In today’s episode of ‘Canadian housing gone wrong’: A 2021 Montréal bylaw meant to lead to the construction of over 1,200 new social housing units has produced zero. 

What happened: The idea of the bylaw is to force developers to contribute to the city’s affordable housing supply by creating housing themselves, giving up a property to the city, or offering a financial contribution. Every developer has chosen the option to pay up.

With rents hitting record highs and the school year incoming, start-ups are helping students find rooms where they can live, study, and hang posters of Quentin Tarantino movies. 

Driving the news: A new crop of companies is providing housing for students by pairing them with the growing number of Canadians with spare bedrooms, per The Globe and Mail.  

Much like baggy clothes and country music, zoning laws are having a moment. 

What happened: Vancouver city council is voting on a policy that would allow developers to build up to six units on just over half of land reserved for single-detached housing. If approved, the policy could come into force by January. 

Hey, want to build houses? Asking for our friends in the construction industry.
 
Driving the news: As one-fifth of Canada’s construction workforce nears retirement age, the industry faces a severe labour crunch as it struggles to recruit new builders. 

We don’t need to tell you Canada needs a lot more homes (around 3.5 million more by 2030 if you ask the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation), and there’s no shortage of people talking about the problem. 

But the Squamish First Nation in B.C. is actually doing something to fix it.

Catch up: Along with the 6,000-apartment Senakw development in Vancouver it announced last year, the Squamish are planning to develop more of their 350 acres of reserve land, over half of which is in Metro Vancouver.

The cost of raising a roof is going through the roof. 

Driving the news: The average cost of building a home or apartment complex in 11 major Canadian cities was up 54% in the first three months of 2023 compared with the same timespan in 2019, per The Globe and Mail.

New Zealand and Canada have remarkably similar housing markets, with one big difference: Prices there are crashing harder than a toddler after a sugar rush.

Driving the news: A series of interest rate hikes have dragged down New Zealand home prices by ~18% over the past 18 months, erasing billions in wealth and helping spin the country into a recession, per The New York Times. 

A new Toronto law allowing multiplexes—up to 4 units in a single building—anywhere in the city aims to bring more affordability to one of the epicentres of Canada's housing crisis. Could this be a blueprint for fixing the country’s housing shortage? We sat down with real estate developer and investor Chris Spoke to discuss how the rule changes will play out on the ground. 

Earlier this year we sat down with one of the country’s keenest observers of the housing crisis, Mike Moffatt, to get to the bottom of why housing is so darn expensive in Canada. Mike is an Assistant Professor at Ivey and the Senior Director of Policy and Innovation at the Smart Prosperity Institute.

Rents in Canada’s big cities are through the roof, and somehow many landlords are still losing money on their rental properties. It’s just another day in our wild, wild housing market. 

Driving the news: A report from CIBC and Urbanation found that most condo investors with a mortgage in the Greater Toronto Area were renting out their properties for less than they were paying to own them—in other words, they’re losing money every month.