Canada’s housing affordability crisis is a matter of considerable concern especially for young people trying to buy a house. The worst problems are in the Vancouver and Toronto markets with their excessive land use regulation. Extensive international research...
Affordability Continues to Decline Sharply in Canada WINNIPEG, June 28, 2022 - The Frontier Centre for Public Policy has released its latest housing affordability rankings for the 46 largest cities in Canada. Prepared by Frontier senior fellow Wendell Cox, this...
A poll by highly respected IPSOS, released by BILD-GTA shows a strong awareness of the GTA’s severely unaffordable housing. In the 15 years from 2004 to the last pre-pandemic year of 2019, the median detached house price rose more than 160% (inflation adjusted), about...
Canada continues to move to the suburbs, as the 2021 census data shows. This is based on a Statistics Canada analysis on metropolitan (Census Metropolitan Areas, or CMAs) population and change since the 2016 Census. Statistics Canada (Statscan) divides the CMA...
It’s a well-known pattern in public policy – profligate politicians damaging their economies with out-of-control spending, massive borrowing and higher taxes – inevitably leading to fiscal crisis, sharp declines in growth and ultimately rapidly falling currency value...
Mass hysteria is the spontaneous manifestation of a particular behaviour by many people. There are numerous historical examples: Middle Age nuns at a convent in France spontaneously began to meow like cats; at another convent, nuns began biting one another. In...
Talk continues of the potential for a housing bust in Toronto. Through the end of March, house prices had had increased 33 percent in a year. Bank of Canada Governor Steven Poloz noted that "There’s no fundamental story that we could tell to justify that kind of...
The Frontier Centre for Public Policy has today released "Restrictive Land-Use Regulation: Strategies, Effects and Solutions," a new report by Wendell Cox, a senior fellow with the Frontier Centre. The report evaluates currently in-vogue housing regulation strategies...
Cities (urban areas or settlements) have been around for millennia. Over that time, cities have changed in form and function. But the way that people move around the city has materially changed only twice. Walking was predominant until less than 200 years ago, then...
Canada is a nation of wide open spaces, yet it has high urban area densities recently driven higher by a redefinition of urban area criteria (Note 1). Canada’s largest urban area (population centre) is Toronto, with a population of 5.4 million continues to be the...
Jointly Published with the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies The 13th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey: 2017 is published in collaboration with the Demographia group in Illinois, USA and the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies in...
Wendell Cox, December 23, 2016 In drafting a National Housing Strategy, the federal government, in cooperation with the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) and the Conference Board of Canada have produced a report on findings from public consultation. The...
Wendell Cox, December 13, 2016 The Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) has issued a “red warning” for the entire housing market in Canada.” Red warnings for overvaluation were issued for the Vancouver, Toronto, Hamilton, and Québec housing markets (census...
Canada has a serious middle-income housing affordability crisis. Canada’s house prices have grown nearly three times that of household income since 2000. This contrasts with the stability between growth in house prices and household income during the previous three...
Runaway house price increases have become the rule across Canada. Since 2000, house prices across the country rose more than incomes in all of 35 larger markets, while prices rose more than four times incomes in Toronto and Vancouver. This is in stark contrast to the...