Absolutely. With people's ability to pay for housing and other big ticket items with near free borrowing costs, prices were not contained so the prices of everything else also went up. No hard decisions on whether or not supply and labour costs are reasonable occurs when you know you can charge any price on a house and you will still get over asking bids. If you are making great margins and growing revenues on low volume, why invest in increasing volume? There isn't enough labour and supplies in the market to build our way out of this quickly. It will take time and pain.
 
Preliminary materials have been released for the Eastern Ave TOC here:

Renderings:
ol_rezoning356easternarchset_20221114_rs02-0.jpg

ol_easternplanningrationale_20230209_rs01-2.jpg

ol_easternplanningrationale_20230209_rs01-11.png

ol_easternplanningrationale_20230209_rs01-553.png
 
Another government land sell-off that will likely come with a 0% affordable housing requirement or any other tangible/significant community benefit.

The degree to which the Conservative party is actively perpetuating the housing problems in this province never ceases to amaze.



Yes lets always blame the Conservatives for everything , because Kathleen Wynne's Liberals would have fixed this by now, if we didn't vote them out?
 
Yes lets always blame the Conservatives for everything , because Kathleen Wynne's Liberals would have fixed this by now, if we didn't vote them out?
No one said they would have/wouldnt have.

What I stated was the our current provincial government is actively making the problem worse instead of improving the situation.
 
and what exact action would you undertake?
I'm not going to derail this thread to get into a silly little debate but here's a short list of what would improve the deteriorating crisis:

- Re-implement rent control
- Require replacement rental units on new builds which are replacing existing rental buildings (something we had until the Conservatives decided to eliminate it in an effort to "improve the housing crisis")
- Put provisions in place to include affordable housing in any provincially owned land that's sold for residential redevelopment (something that has not been done with 1 single parcel of land the government had sold)

I could go on and on regarding things that could be done if the government was actually serious in making housing more affordable, but they arent.
 
I could go on and on regarding things that could be done if the government was actually serious in making housing more affordable, but they arent.
Sure, neither are the federal Libs.

- Require replacement rental units on new builds which are replacing existing rental buildings (something we had until the Conservatives decided to eliminate it in an effort to "improve the housing crisis")
Pretty sure the rental replacement regs are still around.
 
I'm not going to derail this thread to get into a silly little debate but here's a short list of what would improve the deteriorating crisis:

- Re-implement rent control
- Require replacement rental units on new builds which are replacing existing rental buildings (something we had until the Conservatives decided to eliminate it in an effort to "improve the housing crisis")
- Put provisions in place to include affordable housing in any provincially owned land that's sold for residential redevelopment (something that has not been done with 1 single parcel of land the government had sold)

I could go on and on regarding things that could be done if the government was actually serious in making housing more affordable, but they arent.
I agree on the third point, although, just like with the city, they're slow to do it because that lowers the value of the land when they sell it to developers.

The first point (and similarly the second point) sound good in a vacuum, and help some people in the short term, but in the long term they do damage to the rental market by discouraging the building of new apartment building. I'm a believer that the only way to control rents in the long term is to have more competition and the only way to do that is to build more. I'm not doubting the good intentions of people that want rent control, but I am doubting the long term logic.
 
I agree on the third point, although, just like with the city, they're slow to do it because that lowers the value of the land when they sell it to developers.

The first point (and similarly the second point) sound good in a vacuum, and help some people in the short term, but in the long term they do damage to the rental market by discouraging the building of new apartment building. I'm a believer that the only way to control rents in the long term is to have more competition and the only way to do that is to build more. I'm not doubting the good intentions of people that want rent control, but I am doubting the long term logic.
With all due respect...as the current crises of such suggests, there's is no real evidence of this. The competition in the rent market does not create a state of altruism where everything balances out in the end.Therefore, controls are needed in place to bring back the equilibrium where things are affordable again. But I will agree, that's only a start to what is really needed.
 
With all due respect...as the current crises of such suggests, there's is no real evidence of this. The competition in the rent market does not create a state of altruism where everything balances out in the end.Therefore, controls are needed in place to bring back the equilibrium where things are affordable again. But I will agree, that's only a start to what is really needed.
Respectfully, there is no evidence of this in the current crisis because we don't have enough supply of older buildings to stabilize/reduce rents (you can't have evidence on a market with oversupply at a time when you don't have enough supply to meet demand). Competition is not supposed to create altruism, it's supposed to create necessity, where rents stop going up (or go down) because landlords need to compete for renters that have choice (when landlords aren't competing because tenants don't have other options then prices won't come down). If you introduce rent control you'll never get that competition because supply will never catch up (look at the amount of actual rental apartments built in Toronto while we had rent control on new builds vs what is happening post rent control with players like Fitzrovia, Tricon, Bentall Green, etc). If you want evidence of what happens with oversupply then look at what happened during COVID. International students/AirBnb's were taken out of the equation and rents fell, UNTIL those students and immigrants started coming back in (check Toronto rent levels at the start of 2021 to see how low they got - go to a site like Condos.ca and compare the advertised rents at the start of 2021, when rental units were sitting on the market a lot longer than they are now, to what they were at the end of 2019, and to what they are today). If you want to understand current rents better than look at the prices of used cars during COVID, when manufacturers couldn't get their chips, and would-be buyers of new cars started bidding up the prices on used cars (which is what is happening with the rental market right now, there's not enough supply on the top end so everyone is bidding up what should be more affordable units in older buildings). You can also look at what happened to US rents in some cities when they overbuilt in 2008 (all the landlords were trying to rent out their condos).
 
Was there ever a time when we were building this much?

No, though keep in mind there are several years between a housing start and occupancy. Most 2023 starts won't construction to reducing demand until at least 2027.



Since it's fiddly to get there (pick Toronto CSD, Annual, chart) and I can't seem to link it directly, here's the chart:

Screenshot from 2024-02-27 07-51-33.png

The interesting change is the massive increase in purpose built rentals:
Screenshot from 2024-02-27 08-02-04.png
 
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