The way my friend Al Guart saw it, the theft itself was a little thing.
For years, Al covered the Mafia for the New York Post, where I worked with him. A job that was not without some level of danger. You would think that would have inoculated him to the petty crime that had creeped into every crevice of the Big Apple.
A developer lobby group is renewing calls to introduce tax cuts for new projects as housing starts continue to slow, warning that if something doesn’t change, tens of thousands of jobs could be at risk.
On Monday, the Building Industry and Land Development Association released a brief calculation considering how far new home construction could fall and how many jobs could be lost if the sale of new homes remains low.
Exploiting a crisis?
Canadian renters are still grappling with affordability issues even though rent prices have decreased this year, while those contemplating the move to home ownership are adopting a wait-and-see approach, a new report suggests.
Hard work in Canada has never paid less, in economic opportunity or quality of life. For most young Canadians, it doesn’t really matter how much you make in dollars and cents: without family money, the big picture is largely the same. No homeownership. No path to building wealth. Delayed family formation, or none at all.
This corrosive disconnect between salary and lifestyle goes to the heart of Canada’s generational tensions. Outside rural areas, even a six-figure salary often means living paycheque to paycheque by the time rent, transit, food and other basic expenses are paid for. Needless to say, many young people make far less than six figures, which is why one out of every four food bank users in Ontario these days is employed.
Slavica Salihbegovic’s family was growing. So she did what anyone living in Vienna would do: She asked the city for a bigger apartment.
“At that time, I was pregnant with my first kid,” she said. “I lived in a two-room apartment … it was an OK building, but it was small for us.”
Salihbegovic went to an online portal, entered her income and requirements, and was ranked alongside thousands of other residents. Soon, she was assigned a new apartment: a three-bedroom unit in a brand-new building, adjacent to Vienna’s Central Station.
We have subsidized housing. My guess is that Austria’s social housing has not been made stronger by diversity.
Christine Miller has been a Grade One teacher with the Peel District School Board for the better part of a decade and while she earns close to $120,000 annually, she says she is living pay cheque to pay cheque.
Miller belongs to a rising number of middle-income households making up to $125,000 a year that are at risk of being squeezed out of the region, according to a report released by Civic Action this week.
Many members of the group, like Miller, have healthy salaries well over the median income for Toronto but are still struggling to stay afloat and have essentially become ‘the invisible poor,” Civic Action says.
I hope she didn’t vote Liberal or NDP and mass immigration.
The failure to provide plentiful, quality and affordable housing is a damning indictment of the political class.
In Britain today, trust between the people and those who rule us is now on life support. The social contract – an implicit agreement between citizens and state, where the former obeys the laws of the latter in return for the provision of certain, basic needs – lies in tatters. Nothing illustrates the severity of this breakdown as clearly as the housing crisis.
“Restoring affordability to levels last seen two decades ago isn’t realistic, especially after the post-pandemic price surge,” CMHC said. The change in forecast “highlights how widespread the housing affordability challenge has become across Canada.”
Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. says up to 4.8 million new homes will need to be built over the next decade to restore affordability levels last seen in 2019 based on projected demand.
The national housing agency released its latest supply gaps estimate report today, which says between 430,000 and 480,000 new housing units are needed per year across the ownership and rental markets by 2035.
That would represent around double the current pace of home construction in Canada, with 90,760 housing starts recorded so far this year through May.
Canada can’t build that many homes.
The City of Montreal has hired private security guards to patrol parts of Ville-Marie, Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve and the Sud-Ouest starting this summer in an effort to improve safety and cohabitation in targeted public areas.
The move comes during a time of rising tensions between residents and people who are unhoused.
But several organizations that work directly with homeless people question the lack of consultation about the patrols and would have preferred the money be distributed to groups that already do outreach and interventions.
Homeless police. Did not see that coming.
A group of Toronto advocates marched alongside a giant fake cockroach during a protest Saturday as they called on the city to provide more affordable housing and spoke out against corporate landlord practices.
Several people held large cockroach props with speech bubbles containing the names of some major corporate landlords in the city as they marched toward those companies’ offices in the Financial District.
I empathize with the tenants but they will find no succor under a the combined Carney-Chow regimes.
The LPC’s Mass-immigration policy for profit scam has exhausted affordable housing and will continue unabated while the communist Chow will assist in maintaining the housing shortage to stay in power. Manufacturing poverty is her business because it’s her vote bloc.
Canadian non-profit groups are seeing an increase in the number of older individuals seeking assistance at shelters, and they say it’s changing the way their organizations respond to the rising homeless population.
The Mustard Seed senior director of shelter operations Samantha Lowe says her organization experienced a “consistent” rise in the number of individuals aged 55 and older seeking shelter between 2023 and 2024.
More than half of Toronto residents say they are not confident they will be able to live a comfortable life in the city over the long-term, according to a recent survey.
The survey was conducted by Ipsos for the Toronto Region Board of Trade (TRBOT). It sought responses from 1,000 residents in Hamilton and Toronto between May 9 and 22.
Douglas Todd: Canada’s distorted housing market calls for more than ‘cranes on the skyline,’ given that investors now own one in three homes. There are other ways.
This week three of four Canadians declared they have no confidence in Prime Minister Mark Carney’s ideas for solving the country’s housing affordability crisis.
Like most premiers and mayors, Carney is promising to “build, baby, build” to stimulate a record amount of housing construction. But Angus Reid Institute polling suggests the public is more than skeptical, perhaps in despair.
While voters understandably get lost in the complexities of solving a house-price catastrophe that sees average prices at a ridiculous $1.2 million in Greater Vancouver and $1.1 million in Toronto, at least one veteran housing analyst is making a clear and devastating case that Canada’s dilemma is being significantly fanned by a wave of investors.
Canadian policymakers are helicoptering money to stimulate building, but it doesn’t appear to be working. Statistics Canada (Stat Can) data shows the total value of building permits fell sharply in April, dropping to the lowest monthly volume in nearly a year. The annual decline was so large it was amongst the largest since 2020.
