Canada is building more housing than ever, but it still isn't enough
By Carl Gomez
No issue unites Canadian voters more than the sense that housing costs in Canada have spun wildly out of control, especially for young people hoping to enter the market. They’re not wrong: in the Vancouver and Toronto markets, average home prices have soared past $1 million, and similar trajectories can be seen in less expensive cities.
Policymakers have responded to a degree by encouraging more residential investment, and housing development has indeed surged. Despite higher interest rates and construction costs, the number of housing units under construction in Canada was at a record high of over 350,000 at the end of 2023. Building more was supposed to be the solution to this crisis — so why hasn’t it worked?
The truth is that while we’re beating our previously anemic levels of housing construction, rapid population growth, driven in part by high immigration levels, has swelled demand and put an affordable housing equilibrium out of reach. That’s not a problem that can be solved by one or even a few more build-heavy years. Our leaders at all levels, from municipal councils to federal officials, need to recognize how our planning and housing policies are still failing to deliver affordable shelter to millions of Canadians.
The great majority of the recent new crop of housing units are in multifamily buildings; primarily rental apartments and condominiums. It takes around 200 new multifamily rental projects per million people to keep a balance between apartment rental supply and demand; over the past three decades, Canada routinely underproduced this level and only began to make up for lost ground in the last three years. The tipping point seems to have been in the 1990s, when Canada’s apartment
Read more on financialpost.com
