Rising land costs, not construction, to blame for housing unaffordability
Results for "greenbelt"
Canada’s Property Rights Slipping Behind Global Competitors
Property rights protections deliver prosperity and good jobs for all Canadians.
Strengthening Property Rights Part Of The Answer To Canada’s Housing Crunch
Inadequate safeguards for property rights affecting housing affordability
Solving the Global Housing Crisis
The worldwide lack of affordable housing can only be resolved politically. The global housing crisis across the high-income world, particularly in the Anglosphere, represents perhaps the single biggest challenge to the future of the middle class. From the...
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There’s Nothing Fair About Canadian Health Care
For the past 14 years, Vancouver surgeon Dr. Brian Day has led the charge for health-care reform, pushing for the right of patients to pay for private care if their health and well-being are threatened as a result of waiting in a stagnant and overburdened public...
Transformers: More than Meets the Eye
The path to net zero, based on the much disputed belief that carbon dioxide is a pollution, is more steep and impractical than most people realize. Replacing fossil fuels with clean electricity will require much more power generation and a greatly upgraded grid to...
The GTA’s Housing Affordability Crisis: Inequality is the Issue
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...
Policy Restrictions have Caused the Housing Crisis
The choice we face is clear: a modest expansion of greenfield development or greater housing poverty For 18 years, I have been monitoring international housing affordability, as author or co-author of the Demographia Housing Affordability series. The latest...
Serfing the Future?
Land ownership has shaped civilizations from their beginnings, with a constant interplay between great powers—the aristocracy, the state, the Church, the emperor—and those below them. History has oscillated between periods of greater dispersion of ownership, and those...
Canada to Tax Home Equity?
In Canada, where income-adjusted house prices vary more than five times between metropolitan areas, the threat of a federal initiative to tax house equity could be looming. That’s the conclusion columnist Lorne Gunter, writing in The Edmonton Sun, The Winnipeg Sun and...
Higher Mortgage Hurdles Beat up on Working Class
There is no mystery in why Canada has seen a record-setting housing spike in the past year: negative real interest rates and monetary debasement from federal deficits. Rather than considering fiscal austerity and getting inflation under control, Ottawa has opted to...
Canadian Families Denied Preferred Detached Houses, Forced into Condos: Survey
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...
Housing Affordability From Vancouver To Sydney To Toronto: Time To Do What Works
The front page of The Wall Street Journal cited the difficulty of cities (Note 1) trying to stop the escalation of house prices “Western Cities Try, and Fail, To Slow Chinese Home Buying.” The more descriptive online headline said: Western Cities Want to Slow Flood of...
Restoring Housing Affordability in Toronto: A Once-in-a-Generation Opportunity
By Wendell Cox May 4, 2018 Recently, Ontario PC leader Doug Ford’s proposed building single-family homes in a large supply of urban fringe (greenbelt) land to address Toronto’s severe housing affordability. This was a unique...
Why Young Canadians Can’t Afford To Buy a Home
Canada’s middle-income housing affordability crisis (unaffordable homes) is drawing considerable attention, with good reason. Families are being squeezed out of the market and the situation is only going to worsen. Frontier Centre publications, such as the Demographia...