It is a staggeringly ambitious plan. Given the situation, it had to be.
When the economy started slumping in 2015, office vacancies in downtown Calgary began to climb. By 2020, the vacancy rate was sitting at over 30 per cent — about 14 million square feet of office space sat empty.
The value of office buildings in the city’s core had plummeted by more than two-thirds over that period, gutting the city’s property tax base and creating a revenue crisis at city hall.
Kris Wallace and Andy Ali of Vancouver say their search for a larger condo to give their family more room has been frustrating. Real estate and rental costs in the city are so high that their 26-year-old daughter is still living with them and they’re all feeling the squeeze.
A year ago, the federal government instituted a foreign buyer ban after passing the Prohibition on the Purchase of Residential Property by Non-Canadians Act in 2022. The two-year ban, which came into effect on Jan. 1, barred non-citizens, non-permanent residents and foreign controlled companies from buying up Canadian property as an investment.
But Wallace says that ban didn’t do much for her family.
I bet these people voted for Trudeau.
No ‘silver bullet’ to fix housing as population rapidly grows: Trudeau
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he knows young people are frustrated with him, and chief among those frustrations is the high cost of housing, which has left many young people feeling home ownership is out of reach.
However, Trudeau denies critics who suggest the federal government only began taking the housing file seriously in the last few months.
What a shitheel.
Even though the Trudeau government has made no secret of dialling up immigration to historic highs, the latest Statistics Canada figures on population growth are still jaw-dropping. In just three months (from July 1 to Oct. 1), Canada added an extra 430,635 people – only four per cent of which could be attributed to births. For just the first nine months of 2023, Statistics Canada noted that the country had seen a higher level of population growth than “any other full-year period since Confederation in 1867.”
Port Coquitlam Mayor Brad West is speaking out on the latest population growth numbers in B.C. and across the country.
“My message to the federal government is they’ve got to come back to reality,” said West.
B.C. has seen a record-setting net international migration of more than 150,000 people so far in 2023. It’s part of a larger national trend(opens in a new tab), with Canada surpassing the 40 million population mark.
“The number is overwhelming,” West told CTV News. “You cannot build enough to keep up with the number of people who are seeking housing.”
A greater share of Canadians are barred from home ownership as affordability hits near-worst levels for most markets amid soaring prices and interest rates, according to a recent RBC report.
The significant loss of affordability during the pandemic has shrunk the pool of homebuyers in Canada, said Robert Hogue, RBC economist and report author. In 2019, close to 60 per cent of all households could afford to own at least a condo apartment based on their income. That share has plummeted to 45 per cent in 2023. And just 26 per cent can afford a single-family home, down from 40 per cent four years ago.
The federal government recently announced that it will accelerate housing construction by launching a “wartime” catalogue of pre-approved architectural designs for residential builders. However, industry experts have criticized the plan and argued that its impact will be negligible.
Toronto will be given nearly half a billion dollars over the next four years to speed up new housing development, with a formal announcement to take place on Thursday, two sources with knowledge of the deal say.
The money — $471 million, beginning with an immediate payout of $117.75 million with further annual payments made based on the city’s progress toward housing goals, according to one source — comes out of the feds’ four-billion Housing Accelerator Fund pool, announced in March and to be divided between local governments and Indigenous communities who can satisfy national officials about their progress on housing and density.
Everything the Liberals are trying to sell is a lie. Until the Mass Immigration spigot is turned off Canada will never have enough homes.
Canada’s Immigration Plan Is Not Viable In Any Version of Reality: BMO
Canada printed yet another massive, immigration-driven quarter of population growth. What housing crisis, the country just needs to build homes faster, right? BMO Capital Markets crunched the numbers to show just how comically distorted and unviable growth has become. It’s starting to become clear the plan isn’t to diversify the country, but stimulate home prices and validate a real estate bubble.
… Kavcic puts the current plan into perspective to show the type of scale required. “For additional context, at 2.5 people per household, we’d need more than 170k new units every three months at this rate of population growth, even before accounting for domestic household formation,” he explains.
The industry is currently pushed to the max trying to churn out 220k homes per year. That’s a significantly higher number than previous years, but still roughly a quarter of the amount that would be needed to accommodate the supply-side plan.
h/t Mauser
Rent increases slowing in Canada. Here’s where price hikes are cooling most
A report says the average asking price for a rental unit in Canada was $2,174 in November, relatively flat from the previous month but an 8.4 per cent increase year-over-year.
The data released Friday by Rentals.ca and Urbanation, which analyzes monthly listings from the former’s network, showed the annual rate of rent growth in Canada continues to slow, following increases of 9.9 per cent in October and 11.1 per cent in September.
Active-duty military personnel in Nova Scotia are experiencing an “epidemic” of homelessness and housing vulnerability while others are turning down postings in the province because housing is either unaffordable or unavailable, provincial MLAs heard Tuesday.
Several groups that provide community-level supports and services to members of the Canadian Armed Forces and to veterans were invited to a legislative standing committee Tuesday to provide insight into how the province’s cost-of-living crisis is affecting Forces members and veterans.
The B.C. Human Rights Tribunal will hear a complaint from people who camp at CRAB Park and allege the City of Vancouver and its park board discriminate against them by not providing “basic survival services.”
Tribunal member Steve Adamson said in a letter to the group that the tribunal will also fast-track the initial stages of the complaint to give them the chance to resolve the issue through a mediation process.
The group claims discrimination based on Indigenous identity, and physical and mental disabilities, among other allegations. They say there is insufficient electricity, a lack of sanitation, and the park board has not provided washroom facilities.
This is about prolonging the homeless crisis as a viable political wedge issue and fundraising tool.
In Toronto, more than 20 years ago, I lived in a shantytown that was then North America’s largest. Then as now, people with no other place to go are villainized – but increasingly, encampments are treated like the new normal
Two blocks from where I live, in downtown Toronto, is Saint Stephen-in-the-Fields – an old red-brick church, surrounded by thick, gnarled maple trees. Across the street is the fire hall, and halfway down the block used to be a daycare where my son, a decade ago, once spent his days.
Back then, we’d often pass by Saint Stephen’s, and one morning, a heavy, life-size bronze statue appeared – set down in the earth between the corner of the Anglican church and the sidewalk. It was the figure of a cloaked man, sitting on the ground, his hand held out as if asking for change. And if you looked closer, his palm was cut open. Though originally titled Whatsoever You Do by his sculptor, Timothy P. Schmalz, the bronze beggar became known as Panhandler Jesus.
Since early fall, a tent city in Bannerman Park has been drawing attention to homelessness and the affordable housing crisis in St. John’s.
Many of the encampment’s occupants have declined emergency shelter placements due to safety and hygiene concerns and are instead using their visible presence in the heart of the capital city to advocate for long-term, accessible housing solutions for all.
But this is only the latest tent city to emerge at Bannerman Park.
Only 1.6 percent of newcomers to Canada in 2022 were accepted based on having skills to work in construction, federal data indicates, as the Liberal government defends its immigration levels citing the need for new trade workers to build homes.
Immigration Canada provided the data on Dec. 6 in response to an order paper from Conservative MP Pat Kelly.
Canadian housing starts plunged 22% in November from the previous month and missed estimates by a wide margin as higher borrowing costs hurt groundbreaking on multiple unit and single-family detached urban homes, data from the national housing agency showed on Friday.
The seasonally adjusted annualized rate of housing starts fell to 212,624 units from a downwardly revised 272,264 units in October, the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) said.
… A sharp drop in new building starts will further aggravate a housing crisis in Canada and hurt the popularity of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. His Liberal government has made housing its top priority and has announced a series of measures, including a plan to convert federal properties into new homes by March and to identify more public buildings for home conversion.
