If we look past all the name-calling, scandals and competing tax cuts, this election fundamentally comes down to one question: do Canadians trust the Liberals to do now what they have failed to do over the past decade? Judging by the party’s newly released housing plan, the answer should be a resounding “no.”
Canada’s escalating rents and a shortage of housing have not only created challenges for young adults seeking their own homes; they are also reshaping the fundamental structure of family living arrangements, new research suggests.
The increased cost of apartments and homes in cities like Toronto and Vancouver in recent years has forced many young adults to live with family or roommates to manage costs, according to a study from the University of British Columbia.
Douglas Todd: Healthy attempts to reduce foreign money’s distortion of the housing market shouldn’t be demonized as xenophobic, new study says.
Nationalism is fashionable again in Canada now that the federal election is underway and the tariff wars of U.S. President Donald Trump pose a threat to our economic well-being.
But there was a time, very recently, when behaving nationalistically about Canadian housing was condemned as dangerous and defenders of those left out of the housing market were dismissed as xenophobic and reactionary.
Tom Dunn makes an annual salary of $62,000 as a graphic designer and rents a basement apartment in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood but he fears that he may never be able to afford a larger unit above ground and may one day have to leave the city for a more affordable home.
Dunn, 29, has lived in his apartment for about three years, paying about $1,300 a month. A full-time graphic designer and part-time freelancer he explains that the city’s cost of living has taken a significant toll.
Link Fixed.
Last summer, as I lay awake awaiting a forecasted storm, I left my windows open to feel the warm breeze.
As the first lightning strike lit up the night sky, I heard the boom of thunder. Then, like an echo, I heard screams from the homeless encampment on the river bank — the terror of those without shelter who were exposed to the storm and its potential dangers.
That terror hit me close to my heart, aching with the memory of how close my eight-year-old child and I had been to living on the streets ourselves.
In the past year, multiple federal and provincial politicians finally recognized one important reason why Canada’s housing shortage in the last decade became severe, rents soared, and home prices stayed at nosebleed levels: unsustainably high immigration rates, which recent minor reductions have barely begun to address.
In other words, the politicians finally figured out what any first-year economics student could have told them: markets have two sides — supply and demand.
A group living in RVs on a tiny patch of land off Highway 1 in North Vancouver has neighbours concerned about road safety and sanitation.
Known as Bowser Island, the enclave was once home to pleasant, suburban houses — a beautiful fieldstone wall and spired gate testify to that — but the buildings were long ago torn down to their foundations and the sewer line decommissioned when the Upper Levels Highway was widened.
As Bowser’s name suggests, it’s very much like an island, surrounded by a moat of asphalt lanes.
Mortgage delinquencies are rising in Canada, with overall debt levels increasing, according to the Equifax Canada Q4 2024 Market Pulse Consumer Credit Trends report, released February 25.
“Total consumer debt in Canada reached $2.56 trillion at the end of 2024, a 4.6% increase over 2023,” says Rebecca Oakes, vice-president of Advanced Analytics at Equifax Canada, in the report.
Canada’s housing affordability crisis may persist until 2055 due to lengthy planning and approval processes, according to a new report from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC).
Blacklock’s Reporter says the federal insurer’s research found that obtaining municipal permits and completing planning takes twice as long as the actual construction of apartment buildings and townhouse developments.
A San Francisco nonprofit’s rise illustrates the unaccountable growth of homeless services.
Urban Alchemy, a San Francisco–based homeless-services nonprofit, is an organization of many slogans. Those include, among others: No fuckery (“Fuckery is lying. Fuckery is injustice. Fuckery is letting ego override empathy”); Don’t look, see it through your third eye (“The third eye represents the part of us that cannot be cheated, manipulated, or deceived”); and Once you see us, you can’t unsee us (“We are game changers, impact makers and community healers”).
The mortgage renewal shock many experts have been predicting appears to have arrived.
Mortgage delinquencies in Ontario have skyrocketed 50 per cent higher than pre-pandemic levels, and more than 11,000 mortgages in the province missed at least one payment in the fourth quarter of 2024, nearly three times the number seen in 2022, Equifax Canada said in its quarterly credit report.
Your paycheque — if you’ve got one — probably doesn’t go quite as far as it used to.
Since June 2022, the price of groceries in Ontario has gone up more than 11 per cent. Vegetables, in particular, have shot up by almost 20 per cent. Meat? 9.2 per cent. Dairy and eggs? 10.6.
Shelter? That other big thing the United Nations counts as a universal human right? That hasn’t been easy, either. Between October 2022 and October 2024, the price of an average two-bedroom rental in Ontario has gone up 12.8 per cent, according to the Canada Housing and Mortgage Corporation.
The federal government’s plan to achieve affordable housing levels through additional building is “completely unrealistic” and comes with a price tag of over $1 trillion, according to a new report.
The Fraser Institute report “Canada Needs to Save Much More to Finance an Ambitious Investment Agenda” looks at what Canada needs to do to improve housing affordability and attract more business investment.
Squalid encampments are becoming the norm
It’s a toy store called Treasure Trove, but the first thing you see when you enter is no child’s play. Boxes of Narcan, a medication used to treat emergency drug overdoses, sit on the front counter near the cash register, accompanied by a handwritten sign that says “Free”.
Treasure Trove opened a year ago in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, as a satellite store of their toy and second-hand goods shop in nearby Newberrytown. But this second location, within spitting distance of the Pennsylvania State Capitol, has evolved into something like a mission for the chronically homeless that also sells Funko Pops figurines. The owners, a pleasantly nerdy couple named Jason Crocenzi and Jennifer Draisey-Crocenzi, say it was impossible to operate a standard retail business in a downtown where hundreds of deprived homeless people wander the streets and often outnumber regular pedestrians.
A couple of weeks ago, we introduced our Weekly Housing Affordability Metric (WHAM) and showed how housing affordability has changed over time in Winnipeg, Edmonton, and London, Ontario. Naturally, readers wanted to know what the situation looked like in their city, so let’s take a look.
A WHAM score measures the number of weeks of pre-tax income needed to save for a 20% downpayment for a home and the first five years of mortgage payments, taking into account 5-year fixed mortgage rates, the median weekly wage in a province for 25-to-54-year-olds, and home prices.
