The 2023 homeless count has shattered the stereotypes of where people are living without a home, and who is at risk of being unsheltered.
No longer an urban issue, the count released Thursday shows huge increases in homeless people in the suburbs. For the first time, the number of unsheltered was up in every city across the region: An increase of 159 per cent in Delta, 91 per cent in Richmond, and 86 per cent in the Tri-Cities since the last count in 2020.
Agrowing majority of Canadians believe owning a home has become a privilege that can only be afforded by the rich, a new poll suggests, with nearly three-quarters of those surveyed agreeing.
The Ipsos poll conducted exclusively for Global News and released Friday further suggests two-thirds of Canadians have given up on ever owning a home. That number has also risen since the spring.
“Instead of the dream of homeownership, it is turning into a nightmare for an entire generation of Canadians,” said Sean Simpson, Ipsos’ vice-president of public affairs.
It’s the study heard around the world, often cited as the answer to the housing-affordability crisis in big cities.
The research purported to show that blanket property upzoning in pricey Auckland, New Zealand, led to a dramatic increase in new housing units. It has drawn remarkable attention this year across the English-speaking world.
Canada is gripped by a surge in homelessness that has seen tens of thousands of people priced out of rental and real estate markets and left to live in the streets of the wealthy nation.
Researchers warn government data is vastly underestimating the number of homeless across the country, as the social ill spreads from major cities to small towns.
In Quebec, one in two homeless people can be found in rural parts of the eastern province, instead of mainly in Montreal as had been the case in the past, according to a new report published in September.
As the fallout from the Bank of Canada’s interest rate hikes continues, fewer homes are being built today compared to the lowest point in the pandemic — the 2020 lockdowns — and it’s going to get worse, an economist says.
The provincial government has repeatedly claimed that Ontario needs to free up more land to build houses, but according to the report, lack of land is not the issue. Instead, the report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives finds that building has slowed because inflation and the high cost of materials has made home building less profitable for developers, and there are fears the market will slow due to higher mortgage rates.
If you can’t afford a house, a recession will help a lot more than building more homes
“When there’s dynamic demand, there’s just no way that increasing supply is going to all of a sudden reduce prices by 10, 15 or 20 per cent,” Mr. Clayton said. “The only way to do that is what happened back in the late latter 1980s and early ‘90s, and in the first half of the ‘70s – have a big recession, lose a lot of jobs.”
TORONTO – From ultra-low interest rates that led to a huge spike in real estate demand(opens in a new tab) to the speed with which interest rates shot up to levels not seen in a generation, it’s been hard to keep up with the shifting landscape for mortgage holders.
Now, with interest rates increasingly expected to stay higher for longer, many of the homeowners who locked in low rates years ago are likely bracing themselves for financial pain as their mortgage comes up for renewal.
Canadore College President George Burton answered 20 minutes worth of questions Thursday morning from local media in hopes of what he says will set the record straight.
A shortage of affordable housing, the opioid crisis and the lingering effects of the pandemic have contributed to a rise in visible homelessness. Ten Montrealers share their stories.
At the camp where Conrad has spent the last three years of his life, everything has its place. A fuzzy red bath mat, a towel and a couple of sweaters hang on a clothesline outside his tent. A barbecue sits on top of some bookshelves. The earth has been swept with a broom and a small drainage ditch draws a circle around the tent.
“It’s a lot of work,” he says. He tries to keep the tent warm with an insulated tarp. “I’ve got my heater, my Coleman stove. It’s not hot but at least, with the tarp, the cold doesn’t really get in.”
I feel for these people but the media in this country are bound and determined to downplay any link between Trudeau’s callous mass immigration scam and the housing crisis.
Ankita Goel was optimistic when she decided to leave her management consulting job in Mumbai in 2019 to follow her husband to Vancouver, where he already had a job in the tech sector.
Four years later, the cost of living in the city has her regretting her choice.
“Housing is unaffordable, groceries are going up, rent is going up as well, and it’s making me seriously consider moving out of Vancouver,” Goel told Cross Country Checkup.
With Ontario’s Greenbelt once again off limits to developers, Toronto is ready to welcome denser, taller housing and help solve the affordability crisis that has forced people to flee the city, Mayor Olivia Chow said Friday.
Chow’s comments, after speaking to the Toronto Region Board of Trade, came a day after Premier Doug Ford scrapped a push to pave swaths of protected farmland that had mired his government in scandal over how the sites were selected.
I got a feeling there’s gonna be a spurt of neighborhood destroying shoddy rental towers going up.
Toronto’s ombudsman is launching an investigation into the city’s decision to deny refugee claimants space in city shelters and direct them to federal programs.
Ombudsman Kwame Addo says the investigation will determine whether the city met its obligations to treat the claimants and asylum seekers looking for a shelter bed with fairness, dignity, respect and care.
The number of homeless encampments nationwide is growing, and so is the case law saying cities can’t remove them.
A landmark court decision in 2009 in British Columbia first established that, in some cases, removing encampments violates the charter right to “life, liberty, and security.” In January 2023, the first Ontario court decision to this effect was handed down in Waterloo.
OTTAWA — Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre intends to give bonuses to “high-cost cities” that meet their new housing targets and reallocate $100 million from the Liberals’ Housing Accelerator Fund to reward Canadian municipalities that greatly exceed theirs.
On Wednesday, Poilievre tabled his housing bill, the Building Homes Not Bureaucracy Act, that offers a clearer view of what he hopes to achieve to accelerate construction in the midst of Canada’s housing crisis.
Canadians unable to find housing should contact their respective City Halls for help, according to federal Housing Minister Sean Fraser.
At a press conference on Sept. 18, Mr. Fraser faced questions on what his government will do to address Canada’s housing crisis.
“What are you going to do for people who can’t find housing today?” asked a reporter, as first covered by Blacklock’s Reporter. “A lot of these measures are two years, three years down the road—it takes a long time to build apartment rentals.”
