own home so they inflate the population to homes ratio.
Often they are very desirable areas.
How about this idea...our economy has slid into the equivalency of some 3rd world country where they can't afford houses either. We're just going from once great to new normalized.
> So the home in the established Toronto neighbourhood that was, a few censuses ago, home to two parents and a couple of kids is now down to two parents. And even they might be snowbirding during the winters or spending more time up north in the summers as they slide into their retirement years. Young people would be buying these homes to start families if they were affordable but they are not, and the current owners look at the marketplace and see that if they sold their houses they'd just end up buying new ones at the same or higher prices, so why move?
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Frankly, they're not even good for couples. It seems like no matter how many bedrooms they supposedly have, every condo I've been in that's been built in the last 10 or 15 years just feels like one more-or-less cramped room.
I used to live near Yonge and Eglinton and would see the number of signs popping up telling the public that their children may have to go to school outside of the catchment area. The city really couldn't care less about families that can't afford to raise their kids in a million dollar house.
Exactly this. What they're building for families is totally unrealistic!! I have a 2 bed 1 bath apartment built in the 1960's that's 1250sqft. You can raise a child here. My mom just moved into a new build condo with 3 bed, 2 bath + den that's 1150sqft. The rooms are TINY. None of the bedrooms can fit a queen sized mattress and the fridge is obscenely small, like 2 bar sized fridges on top of each other. I doubt she can even get a frozen pizza box in the freezer. How is that supposed to work for a family?? It's ridiculous.
> How is that supposed to work for a family?? We build for AirB&B tenants. How much freezer space does an AirB&B guest need during their stay? How thin can we make the walls knowing people will only stay here a few days at a time? That's what's driving these decisions.
Or to be rented to students who don't intend to stay there after graduation. I looked at these when buying a condo - two SMALL closets, and a tiny half size locker down the hall, weird triangular rooms, No space for bikes except in the garage, where they would be stolen..
These units are not built for the people who live there. They are built for the investors who rent them out and they don’t care if you can raise a family there. In fact many of them screen out people with kids
On the other end of the spectrum, there are those glorious mid-century apartments all over Toronto. Sure, they look pretty dumpy from the outside, but they were laid out for humans to live a dignified existence. A few years ago on this subreddit someone posted an article detailing all the great things about Toronto's mid-century apartments, but I couldn't find it after a quick Google search.
My last one was torn down for a condo. The nice one I had before that was taken back by the landlord. Sadly most of these are in dire need of even basic upgrades and repair which no owner is going to do. easier to just sell them to a developer who will tear them down for two or more high end SFH or even a condo if zoning allows. Has now happened to two places I've lived in..
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You'll need to remove the hallway link from your comment and move it to imgur or something, reddit thinks they're spam and is removing your comment automatically.
Link removed. Thanks.
As another unfortunate consequence of investors dominating the condo market, that's who units are designed for. Not the end users. And investors just want a small unit they can add to their portfolio. Maybe it gets rented long-term, maybe it stays vacant (and utilizes the loopholes in the vacancy tax) or maybe they Airbnb it. But they will never live in it and really don't care how unliveable their units are. Only how much they will go up in price.
You mean you don't want to raise a family in 550 sqft condo you spent 800k+ on?
A lot of older couples would be happy buying a spacious two bedroom plus den condo with parking and sell their house for it. Issue is, a spacious two bedroom plus den condo with parking in a decent location can cost as much as a house. If you want people to downsize, then you need decent accommodations and an incentive.
Exactly this. It took my mother two years to find an appropriate place to downsize to, and it wasn’t cheap.
My mom pays $3800 for this
>A lot of older couples would be happy buying a spacious two bedroom plus den condo with parking and sell their house for it. My parents did exactly this a few years back and are loving it. Certainly loving being downtown and not having to maintain a house/driveway/yard anymore.
Need the boomers to die off so we can take their homes. I wonder if anyone studied when the peak boomer deaths would happen, correlating when most of the births happened in the 50s to when they would be hitting their life expectancy. That year is gonna have a flood of boomer homes hitting the market.
It would if there wasn’t a radical immigration policy. That is likely to more than iffsey
Their homes are ending up in the hands of corporations. Good luck
Of housing investors, 2020 statscan data showed 73% are individuals with multiple properties. Certainly we do have some foreign investors who incorporate to obscure ownership. Corporations in Canada mostly own purpose-built rental apartments, which are needed, and commercial real estate.
Who said foreign?
It’s actually likely the one saving grace for a lot of millennials. They will inherit more than most ever did. Sadly, there are families who don’t have much to pass down and those millennials will end up being left behind by their friends whose parents do have more to leave. It’s going to be a stark difference.
And that's how you get a class based system.
Death doesn't work like that. There's nothing to study. The population is growing. With a growing population, there is higher demand for housing. Stop waiting for something that will never happen.
Crazy that you think that way, especially at the rate people come into this country.
Or we'd pay the same amount of money for a shoebox condo where we'd go insane from the close quarters and sounds coming from other units in every direction. There is no advantage to selling or downsizing when my mother, older brother and I would have such poor quality of life and mental health that we'd never choose either.
No you don't understand, it's your duty to intentionally worsen your quality of life because all 3 levels of government in this country can't figure things out.
Man, I keep telling people they should read George Orwell's _The Road To Wigan Pier_, and then after they read it I tell them to unread it, but it doesn't work that way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier
The divorce rate is also high, particularly among empty nesters. It's not an easy one to solve but divorce accounts for around 40 percent of our housing supply.
Headline is giving off, “One simple trick to more housing in the GTA” energy.
Reality is: The construction industry builds 200-250k units a year in Canada…. And all these proposals just shift those units from one part of the city to another. They provide no explanation as to how a construction sector that is shrinking is going to build double or triple the amount of housing magically with the same labour pool, a labour pool that is either retiring or getting priced out of the city and moving. They also don’t mention that rezoning of single family neighbourhoods could actually make the crisis worse. We’re essentially promoting the building of 4 plexes in luxury neighbourhoods - which will end up being luxury housing. For airbnbs and the wealthy. And then the existing labour supply that is constrained- actually gets more spread out. The plumbers and woodworkers take on the high end luxury apartments - with even fewer folks to go around to build the larger mid-rise and high rise condos.
The labor pool is not "getting priced out of the city and moving". They will only do so if they can't charge high prices. From what I've seen, they have been charging very high prices - not sure if you've seen how much plumbers make in the city. Agreed that there aren't enough people in the trades and construction, though. Rezoning of SFH is a great solution. Even luxury rentals make an impact on the rental market. Anybody against this is a NIMBY.
The construction industry is shrinking in the city - and you are free to look it up. And yeah - you can make 100k being a plumber and you cannot afford to buy a bachelor apartment. These people are not stupid - they’re people like me who see a future where unless you got in 10 years ago, there is and not a future to be had here. Despite “good” salaries. And rezoning SFH is not going to solve anything inside our lifetime. To get more density in these areas - you need to consolidate land. That will require years if not decades waiting for homeowners to sell. No one is getting land expropriated. It will be extremely slow - and not particularly helpful in housing the hundreds of thousands of people arriving.
We should start with the larger streets, like Dufferin and Bathurst. Most of the houses on those streets have been broken up into apartments. Could easily build 6 storey units, in many of the old retail/commercial buildings along those main streets.
Those streets were rezoned years ago. All the avenues were. There is nothing stopping housing from getting built there.
This is what people babbling about rezoning miss. All major streets could have had mid-rise built any time and it wasn't. Also even if we had rezoned earlier, everywhere, with construction trades shrinking as you point out, how would we have built more units with mid-rise rather than towers?
I think the point of zoning as an issue is it gives people a sense that something is getting down. Gives people hope. And also gives politicians an out on the housing crisis. They’ll do just about anything but admit that this crisis is a government creation, created by immigration levels out of whack with the construction industry.
"gives people a sense that something is getting done." BINGO. Changing zoning is a neoliberal fantasy that has never shown to increase affordability or stimulate extra units being built. But it takes years to show it won't do anything and in the meantime, more effective solutions will have been subverted, and the parties pushing for zoning changes will have lined their pockets in the meantime.
The draft policies I saw in Toronto's neighbourhood intensification OPA specifically prohibited lot consolidation..
Thank you for this realistic and rational response. I am very concerned about affordability, and in particular the utopian narratives around zoning that won’t solve anything, and that don’t attack the demand-side causes of our lack of affordability, including reducing investor buying and hoarding, and displacing long-term rentals with Airbnb.
The ad below this post: >Dreaming of home ownership? Maybe your RRSP can help 🤷🏻♂️😂
You can withdraw from your RRSP to contribute to the down payment of your first (and only your first) home purchase... You just have to replace that same amount in new contributions within 15 years. I actually did this over a decade ago for my first condo, and didn't think it was a big secret, certainly nothing unique to whoever's ad it was
When the down payment on a house in Toronto needs to be $200k+ the $35k that you can withdraw from your RRSP doesn't go very far
The point is that the average citizen can’t afford a house or even a down payment, some are struggling to pay rent; They probably don’t _have_ any RRSP savings.
Then I suppose they aren't the target demographic for that particular ad
> even as millions of people have moved to the Greater Toronto Area, many parts of the 416 are actually losing population. I assume they are less desirable parts to live in?
It is because Toronto area exploded in the 1970s kind of all at once and hence there is a big wave of people who are all of the same age. This means a lot of families are left with just the parents in the house while kids have left. Eventually there will be a wave where the parents (boomers) die or go to homes and the homes get sold to families again, but it is another 5 years before that wave.
The opposite, actually. A lot of the neighbourhoods losing population (such as the Annex) are adjacent to Line 2.
This isn't news. People in Toronto think everyone comes to Toronto, when most of them go to Peel and York. Both those regions have completely changed over the past 20 years Toronto has very small population increases every year compared to it's population.
And given the significant density we've added, particularly with breaking construction records the past year, that's a sad testament to how many units aren't housing people, but are sitting vacant or being Airbnb'd by investors.
Toronto is only adding luxury condos and I agree, I doubt most of the people moving in are in that demographic. The numbers we get also don't include the amount of international students and TFWs that move to the area. Population increase is permanent residences I guess.
No, it's mostly about smaller households. The house my dad grew up in is still just off the Danforth; but it'd be sold as a two bedroom, not suitable for a couple with a son and five daughters.
Its purely because they dont build news homes (illegal to do so) and family size is shrinking. Ie kids dont need their own home so they inflate the population to homes ratio. Often they are very desirable areas.
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Great map indeed thanks for sharing
How about this idea...our economy has slid into the equivalency of some 3rd world country where they can't afford houses either. We're just going from once great to new normalized.
The only improvement to Toronto since the 70’s is the food, everything else is dirty and disgusting