A vacant-homes tax may boost housing availability but it hasn’t improved affordability, says a new study on the policy’s impact in Vancouver.
The C.D. Howe Institute study looked at how Vancouver’s Empty Homes Tax has affected the housing crisis since 2017. The tax was introduced amid concerns about high rents, expensive homes, and homelessness happening at the same time as homes were sitting empty, according to the study.
Statistics Canada’s report last week, “Short-term Rentals in the Canadian Housing Market,” reveals that 107,266 housing units were converted to commercial short-term rental (STR) use in 2023, rendering them unavailable for long-term occupancy. Comparing this number to Canada’s current total housing stock of 15,495,361 units, Statscan suggests that a seemingly minor 0.69 per cent of the total housing stock is utilized as commercial STRs.
Smack down of StatsCan’s assumptions.
Alison Rogers and Doug Sykes remember the days when their young children frolicked in the playground at Gage Park.
Having the expansive green space as an extension of their backyard was handy.
“We used to have birthday parties in the park,” Rogers reminisces.
Back then, their biggest concern was that excited, unleashed dogs bounding into the park might pounce on their children, the empty-nesters recall.
For several years, activists and self-styled “advocates” have been attempting to change the way we speak about social problems like homelessness, drug addiction, crime and unsocial behaviour.
The intention is clear: to remove stigma and any overt suggestion of personal responsibility. The new names are meant to reorient our thinking so that we understand that the real causes of misfortune to be societal or systemic. If a word has shameful connotations, that seems to be enough to warrant change. The goal here is to refrain from describing anyone who could plausibly be identified as a victim as having any personal responsibility for their own fate.
Two years and multiple housing laws since the Ford government promised to build 1.5 million new homes in a decade to solve Ontario’s housing crisis, key indicators suggest home construction is grinding to a trickle.
The number of housing starts in the first half of 2024 has lagged behind the previous year, while June saw a 44-per cent drop year-on-year. At the same time, new home sales — which can predict future home construction — are also falling.
And we’re on track to bring in even more foreign students than last year.
Chris Kostav and Shari Keyes may have targets on their backs.
In a hot Toronto real estate market, both tenants are paying well below market rent for their units in a low-rise building in East York.
And now their landlord wants them out. According to their eviction notices, the landlord plans to move family members into both apartments.
LOS ANGELES—In the scrubby Mojave desert north of Los Angeles, a sprawling encampment of decrepit RVs sits just off a dirt road separating the city of Lancaster from Los Angeles County’s unincorporated expanse.
In every direction, garbage spreads out like an algae super bloom—beyond that, endless sand and brush, baking in the summer sun.
“Keep your head on a swivel for dogs,” a member of the city’s public safety and emergency response unit tells us. Through the haze, we see two pit bulls and a German Shepherd under a tarp, but they are tethered, too hot to move.
Bank of Canada (BoC) analysts on Wednesday disputed cabinet claims immigration is an immediate net benefit to the country, and warned the rapidly increasing population is costing Canadians.
Immigrants typically drive up rents, are slow to get a job and contribute “to inflationary pressures in some sectors,” said BoC in a monetary policy report, per Blacklock’s Reporter.
Guy-Émile Beauparlant was born in Montreal but the family moved early and often throughout Quebec to wherever his father found construction work.
Beauparlant left school when he was of working age, embarking on a lifetime of menial jobs. Some he enjoyed, such as climbing trees to hand pick unblemished apples, or working outdoors on a dairy farm. Others he liked less, like roofing the expansive airplane hangars at the St-Hubert airport, or making insulation derived from shredded newspapers — hot, dusty work that clogged his respiratory passages and burnt his eyes.
Everyone in Canada will soon be able to afford a home. We just need investors to build more and rates to be cut, right? Anyone that can do basic math has probably been skeptical of that narrative and with good reason—even the people making those statements don’t believe it. Internal messages from the CMHC make very brief but important notes that challenge the exact narrative its leadership has been publicly spinning. More supply won’t bring down home prices, and lower rates won’t make them more affordable. Higher prices will make more supply feasible and lower rates will help boost prices.
With many Canadian homeowners facing a sharp rise in mortgage payments, many of them have decided to bail, resulting in the highest number of Toronto housing units for sale in more than a decade and signaling a big drop in prices in the coming months.
In Toronto, a city where two-thirds of the country’s condominiums are sold, considered a bellwether for other big metropolitan areas, inventories have pushed past highs reached 10 years ago, data showed. At the same time, sales have lagged.
I’ve lived in apartments in Toronto my whole life. I’ve been in my current apartment for nine years — and I’ve watched in horror as apartments around me doubled, then tripled in price. For the past five years, I’ve lived with the terrifying knowledge that if I had to move tomorrow, there would be nowhere for me to go. As a struggling creative and small business owner, even prices in Etobicoke and Scarborough are beyond my reach.
Canadians now spend more of their incomes on housing than almost any other country in the world. Between 1980 and 2020, housing prices in Canada rose by 746 per cent, far outpacing the median household income, which grew by less than half of that. Then housing prices soared another 50 per cent during the pandemic.
Meanwhile, the country’s fertility rate has been falling steadily, hitting historic lows in each of the past five years it was measured. As of the latest tally in 2022 – when inflation was red hot – Canada’s fertility rate fell to just 1.33 children per woman. For reference, a country requires a fertility rate of 2.1 to keep its population stable, without relying on immigration.
In 2020, in the face of soaring house prices and increasing household debt, Canada’s largest mortgage insurer, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. (CMHC), changed its criteria to make it harder for people to qualify. CMHC did so by reducing the maximum allowable household debt-servicing levels and tightening the personal credit rating criteria.
In Canada, homebuyers with less than 20-per-cent down payment are required to get mortgage insurance to protect the lender in the event of a default. By making it harder for such homebuyers to get insurance, CMHC made it harder for them to qualify for mortgages.
OTTAWA — When it comes to housing, finding it — and affording it — is one of the most pressing issues facing Canadians today.
That’s probably why the subject has become the focus of much political mudslinging in the House of Commons, with party leaders each trying to stake their claim as the person best suited to tackle the crisis.
Remarkably balanced for the Star. Is it a sign of the end times?
