OTTAWA — Despite $443 million in new annual spending aimed to reduce homelessness the number of people without a roof over their head has grown by 20 per cent in Canada, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer.
The new $443 million was a 374 per cent increase compared to prior spending, but it doesn’t appear to be having the desired effect.
It’s a vicious circle with no end in sight, courtesy of the current Liberal government. Canada needs to build more houses, so it needs more construction workers. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation reports a shortage of construction labour as one of three factors contributing to longer build times, and RBC’s assistant chief economist Robert Hogue predicts that Canada requires over 500,000 additional construction workers to build all the homes needed between now and 2030.
A new report says shelters are not designed to meet the physical or mental health needs of the growing number of older adults who are homeless.
Lead author Dr. Jillian Alston says people who experience homelessness age faster than people who are housed due to factors such as ongoing stress and the inability to properly manage chronic medical conditions.
New home construction in Ontario has slowed to a pace not seen since 2018, putting Premier Doug Ford’s government further off track from hitting its housing targets.
Housing starts in April in urban areas of Ontario were down a whopping 37 per cent from the same month last year, according to the latest figures reported by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC).
Economists see no signs of the slowdown reversing in the months to come, creating the potential for a grim 2024 when it comes to new home construction.
Rule of thumb: Everything the Trudeau government has or will have to say about “fixing” the housing crisis they themselves created is a lie.
The city of Oakland recently removed traffic lights from one busy intersection and replaced them with stop signs after the electrical boxes that controlled the traffic lights were repeatedly tampered with and copper from them was stolen.
Local residents and those who own businesses in the area say the issue with the traffic lights stems from the nearby homeless encampment, which has grown over the years.
It’s all about the land, the price of dirt.
The facts and figures are discouraging for people who don’t own urban property, which in a few decades has become the greatest source of wealth in the English-speaking world.
Although land inflation is a global urban phenomenon, Metro Vancouver residents suffer from the worst from it. The cost of dirt in Vancouver, for instance, hyper-escalated by 500 per cent between 2008 and 2016.
The “demographic shock” of mass immigration is aggravating Canada’s affordable housing problem, the National Bank of Canada says in a new report.
Canada now plays host to 807,750 foreign students, 770,000 temporary workers, and 500,000 new immigrants being admitted annually. As a group, they represent mass immigration. Most of these people settle and are concentrated in a few parts of Canada, nowhere more so than southern Ontario and southern BC. Their numbers are rising annually and the 500,000 new immigrants drove our population over 40 million this year. We have the fastest growing population in the Group of Seven (G7). Since 2002, immigration, excluding students and temporary workers, has totalled 5.9 million.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Housing Minister Sean Fraser took their travelling housing show on the road across Canada this spring, promising, with Budget 2024, to throw billions of taxpayers’ dollars at a housing crisis they created.
Trudeau’s Liberal government has targetted immigration to Canada at about 500,000 per year, which does not include temporary workers or those on student visas, which takes the number above the one million mark, creating a severe housing crisis, reducing homeownership rates and pushing people into renting.
A new report says the average asking rent for a home in Canada in April was up 9.3 per cent compared with a year ago, while a slight month-over-month increase was also recorded for the first time since January.
The report by Urbanation and Rentals.ca, which analyzes monthly listings from the latter’s network, says the average asking rent for all home types was $2,188 last month.
Mounds of mouldy garbage, cigarette butts, discarded needles, used tampons, vomit and rat feces litter what was once a clean, empty one-bedroom apartment in Ottawa’s ByWard Market.
The unit above looks similar, with broken windows and walls covered in bright red spray paint.
In the building next door, kitchen tiles peel up following a flood, and the smell upon entering is overwhelming.
Homelessness will not be solved by social justice bureaucrats.
The centrepiece of last week’s federal budget was the Trudeau government’s plan to build 3.87 million homes by 2031. Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. estimates that 1.87 million homes are already going to be built – and Ottawa aims to more than double that pace.
How likely is that? Not very.
Is home ownership only for the rich now? 80% say yes in new poll
The cost-of-living crisis facing Canadians is only getting more bleak, according to new polling that shows everything from buying a first home to affording groceries has gotten harder in the past year.
On Friday, Ipsos polling conducted exclusively for Global News showed that four in five Canadians (80 per cent) now feel that owning a home is only for the rich. That’s 11 points higher than a similar poll from just over a year ago in March 2023.
Freeland Dismisses Concerns Housing Plan Unrealistic or Unsafe
As the federal government looks to spend billions to increase the supply of housing across the country, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland dismissed concerns that the ambitious building program was unrealistic or unsafe.
Ms. Freeland spoke to reporters in Mount Pearl, Newfoundland, on April 23 and was asked about how the federal government expects to build 10,000 homes in Newfoundland and Labrador per year when the province’s home builders association has claimed that in the best year of construction, just 3,300 homes were built.
