On a strip of grass dividing a busy east-end Montreal thoroughfare from a block of residences in the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve district stand about two dozen tents, a reflection of a housing market that can’t provide enough affordable homes.
“Homelessness & Affordability Crisis”
Why haven’t Toronto’s efforts to fight homelessness been enough? These numbers tell the story
If this is to be the start of a new Toronto tradition, it’s a brutal one. For the second year in a row, the City of Toronto unveiled its winter homeless shelter plan by acknowledging the insufficiency of the measures it plans to take. That’s a depressing press conference: Here’s the plan! It ain’t going to work!
It looks like planning for failure — when the stakes are whether people freeze on the street or not — but, believe it or not, as I wrote last year, it is progress. The old annual tradition involved failing to draw up a proper plan at all and then being shocked when there wasn’t enough space in the shelters, and then vowing to do better next year when people froze to death, and then promptly forgetting about it when it came time to set budgets.
The homeless situation will always get worse with leftists in charge. Chow and Trudeau are a perfect match
Bank of Canada risks a home price runup with key rate cut, experts say
The Bank of Canada is walking a tight rope as they rapidly cut the key interest rate to salvage the country’s sluggish economy while risking a drastic run-up in real estate demand and pricing.
The central bank announced Wednesday it’s cutting its key overnight interest rate by 50 basis points — a half percentage point. That brings the overnight rate to 3.75 per cent.
Toronto’s homeless shelters house almost triple the number of kids they before Trudeau
Toronto’s homeless shelters now house almost triple the number of kids they did eight years ago — with more than 1,400 in hotel rooms paid for by city hall
… As of September, nearly 1,500 kids were staying in the city’s shelter system, two thirds of whom were 10 or younger, as well as more than 1,400 children waiting for space in scattered hotel rooms paid for by city hall
… These “bridging hotel” rooms are different from hotels leased as temporary shelters during the pandemic, which are now considered part of the regular shelter system and offer more services like meals. The federal government also operates its own network of hotels specifically for refugees.
How the City of Angels went to hell
Progressives put principles over policy
A journey through Los Angeles, the adopted home of Vice President Kamala Harris, offers a masterclass in urban dysfunction. As you drive through the streets of the southside, and along Central Avenue, the historic main street of black LA, now mostly Hispanic, the ambience is increasingly reminiscent of Mexico City or Mumbai: broken pavements; battered buildings; outdoor swap meets; food stalls serving customers much as one would see in the developing world.
Amy Hamm: Blame ‘progressives’ for Canada’s hellish homeless encampments
I visited one of our country’s many and burgeoning homeless tent encampments last week. None of the residents wanted me to take a photograph of their face.
“I don’t want my mom to see me like this,” said one man who appeared in his thirties. Another would only allow photos of the unbandaged and bleeding venous ulcers on both of his shins, a familiar sight from my days of outreach nursing in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. It seemed important to him that I share the evidence of his physical deterioration. But absolutely not his face.
Nearly two-thirds of Ontarians think Doug Ford must do more to deal with homeless encampments, survey finds
The vast majority of Ontarians feel homeless encampments are a “problem” and most believe Premier Doug Ford is not doing enough to deal with them, a new poll suggests.
Abacus Data found 54 per cent think tents in municipal parks are a “big problem,” while 30 per cent say they are a “minor problem” and 16 per cent insist they are “not really a problem.”
So must Trudeau, so must Chow.
Business association demands bail reform to restore public safety on urban streets
Businesses in cities and main streets across the country say a “humanitarian crisis is playing out in” Canada’s communities and they want the federal government to act swiftly to tackle the crime, addiction and social issues they say are hurting businesses and downtowns.
The issues, business groups say, have been on the rise in recent years but were made significantly worse by the pandemic.
“Repeat offenders are significant drivers of crime and the current bail system does not protect Canadians or small businesses,” Kate Fenske, chair of International Downtown Association Canada (IDA Canada), which represents urban business districts across Canada, said Tuesday.
Your chances of owning a home in Canada were already decided at birth
In today’s Canada, the cradle you’re born into increasingly dictates whether you’ll ever hold the keys to your own home. This isn’t just a market fluctuation. It’s a boiled frog phenomenon.
Incremental changes – the steady rise in home prices, gradual policy shifts and slow-moving supply constraints – went largely unchallenged. By the time the severity of the crisis was recognized, many prospective homeowners were already cooked.
An interesting article marred by the author’s omission of mass immigration as the primary cause of Canada’s housing crisis.
Power-of-sale listings more than double as mortgage lenders repossess homes from over-leveraged buyers
The Toronto area has seen a 112 per cent increase in power of sales over the last year as more homeowners struggle to pay their mortgage, leaving some lenders with no option but to take over the home and sell it.
In September across the GTA, there were 204 power-of-sale listings, more than double the 96 power of sales reported in September 2023, said Anza Malik, broker of record and co-founder of Valery Real estate Inc. Brokerage.
Buying a home out of reach for many Canadians for the foreseeable future
Buying a house may remain out of reach for many Canadians for the foreseeable future, with mortgage costs unlikely to fall enough to offset lofty home prices and weak spending power, economists and real estate agents say.
Even with expectations that the Bank of Canada will keep cutting interest rates in the coming months, the issue of home affordability — which has strangled Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s poll numbers — is unlikely to fade before the next election.
The mandate for the Liberal minority government ends at the end of October 2025, but an election could come well before then, with the Conservative opposition spoiling to end Trudeau’s nine-year run at the top.
No Prime Minister in Canada’s history even approaches the harm done by Trudeau.
Housing affordability, the destruction of Canadian society from the LPC’S evil mass immigration scam, the criminalization of citizens, the unmitigated anti-white racism of its woke policies, Soviet style 5 Year Plan economy ruining green scams and of course the lies, the constant stream of lies about any matter large or small.
Donald Wright: When it comes to where people want to live, Canada is a very small country
The first article of this series laid out the basic arithmetic of Canada’s current housing crisis—ill-advised levels of immigration far above Canada’s capacity to build sufficient housing to accommodate the consequent rapid increase in population—and pointed out that there remains an undiminished belief that the solution to this is to be found on the supply side, and that a set of policy changes will allow Canada to build significantly more houses in the next eight years than it has in the previous eight years.
THOMAS: Fraser’s Follies will not ‘actually solve’ Canada’s housing crisis
Back in May, the Liberal/NDP’s Housing Minster Sean Fraser was traipsing across the country saying he would “actually solve” the housing crisis in Canada by building 3.9 million homes by 2031.
That works out to about 488,000 new homes that Fraser expects to have built every year from 2024 to 2031 to “actually solve” the problem.
Josh Dehaas: Japan convinced me Canadians don’t need to accept urban disorder
On Sunday morning, I had some time to kill in Calgary before a flight home to Toronto, so I grabbed a coffee and started looking for a park bench to sit and read my book. I soon realized that wasn’t going to happen. Every bench was occupied by one or more drug addicts. Over the course of an hour, I saw a man injecting drugs in between his toes, a guy smoking meth while glaring at me aggressively, and hordes of people doubled over from fentanyl. Of the couple hundred people I passed, about 75 were obviously on drugs. I decided to try to find brunch, but few businesses were open. Not surprising. Who’d want to do brunch in this post-apocalyptic environment?
What if our housing crisis can’t be fixed?
It’s a puzzle. Whatever its answer, its consequences are likely to foment an upheaval in Canada that the coming defeat of Justin Trudeau’s Liberals and the election of a Conservative government should not be expected to forestall.
The puzzle, by the reckoning of urban planner, landscape architect, author and University of British Columbia professor Patrick Condon, can be put this way.