A new breed of property barons could hold the key to solving Canada's housing crisis

financialpost.com:

Ben Woolfitt has the perfectly rumpled look of a Canadian abstract painter of international renown. With his shock of white hair, black-rimmed glasses, green pants and a t-shirt that rides up over his belly when he sits at the kitchen table in his groovy, two-storey painter’s loft, it’s hard to imagine the artist hanging his easels anywhere else.

On a good day, his canvases sell for US$20,000 a pop, but those good days have become increasingly rare. The 78-year-old sold a grand total of zero works at a recent showing at a New York gallery, although he feels even worse for some of his abstract painter friends of even greater international renown who aren’t selling any paintings either. Even when they do, they are letting them go at steeply discounted prices.

During the pandemic, Woolfitt stopped sleeping. Tied up in anxious knots, his creativity abandoned him. But now he finally feels free. Not free of fretting over an art market that has gone down the tubes, but free of the artist’s loft and the low-rise building he owned on Queen Street West in Toronto until recently.

The artist may indeed appear rumpled, but he has been preternaturally wise with his pennies. As a teenager, he helped keep the accounting books for his father, a credit union manager in Saskatchewan farm country. He had enough confidence in his money skills that he bought the Queen Street building in 1997, despite a real estate agent telling him not to because it was a “bad area.”

“It was either going to be a great investment for me or a not-so-great investment,” he said.

The neighbourhood is still pretty scruffy, but the $1 million Woolfitt paid in the 1990s for his building, which had been home to a clothing manufacturer that went bust, and that he then