LAST DAYS OF THE NIMBY: HOW OTTAWA’S HOUSING PUSH IS REWRITING THE RULES OF DEVELOPMENT
Last month, city councillors in Calgary settled in for what would turn out to be the city’s longest-ever public hearing. Over the course of 12 days, more than 700 residents and stakeholders paraded through council chambers at city hall to share their views ahead of a vote on sweeping changes to the city’s zoning rules. The question was whether to implement blanket rezoning that would pave the way for more housing density in the 60 per cent of the city allocated to single-family dwellings. An...
read moreBROAD SUPPORT FOR SASKATOON’S AFFORDABLE HOUSING PLAN, BUT LANDLORD GROUP OFFERS WARNING
An affordable housing program with faults is better than no program at all, a city hall committee heard while discussing how Saskatoon will distribute $41.3 million from Ottawa’s housing accelerator fund. “No funding formula is perfect. We’ll take what we can get,” said Angela Bishop, board chair of the Camponi Housing Corporation, a Métis-led non-profit. Bishop told the committee Camponi has a shovel-ready project waiting for funding and more than 300 families on the...
read moreLANDLORDS SIGN ON TO HALIFAX’S NEW RENTAL REGISTRY, TENS OF THOUSANDS OF UNITS LISTED
The deadline for landlords in the Halifax Regional Municipality to register their rental properties has come and gone, with tens of thousands of units now catalogued under a long-awaited new bylaw. The municipality said 10,360 registrations have been received so far, representing 66,590 rental units. Since the April 1 deadline, no landlords have been fined for failing to comply with the mandatory registry. Brynn Budden, a spokesperson for HRM, said staff are using an education-based approach...
read moreCANADA’S HOUSING PLAN ‘BUMPING UP AGAINST’ CAPACITY RESTRAINTS, INTEREST RATES: ECONOMIST
A new report from TD Economics says the federal government’s ambitious housing plan faces supply-side capacity constraints and demand measures that are not expected to have a significant impact. In a report Monday, TD Bank Economist Rishi Sondhi evaluated the federal government’s plan to address housing affordability. Canada’s Housing Plan, released last month, includes several measures intended to impact demand, supply and productivity. By 2031 the plan sets out to build 3.87 million...
read moreTHESE TWO FIXES FOR THE HOUSING CRISIS HAVE A BIGGER IMPACT THAN OTTAWA’S POLICIES
Governments at all levels are finally treating the housing affordability crisis with the urgency it deserves. The latest federal budget produced the most aggressive array of housing policies in generations. The decision to tackle the demand side of the equation by capping the number of non-permanent residents is a giant step in the right direction. Governments are also showing more openness to dramatically changing the role of rental activity in the country’s housing mix. Simply put, the...
read moreCANADA’S NEW HOUISING PROGRAM WON’T HELP, BUT SLOWING IMMIGRATION WILL: BMO
Canada just announced billions in new measures to correct the housing issues it created. Last night the Government of Canada (GoC) released its latest budget, including billions in spending on new housing stimulus. BMO provided a list of the recent changes, noting they’ll have a limited impact, given most of the measures are demand stimulus. However, they do see affordability improving soon—due to new limits on immigration. They reiterated that Canada doesn’t have a problem building, it has a...
read moreRBC URGES CANADA TO PRIORITIZE CONSTRUCTION SKILLS TO IMMIGRANTS TO TACKLE HOUSING CRISIS
Prioritizing construction skills in new immigrants and embracing innovative designs and building techniques top a list of recommendations from economists at Royal Bank of Canada on how best to tackle Canada’s housing crisis. “Canada could need more than 500,000 additional construction workers on average to build all homes needed between now and 2030 — and even more than that in the short term to meet peak growth in demand,” the economists said in a report released Monday. To address the...
read moreHOME PRICES COULD REACH PEAK LEVELS BY NEXT YEAR, SET NEW HIGHS IN 2026, CMHC REPORT SHOWS
The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. is forecasting home prices could match peak levels seen in early 2022 by next year and reach new highs by 2026. The agency’s latest housing market outlook, released Thursday, says despite an increase in rental housing coming on the market in 2023, supply is not forecast to keep up with demand, leading to higher rents and lower vacancy rates in the coming years. “Unfavourable financing conditions are expected to make it more difficult for home builders to...
read moreSURGE IN APARTMENT STARTS OFFSET PLUNGE IN SINGLE-DETACHED HOME BUILDS IN 2023, CMHC SAYS
The number of single-detached homes being built in Canada’s big metropolitan areas plunged in 2023, even though overall starts were down only slightly, according to housing supply data released Wednesday by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. CMHC’s report on new housing construction trends in Canada’s six largest census metropolitan areas (CMAs) — Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal — found that housing construction dropped by 0.5 per cent compared to 2022, with a total...
read moreTHE EVIDENCE LEAVES NO DOUBT – RENT CONTROL HURTS RENTAL SUPPLY
Many housing advocates champion rent controls as a panacea for rising rents, but a wealth of empirical evidence indicates that while such controls may offer temporary respite to current tenants of controlled units, they invariably inflict long-term damage on future renters. This is because landlords grappling with rents that don’t cover improvement costs often neglect maintenance, leading to a decline in housing quality. This neglect is not just a theoretical possibility, but a real-life...
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