“Homelessness & Affordability Crisis”

Next to inflation, Americans ranked housing as their top financial worry in a Gallup survey last May. It’s only gotten worse. January home sales were down 5% from last year’s dismal numbers. Record numbers of first-time buyers are stuck on the sidelines as housing affordability stands at the lowest level ever recorded, while one in three Americans now spend over 30% of their income on mortgage or rent.

For a country that looks so big on the map, it’s awfully hard to get houses built in Canada these days. But this is all by design: in “Canada’s Million-Dollar Housing Crisis, homes are treated as an investment vehicle rather than a place to live. Dealing with one of the worst shortages in the developed world, Canada’s voters in the recent election were not concerned just about Trump but about who could save the middle-class dream.

As Canadians greeted the announcement of Mark Carney’s cabinet, the expectation was that of far-reaching change. But a day after being sworn in, Canada’s new housing minister, Gregor Robertson, put an end to those hopes. Robertson, the ex-mayor of Vancouver — which saw one of the most severe localised housing crises — said home prices should not go down. Has his boss’s campaign pledge already been turned to dust?

In Toronto, towers upon towers of small condo units fill block after block downtown. Condo sales across the board are slumping in Canada’s biggest cities as supply soars and demand shrinks. And the hardest units to sell are often the tiniest.

Bachelor and one bedroom units in the Toronto area made up 20 per cent of condo sales in the last quarter of 2024, according to the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board. Bigger units, such as one bedroom plus den, two bedrooms and two bedrooms plus den, collectively made up 72 per cent of sales.

One bedrooms are also fetching less on the rental market — the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Toronto has dropped 5.8 per cent year-over-year, according to data from rental unit listing site Rentals.ca, while that decline is even steeper in some other Canadian cities.

A longtime Manitoba construction business owner is sounding the alarm about a growing financial crisis that could eliminate small and mid-sized builders across Canada. The warning comes after more than 30 discussions with banks, credit unions, and private investors, all of whom have significantly reduced their construction lending. Despite strong demand for housing and infrastructure, industry insiders state that most builders can no longer access credit to keep projects moving.

The new Ontario budget foresees a slow pace for housing construction over the next three years, making it increasingly unlikely that Premier Doug Ford’s government will achieve its target of 1.5 million new homes by 2031.

The budget forecasts 71,800 housing starts in 2025, followed by 74,800 next year and 82,500 in 2027.

There have been 260,000 actual housing starts in the three years since the target was set. So if you add in the projections for 2025 and 2026, the province would only be about one-quarter of the way toward its goal at the end of next year, the halfway point of the target timeline.

JD Vance on migrants and housing …

JD Vance shuts down reporter and shows them why he was the best choice for VP. pic.twitter.com/AEwq78uE2q

— SonnyBoy (@gotrice2024) May 18, 2025

When it comes to homelessness, my heart is in danger of bleeding dry

I’m a bleeding-heart liberal, voting green or orange, or strategically red. I’m also fortunate: I make a good living and am happy to be taxed to help improve the lives around me. Most of my family and friends share my sociopolitical views, which is comfortable and reaffirming.

Lately, however, I’ve sensed a subtle shifting of the plates in my social-justice core, relating to a specific quadrant of lefty groupthink: the dual crisis of addiction and homelessness.

Liberal gets mugged by reality story ahead.