The Calgary Herald reports that some office tenants are being forced out of their buildings in the city of Calgary’s program to convert office buildings to residential uses. We had covered this program recently, noting that “that the City has adopted an aggressive...
A friend of mine is building four high-rise condo and rental towers in Victoria, the capital city of British Columbia, where I live. It is a charming city, founded in the 1840s, its core an almost classic English village around which a modern city was slowly...
“It is absolutely impractical”
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...
At the time of Confederation, Canada’s Plains Indians were in a desperate situation. The same European-introduced guns and horses that resulted in a briefly glorious golden age for them had also resulted in constant inter-tribal warfare and the rapid disappearance of...
Political attacks on the Indian Act are back in the news, and that is a good thing. However, Canadian politicians, including First Nation politicians, need a credible plan about what to do before we pull out the champagne. Attacking the Indian Act is not a big deal...
One of the principal advances of the past two centuries has been the drastic reduction in poverty and the rise of a large middle-class, a process expertly detailed by economists Diedre McClosky and Robert Gordon. At the heart of this trend was the increase in the home...
How affordable is housing in your City? There has long been concern about deteriorating housing affordability in Canada. The OECD has expressed concerns about the decline of the middle-class in Canada and the substantial role of house price increases. Two of the 10...
"Although the housing boom and bust has national repercussions its origins tended to be concentrated in particular places. Most of the adventurous financing was concentrated in places like coastal areas like California, Phoenix, Florida, which was where the great bulk...
The federal Liberal government’s proposed budget includes an innovative plan to improve housing affordability through “shared equity” mortgages. First-time homebuyers could qualify for a 10-per-cent “shared equity” mortgage on Canadian Mortgage and Housing...
Frontier Senior Fellow Wendell Cox discusses the 15th Demographia International Housing Affordability Index with Geoff Currier on CJOB Winnipeg. Exploring why houses are more or less expensive in different Canadian markets. (14 minutes)
CANADA, January 21, 2019 - The Frontier Centre for Public Policy has just released the 15th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey. The survey is prepared by Wendell Cox of Demographia (USA) and a Senior Fellow at Frontier Centre and co-authored...
A new poll by Sotheby’s International Realty suggests substantial disappointment among Canada’s young urban families, unable to afford to purchase the types of houses that they prefer. The poll determined that young urban households in Canada strongly prefer detached...
The average house prices in Canada has skyrocketed over the last ten years, fueled with high demand in hot spots like Vancouver and Toronto. Is there a way to bring prices to a little more affordable level for Canadians?
New Zealand’s Minister of Housing and Urban Development, Phil Twyford reasserted the coalition government’s intention to abolish Auckland’s urban growth boundary at a recent environmental summit. Environmental Defense Society (EDS) CEO Gary Taylor expressed concern...