Buying a house may remain out of reach for many Canadians for the foreseeable future, with mortgage costs unlikely to fall enough to offset lofty home prices and weak spending power, economists and real estate agents say. 0 Even with expectations that Bank of Canada will keep cutting rates in the coming months, the issue of home affordability - which has strangled Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s poll numbers - is unlikely to fade before the next election.
The mandate for the Liberal minority government ends at the end of October 2025, but an election could come well before then, with the Conservative opposition spoiling to end Trudeau’s nine-year run at the top.
“You won’t get back to an affordable range for housing on a sustained basis for a decade,” Tony Stillo, director at forecasting and analysis group Oxford Economics, said last week at a conference.
Completely agree. Greenbelt policies are necessary for environmental and infrastructure reasons, they just also cause problems from a housing affordability / market elasticity standpoint, which we haven’t addressed at all.
I do generally agree with this approach, though I think that a) as long as units are up for private ownership, it will make sense for investors to buy them up and hold them, you do also need to pair this with both vacant property taxes and ban investors from buying government built housing.
And b) it also won’t work if the government only builds out the bottom of the market. Like we’re seeing right now with the condo market, if you just build shitty units that people don’t actually want to live in, then people won’t really consider them part of the same market and any effects their supply has won’t spread widely. If the government actually builds out livable Habitat 67 style buildings and units that middle class people would want to live in then it will be most effective.
Oh yes units like this should be non-market or heavily insulated from the market / regulated, etc. Basically all the things you said.
As for the quality of units, when I say cheap I don’t mean shitty to live in. For example the current luxury condo units being built are expensive to build but shitty to live in. Money is spent on using flashy materials, trims, ceiling to floor windows that are difficult to insulate and last less. Not on larger units that are comfortable to live in. You get a luxury shoebox. If you look at some buildings from the last century, you can see much simpler construction cheaper materials but 1400 sq ft units that you can raise a family in. I live in one built in the 70s and it’s in perfect shape today. Many families with children live here. That’s what I mean by cheap and durable construction. I guess I should have added the family-sized qualifier. 😄