Much of Seoul is a sea of high-rises. And not just Seoul: Busan and other cities in South Korea have lots of high rises. More than half of all South Korean households live in high rises, and well over 60 percent live in some kind of multifamily housing. South Korea...
Housing Affordability
Premier Wants to Solve Problem Caused by Regulations with More Regulations
Excessive government regulations and land use restrictions are the most documented drivers in our housing affordability crisis right now. So, why, pray tell, is Premier Wab Kinew thinking of adding more regulations to fix a problem caused by excessive regulations? It...
Costly Construction Isn’t the Culprit Behind Unaffordable Housing. Costly Land Is
The latest Demographia report on housing affordability in Canada, which I produce for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, reveals that over half of the 46 Canadian housing markets we assess are severely unaffordable. In fact, Vancouver and Toronto rank as third and...
Over 20 Canadian Housing Markets Are “Severely Unaffordable”
BNN Bloomberg
Featured News
The Swedish Response to Covid-19 versus Canada
In a recent New York Times article, David Wallace Wells asked, “How did No-Mandate Sweden End up with such an average pandemic”. Let’s be clear. This admission from the New York Times, who tried to destroy the response to Covid-19, starting in April 2020 and...
Draconian, Anti-Science Measures During the Pandemic Has Led to Loss of Trust in Our Institutions
Candida Auris is a fungus that, unlike most fungi, can survive in a human body. It is capable of spreading within the body, resulting in an agonizing death. For unknown reasons the fungus is spreading at a rather alarming rate. So far, cases have been confined to long...
Calgary City Council: Reimagining the CBD
In a previous post, I commented on the difficulties faced by the Calgary CBD (downtown), with its huge office vacancies resulting from the mid-decade oil bust, along with the rise of remote and hybrid working accelerated by the pandemic. Calgary (metropolitan area...
Demographia International Housing Affordability – 2023 Edition Released
Demographia International Housing Affordability rates middle-income housing affordability in 94 major housing markets in eight nations: Australia, Canada, China, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States. This edition covers the third...
The 15 Minute City: An Idiotic Dream
One of the arguments against single-family zoning is that separating housing from other uses forces people to drive to shops, work, and other destinations. Urban planners want to redesign cities so that people can walk to most of those destinations. They even have a...
Canadians on the Move, to Smaller Communities
The Canadian Dream is increasingly being realized in smaller areas For decades, Canadians moved to the larger cities (census metropolitan areas, or CMAs) with their economic opportunities. The latest estimates indicate that CMAs have 72 per cent of the nation’s...
The Rural Character of Canada’s Metropolitan Areas (CMAS)
There is considerable confusion with respect to the terms of urban geography, not only among the population in general, but also among the media, and sadly, among academics. Perhaps the greatest confusion is between the terms “metropolitan area” and “urban area.”...
Cities Have to Expand for House Prices to Fall
The cost of actually building a house does not vary that much across Canada The Ford government’s plan to expand the land supply available for housing has evoked the usual dog whistles about “urban sprawl” by interests apparently unaware of the strong...
Return to Reason Podcast – Wendell Cox – How to Solve Canada’s Housing Crisis
The housing market crisis in Canada has hit an all time high. Expert in demography, Wendell Cox has an eye-opening discussion with guest host David Craig about the public policies surrounding this issue, and how to solve the problems with supply, demand and...
Wokeness kills Vancouver
“Harm reduction--somebody’s got a sense of humour, man. ‘Cuz that ain’t helping nobody, man. It’s helping everybody get high more.” Does passive policing and harm reduction improve health and safety? Vancouver is a living, breathing example to the contrary—or...
Deteriorating Housing Affordability in Canada
The Frontier Centre for Public Policy has released the 2022 edition of Demographia Housing Affordability in Canada. This article includes the Executive Summary, with a link to the entire report. The report is authored by Wendell Cox, a senior fellow with the Frontier...