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Difficult to extrapolate a 2 year trend forwards. I suspect the immigration quotas will soon be lowered back closer to 250K due to housing shortages and negative per capita GDP growth. That being said, the exodus from ON and BC could accelerate as AB is less a dumpster fire than the rest of Canada.
 
There's a marketing slogan if I ever heard one. Come to Alberta, we're less of a dumpster fire than where you currently are..... sigh... it's true though.

This keeps me up at night. We are headed for Vancouver/Toronto level housing crisis if these growth rates continue. Despite this growth, where are the new tower proposals? Were it not for Truman, I don't think we would have had a new residential highrise proposed in the past 2 years? Gallery, Broward and Imperia. Am I missing others? And technically, Broward is a 2020 DP.... so really it is just Gallery and Imperia that are a 2023 development permit..... Stephen Avenue Place I suppose would count.

H-Go infill applications are nice, but will never be enough. Assuming 10 units per 50' lot (5 liveable townhomes, 5 basement suites) averaging (generously) 2 people per unit means with 50% going to the established area, so 20,000 people, we would need 1,000 H-Go style projects built each year to handle that level of growth. Never going to happen, not even close. I doubt there would ever be that much land supply available (as in, a 50' lot, with a building that is at least 45 years old, with owners willing to move).
 
MichaelS said:
There's a marketing slogan if I ever heard one. Come to Alberta, we're less of a dumpster fire than where you currently are..... sigh... it's true though.

This keeps me up at night. We are headed for Vancouver/Toronto level housing crisis if these growth rates continue. Despite this growth, where are the new tower proposals? Were it not for Truman, I don't think we would have had a new residential highrise proposed in the past 2 years? Gallery, Broward and Imperia. Am I missing others? And technically, Broward is a 2020 DP.... so really it is just Gallery and Imperia that are a 2023 development permit..... Stephen Avenue Place I suppose would count.

H-Go infill applications are nice, but will never be enough. Assuming 10 units per 50' lot (5 liveable townhomes, 5 basement suites) averaging (generously) 2 people per unit means with 50% going to the established area, so 20,000 people, we would need 1,000 H-Go style projects built each year to handle that level of growth. Never going to happen, not even close. I doubt there would ever be that much land supply available (as in, a 50' lot, with a building that is at least 45 years old, with owners willing to move).
Click to expand...
High inflation adds risk to business cases which in turn discourages investment in physical items like housing, plant and equipment. I don't see an end to high inflation as government is still running deficits, individuals aren't reigning in spending and political pressure still pushes regulators to delay individuals and governments from defaulting on their debts.
 
DougB said:
Difficult to extrapolate a 2 year trend forwards. I suspect the immigration quotas will soon be lowered back closer to 250K due to housing shortages and negative per capita GDP growth.
Click to expand...
Even without a formal drawdown, a hopeful end to the Ukraine conflict will lead to expiration of visas for many, not renewals, removing 25% of in migration and adding to out migration for the following 3 years.
 
The immigration targets are 465K for this year, 485K for 2024 and 500K for 2025....and that number doesn't include Quebec.

So I don't see Canada going down to 250K quota anytime soon. I guess the Conservatives could suggest lowering it and get elected but that presumably wouldn't be until 2025...
 
MichaelS said:
There's a marketing slogan if I ever heard one. Come to Alberta, we're less of a dumpster fire than where you currently are..... sigh... it's true though.

This keeps me up at night. We are headed for Vancouver/Toronto level housing crisis if these growth rates continue. Despite this growth, where are the new tower proposals? Were it not for Truman, I don't think we would have had a new residential highrise proposed in the past 2 years? Gallery, Broward and Imperia. Am I missing others? And technically, Broward is a 2020 DP.... so really it is just Gallery and Imperia that are a 2023 development permit..... Stephen Avenue Place I suppose would count.

H-Go infill applications are nice, but will never be enough. Assuming 10 units per 50' lot (5 liveable townhomes, 5 basement suites) averaging (generously) 2 people per unit means with 50% going to the established area, so 20,000 people, we would need 1,000 H-Go style projects built each year to handle that level of growth. Never going to happen, not even close. I doubt there would ever be that much land supply available (as in, a 50' lot, with a building that is at least 45 years old, with owners willing to move).
Click to expand...
Calgary can't be in as bad of shape as Toronto and Vancouver as it doesn't have the same regulatory barriers or overstretched infrastructure. I'm guessing labor shortages and financing costs are holding back supply.
 
MichaelS said:
There's a marketing slogan if I ever heard one. Come to Alberta, we're less of a dumpster fire than where you currently are..... sigh... it's true though.

This keeps me up at night. We are headed for Vancouver/Toronto level housing crisis if these growth rates continue. Despite this growth, where are the new tower proposals? Were it not for Truman, I don't think we would have had a new residential highrise proposed in the past 2 years? Gallery, Broward and Imperia. Am I missing others? And technically, Broward is a 2020 DP.... so really it is just Gallery and Imperia that are a 2023 development permit..... Stephen Avenue Place I suppose would count.

H-Go infill applications are nice, but will never be enough. Assuming 10 units per 50' lot (5 liveable townhomes, 5 basement suites) averaging (generously) 2 people per unit means with 50% going to the established area, so 20,000 people, we would need 1,000 H-Go style projects built each year to handle that level of growth. Never going to happen, not even close. I doubt there would ever be that much land supply available (as in, a 50' lot, with a building that is at least 45 years old, with owners willing to move).
Click to expand...
I am wondering this too - all the incremental stuff like H-GO is super important and good for long-term resiliency both in adding supply and diversity. But the gap is larger than just that - for now anyways. Was about 12 months ago the condo market remained (remains?) largely dormant for many tower products, after nearly a decade of dormancy. It's not clear that immigration and interprovincial migration will remain elevated for an extended period.

Part of the issue here is that there are structural problems with housing - supply shortages and overbuilding are built right into our market system. Even in the best scenario, market systems can typically only meet 70 - 80% of the housing demand, there will always be a sizeable portion that won't ever afford market rents under our current framework. It's why it seems to hardly matter if times are booming or we are in a depression - in both scenarios there's a huge portion of the population that can't afford basic accommodations.

Our experiment since 1980, with trying to incent and enable the market to do everything in housing has resulted in this crisis. Partially this failure is because we also restrict what the market can do through onerous local land use controls, but partially it's driven by the market issues itself like speculation, continual cycles of over/underbuilding endless disrupting labour and development supply chains.

I do wonder if the solution now is something more radical - a large counter-cyclical publicly supported housing development framework. By "large" i mean truly massive, to the scale that the government intervened in the housing system post-WW2 to about 1980 - something that's job is to build 100,000+ units a year, every year, boom or bust. This could be a direct government building program or some hodge-podge of private/public/non-profit work + interest-free loans for rent-stable developments - probably best a mix of all sorts of stuff. But the goal is create that supply and create the conditions for stable production of supply into the future. Go back to the basics of mass production, but avoid the design flaws and car-dependency that undercut all that effort to increase affordability from the previous time the government intervened in housing to this extent.

The end goal would be a stable giant supply of boring but functional and sustainable housing that directly competes with market actors to reduce housing price volatility. If successful over a period of time this tames price spikes, creates a predictable pipeline for labour and building material demand, and ultimately would dilute the massive equity build-up of the corporations and previous generations that stand in the way of unlocking sustainable affordability. Contentious stuff for sure - but I really don't see how incremental improvements to business-as-usual doesn't just empower wealth to accumulate even further to those that already own housing.
 
MichaelS said:
Something like the Housing Accelerator Fund?

Housing Accelerator Fund

Incentives to boost housing supply across Canada.
www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca
Click to expand...
It's certainly a start - we will see if it yields the results that are needed. The scale of the issue is the problem - $4B doesn't buy much housing directly. But if the accelerator fund it incentivizes unlocking market and non-market actors, other governments to act with more seriousness in creating supply it may yield a lot of benefit.
 
DougB said:
Sounds like another federal superclustrerfuck. Have any government initiatives to increase housing supply worked in the past 4 decades?
Click to expand...
Section 95 of the NHA built almost 200,000 houses in the past four decades, and would have done a lot more if it hadn't gutted by the Liberal government in 1994. The new program seems to have created 35,000 houses as of 2019, but the problem is that the governments in between built up a massive affordable housing debt.

FedHousingChartAffordableUnits.png

source
 
I struggle to understand what competitive advantage government would have in building housing. I would argue that government activity would make the situation worse by consuming more resources than would the private sector:
  • if government could build y units with X dollars, the private sector can always build >X as it is always more efficient
  • any initiative that requires cooperation between multiple levels of government will always waste resources and time
  • the market will always have a better sense of what type of product to build as it is always closer to the customer than government
  • if government can take regulatory short cuts, why couldn't it offer the same to the building industry?
Government built lots of housing in the 70s because the private sector also built lots of housing. The real solution is for government to do less, not more:
  • fewer requirements for community and other forms of consultation. Perhaps the best approach would be to time box all consultation (i.e. requirement is to do as much consultation as possible within 3 months under the assumption that the most important concerns would surface first)
  • some form of provincial anti-NIMBY legislation (Ontario is trying this with strong mayors)
  • dramatically lower development levies (i.e. cost recovery on infrastructure and nothing more) and repeal of land transfer taxes. The lost revenue could be managed through payroll constraint
  • this will be unpopular, but perhaps anti-sprawl and climate change activism has gone too far
  • also unpopular, review municipal sites such as closed schools, undeveloped school sites, municipal maintenance facilities and even some greenspace (ex. build housing on the interface between parks and streets) to be sold to developers for the highest bid (avoid accusations of favoritism)
The only federal action should be to prioritize immigrants with scarce skillsets, like in the building trades, at the expense of family reunification candidates who consume housing but do little to resolve labor shortages. This would be highly unpopular with the federal Liberals as it could potentially hurt them in swing ridings around Toronto and Vancouver
 
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