“Homelessness & Affordability Crisis”

Are We in San Francisco?

Wednesday morning at the corner of Sacramento and Cherry. The three of us—me, the bus driver, and an elderly woman—peer into a parked bus with muted awe. Inside, an enormous man is shouting at a crumpled blanket. “Hey, HEY! Wake up! Get up!”

As it turns out, under the blanket lies a man wearing ripped clothing; he staggers to his feet at the third admonishment, limps out the door, and vomits. He has no idea where we are. “Are we in Sacramento?” he asks. “No,” says the enormous man, a Street Crisis Response Team “peer specialist” dispatched to respond to a report of an unresponsive adult male on the 33 bus. “We’re on Sacramento and Cherry. Presidio Heights. San Francisco. West Side.”

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Homelessness & Affordability Crisis", "Progressive Paradise"

Toronto housing among least affordable on this global index.

A new global index suggests Toronto is among the world’s worst cities when it comes to housing affordability — as experts blame decades of policy missteps, development delays, and overwhelming population demand for the problem.

The 2025 Global Cities Index from Oxford Economics finds that as a result of Toronto’s expensive real estate market, residents “spend more of their income on housing than residents of nearly every other city in the world.”

While the federal government recently promised to eliminate the GST on first-time home purchases under $1 million, critics argue that restrictive housing policies, costly development charges and sluggish approvals have created a market that’s out of reach for most buyers.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Homelessness & Affordability Crisis", "Toronto - Canada's version of a Democrat run city"

THOMAS: A dwindling first-time home buyers’ pool threatens Canadians’ home equity

Prime Minster Mark Carney’s solution to the ‘housing crisis’ is the same as was that of former Prime Minster Justin Trudeau’s: throw money at it. Most of Carney’s government people are former Trudeau government people, so it shouldn’t be a surprise their answer is to spend other peoples’ money.

The Carney Liberals’ plan is to build a new bureaucracy to build new homes, called Build Canada Homes, at a cost of $25 billion taxpayer bucks. While in office, Trudeau’s government spent $116 billion on the housing crisis, so Carney has a long way to go to match Trudeau’s pilfering of Canadians’ tax money but of course, he’s just getting started.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Homelessness & Affordability Crisis"

Fewer Ontario cities will hit housing targets amidst ‘major crisis’: minister

Ontario’s housing minister is conceding that the number of new homes in the province is stuttering and his government won’t be able to hand out incentive rewards to many cities for hitting their targets, but says he hopes new legislation will help.

On Friday, Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing Rob Flack accepted that the number of new homes in Ontario was lagging far behind the targets the province set itself, calling the situation “a major crisis” across Canada.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Homelessness & Affordability Crisis", Canada

‘We’re people too’: Canada’s homeless population is aging, changing how shelters run

VANCOUVER — Seventy-one-year-old Roger Oake sat on a bench outside the Union Gospel Mission shelter in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside after breakfast.

He had been sleeping at the shelter for about a month “this time” and said that after several years of homelessness, walking “the beat” during the day when the shelter isn’t open has become harder as he gets older.

“I really don’t know where to even begin. There’s so many things that could or should change, but I really don’t know,” he said on Wednesday.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Homelessness & Affordability Crisis"

Class action bid launched on behalf of refugees denied access to Toronto shelters

Two law firms and a legal clinic have filed a proposal for a multimillion-dollar class action lawsuit against the city on behalf of all refugee claimants who were denied access to shelter system beds between November 2022 and October 2023.

Acting on behalf of Wasiu Adekanmbi, a 40 year-old Nigerian refugee claimant, in a statement of claim filed last Friday, Black Legal Action Centre (BLAC), Lewis Litigation PC and Steiber Berlach LLP argue that the city preventing refugee claimants from accessing municipal shelter beds constituted a violation of Charter rights and freedoms, the Ontario Human Rights Code and amounts to “systemic negligence.”

Send them home.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Homelessness & Affordability Crisis", "Societally Destructive Immigration Policy"

THOMAS: Hopes of solving housing crisis fade as 817,000 immigrants arrive in Canada

It’s obvious the federal Liberals are not serious about solving Canada’s housing crisis.

Liberals embrace ‘governing-by-crisis’.

A crisis is a great way to get Canadians to pay attention to the Liberals’ policies and platforms. Once they have the attention of the electorate, they make massive promises to attack the ‘crisis’ with every weapon they can find, which usually is pissing away taxpayers’ dollars on ineffective programs.

The only thing Carney and his crony Mark Wiseman are interested in is turning Canada into a 3rd World Shithole state from which they will both profit handsomely.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Homelessness & Affordability Crisis", "Immigration from incompatible cultures", "Mass Immigration - Follow the money", "Societally Destructive Immigration Policy", Canada, Canada's Corporate Welfare Class, Canada's Corrupt Liberal Government

Regulation Making Homes Unaffordable Around the World

Next to inflation, Americans ranked housing as their top financial worry in a Gallup survey last May. It’s only gotten worse. January home sales were down 5% from last year’s dismal numbers. Record numbers of first-time buyers are stuck on the sidelines as housing affordability stands at the lowest level ever recorded, while one in three Americans now spend over 30% of their income on mortgage or rent.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Homelessness & Affordability Crisis"

WENZEL: The worst housing minister in Canadian history

‘First he broke Vancouver, now he’s the Liberal housing minister for all of Canada.’

When Prime Minister Mark Carney appointed Gregor Robertson as Canada’s new Minister of Housing, Infrastructure, and Communities, the reaction from us in the homebuilding industry ranged from stunned disbelief to resigned frustration.

It was already clear that the federal government was floundering on a housing strategy that was created by incompetence, but this appointment sent an unmistakable signal that they’re doubling down on ideology over experience and on image over substance.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Homelessness & Affordability Crisis", Canada's Corrupt Liberal Government

How Canada’s boomers stole the future

For a country that looks so big on the map, it’s awfully hard to get houses built in Canada these days. But this is all by design: in “Canada’s Million-Dollar Housing Crisis, homes are treated as an investment vehicle rather than a place to live. Dealing with one of the worst shortages in the developed world, Canada’s voters in the recent election were not concerned just about Trump but about who could save the middle-class dream.

As Canadians greeted the announcement of Mark Carney’s cabinet, the expectation was that of far-reaching change. But a day after being sworn in, Canada’s new housing minister, Gregor Robertson, put an end to those hopes. Robertson, the ex-mayor of Vancouver — which saw one of the most severe localised housing crises — said home prices should not go down. Has his boss’s campaign pledge already been turned to dust?

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Homelessness & Affordability Crisis"

Ottawa has to allow home prices to fall to make housing more affordable, experts say

OTTAWA – Housing experts are pushing back against a federal cabinet minister’s recent claim that home prices don’t need to go down in order to restore housing affordability.

Gregor Robertson, the former mayor of Vancouver who was elected to the House of Commons in April, sparked the debate after he was sworn in as housing minister earlier this, when a reporter asked him whether he thinks home prices need to fall.

“No, I think that we need to deliver more supply, make sure the market is stable. It’s a huge part of our economy,” he said.

People holding “underwater mortgages” are increasing and are typically found in urban centres like those that voted for Carney.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Homelessness & Affordability Crisis", Canada's Corrupt Liberal Government

Geoff Russ: Canada’s populist movement will have its day

Unless Carney addresses issues such as affordability and immigration, grassroots anger will eventually bring his government down

Canada’s populist moment did not come to pass — at least not yet.

Having deluded themselves into believing that the status quo is tenable, many on the left celebrated the result of the recent federal election as proof that Canada could withstand the wave of anti-establishment politics that has swept the West in recent years.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Homelessness & Affordability Crisis", "Mass Immigration - Follow the money", Canada, Canada's Corrupt Liberal Government

Is Canada trying to lower home prices or not? Mark Carney should give Canadians his answer to this yes/ no question

Canada’s new federal housing minister, Gregor Robertson, says he wants to make housing more affordable — just not by lowering prices. In a recent interview, Robertson argued that home prices don’t need to fall for affordability to improve. He’s not alone: Prime Minister Mark Carney recently restated that this is “not a yes-no question,” and that it depends on “different time horizons.”

But this kind of linguistic loopty-loop isn’t harmless. It’s a political strategy — one that dodges a simple but essential question: Is the goal of Canadian housing policy to lower home prices or not?

It is, in fact, a yes-or-no question. And the answer matters.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Homelessness & Affordability Crisis", Canada's Corrupt Liberal Government

‘Financial landlords’ driving up rent prices in Toronto faster than other types of landlords: study

A group known as “financial landlords” are driving up the cost of rental housing in the city, worsening affordability, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Waterloo.

Financial firms, including private equity, asset managers, and real estate investment trusts (REITs), have been snapping up rental housing stock in Toronto for decades and according to the study, these groups charge monthly rents that are 44 per cent higher than the average neighbourhood price in Canada’s largest city. This represents about $670 more on average per month, according to the researchers.

Until the Feds shut the immigration floodgates this will only get worse. And worse is what they want.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Homelessness & Affordability Crisis", "Societally Destructive Immigration Policy", "Toronto - Canada's version of a Democrat run city"

Adam Zivo: Housing minister says unaffordable homes are the answer

Canada’s new housing minister Gregor Robertson says that the prices of existing homes shouldn’t go down, lest this negatively impact current homeowners, and that affordable housing should be provided through massive government subsidies instead. His position is economically illiterate and raises concerns about his fitness to lead this portfolio.

Anyone with a cursory understanding of economics knows that, in a regular market, the price of any given commodity will be roughly the same for both the buyer and seller. If you want people to have the option of purchasing $3 coffee, for example, you need cafes that are willing to sell coffee for $3 as well. While these dynamics are sometimes distorted — i.e. through taxes and subsidies — this is, for the most part, how transactions work.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Homelessness & Affordability Crisis", Canada's Corrupt Liberal Government, WTF?