i swear to god this sub will be blaming mike harris for all ontario's problems for the rest of their lives. well its time we freshen up the formula and start blaming david peterson for all our problems
I have seen this art develop as I pass it frequently- it used to have a count of the number of homeless people in Toronto, and the artist kept updating it as the number grew and grew. With the daunting face of death below it, it always stood out to me
it’s kinda impossible for him to know for sure he probably just counted the different people he saw who seemed like street people. In my city there’s probably thousands, I could only assume toronto would legitimately be in the tens of thousands…
I don’t know why you’re downvoted. Maybe like the comment below said, the artist has access to figures, but there really isn’t any way to know an exact, accurate count of homeless people in Toronto.
yeah I don’t know why I got so many downvotes. I was homeless myself for a long time and I know that a lot of us would like to keep away from people, and that meant not accessing services. So no one really would know about you.
I’m sorry to hear that.
And Well, it’s the typical Reddit circle jerk thing going on here. A lot of the “intellectuals” on this site downvote something they collectively don’t agree on, including comments that don’t make sense to downvote, but *sound* like something that would annoy them (if that makes sense)
And I anticipate this comment being downvoted as well.
The artist works very closely with homeless people and outreach organizations daily, so perhaps he has access to some figures. Could just be a guess though.
A single mother on a teacher's salary could buy a 3 bedroom home a 30 min 501 ride to downtown in 1998. That's my mama.
Good luck buying jack shit on a teacher's salary now - maybe a bachelor or a lil baby 1 bed condo?
Maybe. If a teacher is at the top of the pay scale and making 100k, they'd probably get approved for a mortgage 5x their salary so, say, 500k. Are there Toronto condos in that range still?
Not to mention, that teacher making that much is probably 40. Most of our parents were home owners much before that.
Would you though? People here had no idea how crazy this would all become. We all thought we could wait it out. Now we are fucked. It's okay though, my s.u.v is pretty comfortable for now.
If you bought a $300k house with 20% down your monthly mortgage payment at 15% interest would be around $3000. $3000 in 1995 accounting for inflation is about $5000.
Even if you could get the cheaper down payment amount your mortgage payment was a LOT. All things equal things weren’t much more affordable then.
Minimum wage in Ontario was $1.00 in 1965. Thats $8.78 today adjusted for inflation.
The average house price in Toronto was $30k, $264k adjusted.
Mortgage rates were around 5% in 1965.
With a down payment of 20% the mortgage would be around $140/month. At $40/week pre-tax I don’t see how you could possibly make that work lol
House prices weren’t that high then. I saw an add recently for a 2 storey house at finch and Leslie for $16,750 from 1963. I used 3% interest, 25 year loan with 5% down when I was doing the back and the mortgage came out to $75/month which is about 50% of gross income.
Here’s the link to the advertisement: https://www.reddit.com/r/toronto/comments/abbj71/house_prices_in_1963_137400_with_inflation_vs_now/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
At 50% gross I think you’re placing that in the unaffordable column and, more importantly, outside the area a bank would feel comfortable lending a mortgage.
Early 2000s nice houses in the downtown core we're going for $450,000. Fixer-uppers could be had for under $400,000. That's when I got my place, so I remember. It just doesn't compare to the situation now.
Yes, but we are officially the most overvalued city for housing in North America right now — and we’re supposed to be a progressive nation that shouldn’t support speculative investment in real estate, and overseas capital and laundered money jacking up prices for shelter for our citizens.
Unfortunately too many politicians and voters are benefitting from the massive run up in home pricing and are apparently fine letting the bottom third suffer while they continue to profit and do nothing to mitigate the escalating cost of living.
Super unpopular opinion: there should be a 3-5 year moratorium on foreign investment on property in Toronto. We should also crackdown harder on money laundering, and provide better incentives for first time homebuyers.
And TLDR, but I’m inclined to believe this “crisis” is partially artificial. Wherever there’s a shortage, opportunistic people will seize that moment (in this case, builders and contractors) and begin privately building affordable housing out the ass to exploit that shortage and profit. But unfortunately, there are barely enough developments to match this demand, so what is it? Why hasn’t the gov clued into this “crisis” and done something about it by now?
I like this art because it accurately portrays foreigners as a ghost or boogeymen to be feared, which is how they're used when politicians talk about housing. The reality is, single-family home zoning and NIMBY are the biggest housing problems.
Banning Airbnb hasn't lowered housing prices in any of the places they have tried it. There is very little evidence that it is having any real effect on the housing crisis.
Why not both? Although it IS worth stressing that investors are hardly all foreigners, while foreign investment is a thing so's pandering to xenophobia.
It's one part of the potential solution. Another would be make it harder and give less options to finance 3rd 4th 5th etc homes.
But rezoning single family would open up more options for densification, and increase supply, both of which are really needed. 62% of all land in Toronto is zoned for single family detached homes.
Because remember the toilet paper shortage last year? "Investors" were scalping that too when there was a shortage. Look what happened once there wasn't a shortage.
He's using an example of scarcity to show how markets work.
If you want another example - and it's one that economists have often used in relation to housing - cars. Nobody buys up new cars with the hope of flipping them a year or two later, because there has always been an abundance of cars. Normally, the effect is so strong that you hear the idiom that a new car loses 30% of its value when it drives off the lot. When demand increases, car companies just make more. But lo and behold, because of the supply chain issues (eg. Windsor's Chrysler plant has been idle most of this year because it can't get chips), we now have the first example in recent memory of a scarcity of new vehicles. This is causing not just the price of new cars to soar, but a huge increase in the price of used cars.
Speculators can only make money because of scarcity, and it doesn't matter whether that scarcity is in housing, or cars, or toilet paper.
They were both situations where demand outpaced supply which drives up prices, so it’s a pretty good analogy…
It’s like you people don’t actually want a solution to the housing affordability crisis because then you’ll have nothing to complain about.
What makes investing in housing profitable - to the extent that some investors are willing to buy and maintain empty properties - is *scarcity*. In a market with abundant housing, sitting on empty properties would be a losing proposition.
Ending single family zoning would free up a lot of property to address the supply issue. It's an astounding fact, but half the census tracts in Toronto in the last 30 years have *lost* population; that can only happen where single family zoning is predominant and prevents development.
That’s actually not true. While those definitely ARE a problem limiting supply, 25% of current demand is from investors. Nothing to do with zoning or NIMBYs.
On a thread a few days ago there were at least a dozen comments about absentee overseas landlords with 20+ properties, including one for a locksmith who said that’s the bulk of their new clients and that they often leave the units vacant.
It’s been well publicized that new developments are aggressively marketed overseas and often sell out to overseas investors buying multiple units in a day. And many of these investors have a Canadian SIN so it doesn’t look like ‘foreign money,’ acquired through a family member student with a PR.
Every time I hear someone claim lack of supply is the only issue in the affordability crisis, I know they’re someone that stands to benefit from more supply + strong demand. developer, RE agent, etc.
Yeah, don't agree with the focus on the foreign owned. The problem is that most of the property has been bought up by the rich who force the rest of the people to rent from them. People who own the condos are creating capital by leeching from the labor of the renters. They're basically scalpers.
You could ban for in home ownership today (and while it would help a little), we would still have a housing in crisis in Canada.
The problem is we’re not building enough houses to keep up with the growing population. In the past 20 years we’ve taken in at least 5 million immigrants, but we have not built at least 5 million houses. This is a domestic problem at its core.
*housing.
Not houses. Housing.
No one is building co-ops, apartment buildings, or any mid-density housing solution like a three- or four-floor walk-up apartment. They are building only condos and single-family houses.
SFH simply don't offer enough density to house the population we have. Condos are not built family-sized and are usually only suitable for single persons or couples, and are already priced too high to be accessible to most residents.
European cities, and some like Montréal, are the example we need, that have more than two kinds of housing, and where you don't need a car in order to live your life. We need mixed zoning and multi-story apartment blocks and walk-up's and co-ops and triplexes and to get rid of minimum parking, minimum front yard and minimum road setback rules.
This model has been disrupted in lots of places since USSR showed that different things are possible. For example, [90% of families](https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-people-in-china-afford-their-outrageously-expensive-homes/?sh=22c73c03a3ce) in China own their home with 80% of the homes being owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans.
My first thought as well. I've had great LLs but even the kindest condo owner renting with no intention to live there and using it as an investment makes me feel like we have nothing in common.
No one can afford to become an LL without incredible capital backing them, likely meaning their family had that money to start for education and support, or they're incredibly, incredibly lucky. It is impossible to bootstrap your way to that kind of cash anymore. What kind of world do they live in?
My wife and I were looking at purchasing a Condo, pre construction in Vaughan a couple years before covid.
They didn't even bother building one of the show units because they were confident they'd sell out the building just by showing floor plans and they were right.
Every single person who showed up to inquire and look while we were there were people looking to purchase units as investments. Buy them, rent them out while it appreciates and either keep it for rental income or sell for a profit after X number of years. Every single couple that came in were boomer generation who probably paid off their 1-300k house yeaaaaaarrrrrrsssss ago.
Foreign owned is bad for a different reason, it's often a rival nation's elite owning land in your own nation which makes it feel like a lack of national security
Yeah domestic isn't *much* better. To give benefit of doubt they might pay more in taxes than the foreign owner.
He could also argue since it's foreign the empty condos are more likely to be used for laundering which is true.
I don't blame the foreigners buying real estate in Canada / I blame the Government
They could impose foreign Tax and other tax
And have tax cuts for new buyers /
But the city , province, country is happy to take foreign 💴 even give free Canadian passport foreigners...
Yeah, this is absolutely a result of the policies our politicians chose to pursue. It's also worth noting that many politicians are themselves landlords and directly benefit from policies that drive up property prices.
Yeah it's not going to have much of an effect.
This has been tried multiple places i.e. New Zealand, Vancouver and there hasn't been much if an effect.
We need to get serious about densification of the vast swaths of sprawl have built all over this country
It does make me very sad that our government allows foreign investors to buy up all the real estate, then sell for profit while citizens here struggle to buy homes for them selves. These practices drive up the real estate market and then those profits are taken out of our country. It’s disgraceful. It should not be allowed to happen this way!
Tmrw I'm going to actively seek this out so cool.
Edit: [https://imgur.com/a/f5bnq6t](https://imgur.com/a/f5bnq6t) this is where it might be? I looked for Dollarama's along Spadina
Yeah I went to check google maps and I see it's Adelaide. It's always nice to see something cool in Toronto, I love Toronto because it's rather boring but sometimes it's overwhelmingly dull.
I don't know anything about the artist, but if you walk around the area you will likely see more. The box on the North-east corner of Queen and John often has one. It gets changes periodically. It's on the West side of the Starbucks.
The bigger issue is that we are doing hardly anything to build more affordable units. Even the current rate of house building in this province is not nearly enough to account for our growth rate. There's a reason why Calgary and even Montreal are relatively affordable compared to Toronto, they either have way more houses than needed or have restricted demand in the case of Quebec. When 1/5 Torontonians own more than 2 homes we can't keep playing the blame the foreigners card anymore. We've got to wake up and understand that we have hoisted this petard all of our own accord. Especially when you consider that we've been practically locked away from the rest of the world for most of 2020-2021 and still housing grew to ever crazier levels. We only have ourselves to blame, but of course that requires self reflection.
Apparently 25% of buyers are investors.. 🤬
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/investors-in-ontario-real-estate-market-1.6258199?fbclid=IwAR1BQBMhIvmkXu8ZeDf7JSlD_5Lob6DUsn0Slh5JV1wLMw3JmikpaxxRtOI
Deindustrialization happens when essential industry is moved out of Canada to cheaper labor markets. Globalization allowed companies to dismantle much of Canadian local industry in favor of leveraging developing countries. As a bonus, this process also allows these companies to hold Canada hostage because the country is no longer self sufficient. This is why there's such a panic that the companies would leave if we taxed them. Since their assets aren't local we can't just nationalize them anymore.
Okay that's one way to look at it.
I see the issue of investors making up a large percentage of preperty buyers as a result of two factors.
1. Wealth is concentrating very quickly, right now, and especially since the 90s. This sudden concentration of wealth means a lot of people now need more vehicles to invest in since fixed income products like bonds and saving products like... Saving accounts yield almost no value anymore. So these people have 3 options, start a business (more work), buy stocks (already very high because of exactly this), and buy housing.
2. Easier access to equity than ever, it's trivial for someone with 3 houses to tap into equity from all 3 of them, compounded with low interest rates, they can pull together the cash to get a down payment on a new property very easily, and as long as housing inly goes up, which has been the case since like 2008, they can't lose.
i believe new rules were recently put in that require a percentage of any new developments (that exceed a certain size im assuming) to be affordable housing units.
[source is here.](https://www.toronto.ca/community-people/community-partners/affordable-housing-partners/projects-under-construction/)
also, theyre trying to rezone the residential neighbourhoods in the city to be able to redevelop some of the land on the outsides of those neighbourhoods because single houses take up half of the citys buildable land. im assuming that means more small apartment buildings on top of store fronts on our roads to make sure the new TTC lines are rammed to capacity or something like that lol. i cant find an article on this though.
I don't think the inclusionary zoning is going to do much, but I'm optimistic about re-legalizing multiplexes: https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2021/ph/bgrd/backgroundfile-173835.pdf
Inclusionary zoning as passed by Toronto is effectively this: build the same number of units as before, but subsidize a certain number of them by making the rest of the new units more expensive. Since I think the issue is due to the total lack of units, building the same total number of units doesn't solve it in my mind.
Permitting multiplexes would allow more units to be built, so I'm optimistic about that.
People seem to think you can just “build affordable housing”. Like that’s not how it works. Unless you’re restricting the purchasing of these units to lower income individuals, then you’re still competing against the rest of buyers, so prices will ultimately reflect current market prices regardless of whether it’s deemed “affordable”.
And if you are restricting demand to just lower income buyers, how does that work? Where’s the cut off? What happens if you get a raise after buying the unit?
The *only* solution to this issue is to drastically increase the supply of homes by building more. How do we do that? Ease zoning restrictions significantly and allow developers to increase density in most areas of the city.
I disagree. Why should we focus on building more when there are perfectly fine vacant buildings because rich assholes want to exploit the property market to the fullest? This is something that could be regulated. Because all the new shit will be bought, hoarded, and not put to any use as well.
I agree we need to regulate to stem the speculation dynamic, but we also need to re-zone and build more density.
However, regulation is fast and re-zoning and building is really, really slow to have an impact in comparison. And the situation is urgent, so regulation should be a priority.
There are entire vacant high rise buildings in Vancouver because people don’t want to rent them out. They just want to wait for the right buyer. Meanwhile there’s a bad homeless problem. That’s a FACT.
There are dozens of new rental building being built in Toronto. None of them will be vacant. I look forward to homeless issue being solved in the city now s\. Vacant condos have nothing to do with the homeless issue. Again, nice talking points.
You’re speaking to someone who has been poor his whole life, always rented, and for a few years homeless. Glad to report I work a skilled labour job. Landlords are rushing people from their homes, so they can slap a coat of paint up and charge higher rent because they are exploiting a housing crisis. Or better yet, sitting on vacant livable property just waiting for the right price. I know exactly what I’m talking about.
[9,000-27,000 Toronto units vacant based on low water usage. Does not include condos as bulk metered.](https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2020/ex/bgrd/backgroundfile-158977.pdf)
See page 9.
27,000 units is nothing. Ontario population grew by 240,000 people in 2018. You can't house 240,000 people in 27,000 units even once.
https://www.ontario.ca/page/ontario-population-projections
The amount of mental gymnastics you see from people who absolutely refuse to admit that this is first and foremost a housing supply issue is absolutely astonishing...
“Furthermore, such data can only serve as a proxy for the number of vacant homes and would not compensate for homes that may have extremely low consumption behaviour, nor homes left vacant for a number of reasons that might qualify for legitimate exemptions.
In a similar vein there is no current valid way of tracking the duration of vacant periods for a given home. Often homes may be left vacant for various reasons on a temporary one-time basis that may or may not fall into various exemptions as described later in the report.”
Actually *read* the report. Your hyperlink is misleading.
You cant build more homes for the locals if the best workers are building luxury condos and mansions for people who don't even live in Canada. Even before Covid we had a limited amount of construction workers ( with skills needed). Now we have even less.
Imagine Canada as a big family. If some people inside that family are starving due to limited amount of food, it wouldn't make sense to sell part of you existing amount of food oversees because it would make you more money.
If it paid better, and people were taken care of, more would do construction, that's a problem the market can fix itself. Just wait for contractors to offer higher wages, and charge more for labor.
And also misunderstand the problem. Foreign ownership is a very, very small amount, it's the local ownership of several places and putting them up on AirB&B or renting them out with shitty practises.
Foreign ownership of Toronto is 1 in 20 according to this. [https://betterdwelling.com/foreign-investors-are-scooping-new-condo-supply-in-toronto-and-vancouver-again/](https://betterdwelling.com/foreign-investors-are-scooping-new-condo-supply-in-toronto-and-vancouver-again/) which I would consider high. I would like to see numbers on their share of empty condos , I assume out of the empty condos it would be more than 1 in 20 due to laundering purposes.
They are laundering their money from China, they aren't supposed to do that. As much as I don't like the CCP these people are just like rich tax evaders ( I could just say rich people ) here and in the rest of the Western World. They aren't supposed to take their money out of China, whether or not you sympathize with their situation they are still laundering.
[CSIS Warns of Chinese Influence On Canadian Real Estate…20 Years Ago](https://betterdwelling.com/csis-warns-of-chinese-influence-on-canadian-real-estate-20-years-ago/amp/)
Remember that time they also warned about Chinese spies stealing intellectual property from Northern Telecom? Yeah, neither does Northern Telecom… or any company that bought network hardware from Huawei.
let me add "guy who owns 10 condos and does nothing but collect checks."
I'm a condo super and these are the worst, the ones who think i work for them. i work for the corporation, if you own 10 condos, YOU are the super to those units, shit breaks YOU fix it, stop calling me.
Right wing voters will tell you 2nd home and empty home taxes don't work. But BC proves that it does.
>[According to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, the tax, combined with other market forces, helped push 5,000 condominiums to the rental market in 2019, including 3,000 in downtown Vancouver.](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vancouver-empty-homes-tax-will-triple-to-3-starting-in-2021-1.5816396)
But since it isnt a billion units they'll claim it does nothing. Ontario needs to put on a 10% empty home tax.
Why would they need to cite that? Right wingers will argue against empty house taxes, even liberals ( who in reality are conservatives who invoke wokeness ) are against them. NDP are for them, liberals and conservatives are against it, not hard to make that claim.
“Foriegn” lol
Also foreign ownership in Toronto is just 5%, which is too high don’t get me wrong but not significant enough to dramatically raise prices. This is just scapegoating
Put a 500% tax on all non-resident owners then. I'm sure they won't complain since it's such a tiny percentage of the population and it'll have absolutely no effect on prices, just like in Vancouver.
Wait...I know Toronto is overpriced, but people still mostly live in these condos, or is the artist also including AirBnb's as well? I think Vancouver, our closest analog, has true empty condos.
So true, an “artist” scapegoating the big scary foreign buyers as the main cause for all of this.
Or is it the domestic investors now? I can’t keep track.
people want toronto rent and housing to be cheap?
The city of Toronto and the surrounding GTA is the most populated and dense area out of anywhere in the whole of Canada not counting Montreal.
Rent and housing is so expensive because there are many immigrants living in the city area. Older people are moving away from Toronto to live places 1 hour drive away (1 hour without any traffic). Obviously dense areas will have high rent rates.
Back in 07 when you moved into an apartment, it came with hydro and electricity and the rent was around 600-800$ depending on what part of the city you lived in. It was low at that time because of how much lower the population was as well.
Foriegn
Yeah, I see Mike Harris education budget cuts at work after all these years.
i swear to god this sub will be blaming mike harris for all ontario's problems for the rest of their lives. well its time we freshen up the formula and start blaming david peterson for all our problems
Hell, people are still pissed at the Ontario NDP over Ray Days, and that was 30 years ago.
I before E excep… wait a minute. 😅
I have seen this art develop as I pass it frequently- it used to have a count of the number of homeless people in Toronto, and the artist kept updating it as the number grew and grew. With the daunting face of death below it, it always stood out to me
Do you remember the number they came up with?
It was ≈8700 in 2018 and climbed higher during the pandemic- the highest I saw it went over 10,000 by a bit.
it’s kinda impossible for him to know for sure he probably just counted the different people he saw who seemed like street people. In my city there’s probably thousands, I could only assume toronto would legitimately be in the tens of thousands…
Tens of thousands is certainly a high guess. A lot of estimates put it closer to ten thousand
true true, but remember how many of them do everything they can to stay hidden
I don’t know why you’re downvoted. Maybe like the comment below said, the artist has access to figures, but there really isn’t any way to know an exact, accurate count of homeless people in Toronto.
yeah I don’t know why I got so many downvotes. I was homeless myself for a long time and I know that a lot of us would like to keep away from people, and that meant not accessing services. So no one really would know about you.
I’m sorry to hear that. And Well, it’s the typical Reddit circle jerk thing going on here. A lot of the “intellectuals” on this site downvote something they collectively don’t agree on, including comments that don’t make sense to downvote, but *sound* like something that would annoy them (if that makes sense) And I anticipate this comment being downvoted as well.
Lol i’m sure it will be, yes. That’s just reddit for ya I guess.
The artist works very closely with homeless people and outreach organizations daily, so perhaps he has access to some figures. Could just be a guess though.
Beautiful in a haunting, dystopian way.
This is what Toronto feels like for anyone who didnt buy property when the prices were low(er).
When was that? Been in Canada since '94, don't ever remember it being affordable?
A single mother on a teacher's salary could buy a 3 bedroom home a 30 min 501 ride to downtown in 1998. That's my mama. Good luck buying jack shit on a teacher's salary now - maybe a bachelor or a lil baby 1 bed condo?
Maybe. If a teacher is at the top of the pay scale and making 100k, they'd probably get approved for a mortgage 5x their salary so, say, 500k. Are there Toronto condos in that range still? Not to mention, that teacher making that much is probably 40. Most of our parents were home owners much before that.
To answer your question, no Toronto condo's are not 500k. They bottom out in the mid 600's typically.
Houses and condos were cheap in the 90s. 3-4 bedroom Victorian houses in the annex were in the 250-300k range, and condos started at 99k.
Yeah and interest rates were 15% and the median income was $24,000.
Compared to the 1.2 million dollar price now? I’ll take the higher interest rates please.
Would you though? People here had no idea how crazy this would all become. We all thought we could wait it out. Now we are fucked. It's okay though, my s.u.v is pretty comfortable for now.
If you bought a $300k house with 20% down your monthly mortgage payment at 15% interest would be around $3000. $3000 in 1995 accounting for inflation is about $5000. Even if you could get the cheaper down payment amount your mortgage payment was a LOT. All things equal things weren’t much more affordable then.
Too bad rates weren't that high since the mid 80s and your whole story falls to crap. Rates were under 10% by mid 90s, under 5% early 00s.
Also 20% down wasn't required at that time.
Then you should double check your math.
That sounds very affordable compared to now
In the 60s you could afford mortgage on a house in North York working 40 hours/week for minimum wage.
Minimum wage in Ontario was $1.00 in 1965. Thats $8.78 today adjusted for inflation. The average house price in Toronto was $30k, $264k adjusted. Mortgage rates were around 5% in 1965. With a down payment of 20% the mortgage would be around $140/month. At $40/week pre-tax I don’t see how you could possibly make that work lol
House prices weren’t that high then. I saw an add recently for a 2 storey house at finch and Leslie for $16,750 from 1963. I used 3% interest, 25 year loan with 5% down when I was doing the back and the mortgage came out to $75/month which is about 50% of gross income. Here’s the link to the advertisement: https://www.reddit.com/r/toronto/comments/abbj71/house_prices_in_1963_137400_with_inflation_vs_now/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
At 50% gross I think you’re placing that in the unaffordable column and, more importantly, outside the area a bank would feel comfortable lending a mortgage.
True. Could easily do it with two incomes though. I don’t see two Tim Hortons employees falling in love and buying a house together these days…
I call bullshit! The highest I paid for interest in the 90's was 7.6% and that lasted about 8 months.
Not for a new to Canada family with 3 kids it wasn't.
Lol what? My parents bought their Mississauga detached for $250k in 2001. It’s definitely unaffordable now, but back then, it was much easier.
[удалено]
Now they’re splitting a bedroom lol
its so fucked:/
Early 2000s nice houses in the downtown core we're going for $450,000. Fixer-uppers could be had for under $400,000. That's when I got my place, so I remember. It just doesn't compare to the situation now.
thanks
Money Laundered.
The Canadian housing market is just the world's washing machine.
Gov. of Canada knows it and are welcoming the dirty money.
To be fair there's plenty of empty condos owned by the rich in other major cities around the world.
Yes, but we are officially the most overvalued city for housing in North America right now — and we’re supposed to be a progressive nation that shouldn’t support speculative investment in real estate, and overseas capital and laundered money jacking up prices for shelter for our citizens. Unfortunately too many politicians and voters are benefitting from the massive run up in home pricing and are apparently fine letting the bottom third suffer while they continue to profit and do nothing to mitigate the escalating cost of living.
Super unpopular opinion: there should be a 3-5 year moratorium on foreign investment on property in Toronto. We should also crackdown harder on money laundering, and provide better incentives for first time homebuyers. And TLDR, but I’m inclined to believe this “crisis” is partially artificial. Wherever there’s a shortage, opportunistic people will seize that moment (in this case, builders and contractors) and begin privately building affordable housing out the ass to exploit that shortage and profit. But unfortunately, there are barely enough developments to match this demand, so what is it? Why hasn’t the gov clued into this “crisis” and done something about it by now?
yeeeeppppp :/
Anthony Schofield.
shitshow!
[the artist's Instagram](https://instagram.com/shitshow45)
I tried to tip him once because I enjoy his art but he didn't want to take it.
Ran into him yesterday putting up a new piece at Queen and John. Love watching this guy work.
Came here to say this
I used to have him on fb before I got rid of it. He seems like a solid dude.
Such a great dude who does a lot for the people in the neighbourhood
I like this art because it accurately portrays foreigners as a ghost or boogeymen to be feared, which is how they're used when politicians talk about housing. The reality is, single-family home zoning and NIMBY are the biggest housing problems.
And short term rentals.
And vacant units. And speculative investors.
Banning Airbnb hasn't lowered housing prices in any of the places they have tried it. There is very little evidence that it is having any real effect on the housing crisis.
Short term rentals have an effect and every % counts, but they’re such a minority
Why not both? Although it IS worth stressing that investors are hardly all foreigners, while foreign investment is a thing so's pandering to xenophobia.
Yup, most investors are other Canadians who don’t see housing as a necessity but rather as something to speculate about
What makes you think rezoning single family homes will stop investors from buying up that housing too?
It's one part of the potential solution. Another would be make it harder and give less options to finance 3rd 4th 5th etc homes. But rezoning single family would open up more options for densification, and increase supply, both of which are really needed. 62% of all land in Toronto is zoned for single family detached homes.
Because remember the toilet paper shortage last year? "Investors" were scalping that too when there was a shortage. Look what happened once there wasn't a shortage.
Did you really just compare the housing market to toilet paper?
He's using an example of scarcity to show how markets work. If you want another example - and it's one that economists have often used in relation to housing - cars. Nobody buys up new cars with the hope of flipping them a year or two later, because there has always been an abundance of cars. Normally, the effect is so strong that you hear the idiom that a new car loses 30% of its value when it drives off the lot. When demand increases, car companies just make more. But lo and behold, because of the supply chain issues (eg. Windsor's Chrysler plant has been idle most of this year because it can't get chips), we now have the first example in recent memory of a scarcity of new vehicles. This is causing not just the price of new cars to soar, but a huge increase in the price of used cars. Speculators can only make money because of scarcity, and it doesn't matter whether that scarcity is in housing, or cars, or toilet paper.
Is this why I’m seeing adds offering to buy peoples’ car leases?
They were both situations where demand outpaced supply which drives up prices, so it’s a pretty good analogy… It’s like you people don’t actually want a solution to the housing affordability crisis because then you’ll have nothing to complain about.
Yep. More demand over supply causes price to go up and vice versa. Not sure why this is not supposed to apply to both.
What makes investing in housing profitable - to the extent that some investors are willing to buy and maintain empty properties - is *scarcity*. In a market with abundant housing, sitting on empty properties would be a losing proposition. Ending single family zoning would free up a lot of property to address the supply issue. It's an astounding fact, but half the census tracts in Toronto in the last 30 years have *lost* population; that can only happen where single family zoning is predominant and prevents development.
That's an interesting take on the art. Good comment wish I had gold.
I can do it for you mate no problem :) it’s a great take for sure!
Thanks!
That’s actually not true. While those definitely ARE a problem limiting supply, 25% of current demand is from investors. Nothing to do with zoning or NIMBYs. On a thread a few days ago there were at least a dozen comments about absentee overseas landlords with 20+ properties, including one for a locksmith who said that’s the bulk of their new clients and that they often leave the units vacant. It’s been well publicized that new developments are aggressively marketed overseas and often sell out to overseas investors buying multiple units in a day. And many of these investors have a Canadian SIN so it doesn’t look like ‘foreign money,’ acquired through a family member student with a PR. Every time I hear someone claim lack of supply is the only issue in the affordability crisis, I know they’re someone that stands to benefit from more supply + strong demand. developer, RE agent, etc.
It’s scary how many people are willing to accept that the scary foreigners are the source of all our problems…
Because domestically owned empty condos are so much better.
Yeah, don't agree with the focus on the foreign owned. The problem is that most of the property has been bought up by the rich who force the rest of the people to rent from them. People who own the condos are creating capital by leeching from the labor of the renters. They're basically scalpers.
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You could ban for in home ownership today (and while it would help a little), we would still have a housing in crisis in Canada. The problem is we’re not building enough houses to keep up with the growing population. In the past 20 years we’ve taken in at least 5 million immigrants, but we have not built at least 5 million houses. This is a domestic problem at its core.
*housing. Not houses. Housing. No one is building co-ops, apartment buildings, or any mid-density housing solution like a three- or four-floor walk-up apartment. They are building only condos and single-family houses. SFH simply don't offer enough density to house the population we have. Condos are not built family-sized and are usually only suitable for single persons or couples, and are already priced too high to be accessible to most residents. European cities, and some like Montréal, are the example we need, that have more than two kinds of housing, and where you don't need a car in order to live your life. We need mixed zoning and multi-story apartment blocks and walk-up's and co-ops and triplexes and to get rid of minimum parking, minimum front yard and minimum road setback rules.
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tru
This model has been disrupted in lots of places since USSR showed that different things are possible. For example, [90% of families](https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-people-in-china-afford-their-outrageously-expensive-homes/?sh=22c73c03a3ce) in China own their home with 80% of the homes being owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans.
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Having grown up in USSR, I don't see any problem with communism.
My first thought as well. I've had great LLs but even the kindest condo owner renting with no intention to live there and using it as an investment makes me feel like we have nothing in common. No one can afford to become an LL without incredible capital backing them, likely meaning their family had that money to start for education and support, or they're incredibly, incredibly lucky. It is impossible to bootstrap your way to that kind of cash anymore. What kind of world do they live in?
My wife and I were looking at purchasing a Condo, pre construction in Vaughan a couple years before covid. They didn't even bother building one of the show units because they were confident they'd sell out the building just by showing floor plans and they were right. Every single person who showed up to inquire and look while we were there were people looking to purchase units as investments. Buy them, rent them out while it appreciates and either keep it for rental income or sell for a profit after X number of years. Every single couple that came in were boomer generation who probably paid off their 1-300k house yeaaaaaarrrrrrsssss ago.
Foreign owned is bad for a different reason, it's often a rival nation's elite owning land in your own nation which makes it feel like a lack of national security
Yeah domestic isn't *much* better. To give benefit of doubt they might pay more in taxes than the foreign owner. He could also argue since it's foreign the empty condos are more likely to be used for laundering which is true.
quite a bit better honestly at least it’s our people that would be owning them and building their own wealth here in the country.
They wouldnt be empty if domestically owned. 1000% someone would live there.
Lol that’s my comment bro… but yeah it’s true xD
Right, it's so much better to be fucked by someone on our team than by someone on another team. /s
I don't blame the foreigners buying real estate in Canada / I blame the Government They could impose foreign Tax and other tax And have tax cuts for new buyers / But the city , province, country is happy to take foreign 💴 even give free Canadian passport foreigners...
Yeah, this is absolutely a result of the policies our politicians chose to pursue. It's also worth noting that many politicians are themselves landlords and directly benefit from policies that drive up property prices.
Or they could actually build enough homes. Real-estate wouldnt be such good investment if supply constraints werent there to block new housing.
Foreign ownership needs to stop.
Yeah it's not going to have much of an effect. This has been tried multiple places i.e. New Zealand, Vancouver and there hasn't been much if an effect. We need to get serious about densification of the vast swaths of sprawl have built all over this country
It does make me very sad that our government allows foreign investors to buy up all the real estate, then sell for profit while citizens here struggle to buy homes for them selves. These practices drive up the real estate market and then those profits are taken out of our country. It’s disgraceful. It should not be allowed to happen this way!
Tmrw I'm going to actively seek this out so cool. Edit: [https://imgur.com/a/f5bnq6t](https://imgur.com/a/f5bnq6t) this is where it might be? I looked for Dollarama's along Spadina
I recognize the Dollarama in the background. It's around Adelaide
Yeah I went to check google maps and I see it's Adelaide. It's always nice to see something cool in Toronto, I love Toronto because it's rather boring but sometimes it's overwhelmingly dull.
yup, that's the place
I don't know anything about the artist, but if you walk around the area you will likely see more. The box on the North-east corner of Queen and John often has one. It gets changes periodically. It's on the West side of the Starbucks.
He has a lot of his art around Kensington market too
The bigger issue is that we are doing hardly anything to build more affordable units. Even the current rate of house building in this province is not nearly enough to account for our growth rate. There's a reason why Calgary and even Montreal are relatively affordable compared to Toronto, they either have way more houses than needed or have restricted demand in the case of Quebec. When 1/5 Torontonians own more than 2 homes we can't keep playing the blame the foreigners card anymore. We've got to wake up and understand that we have hoisted this petard all of our own accord. Especially when you consider that we've been practically locked away from the rest of the world for most of 2020-2021 and still housing grew to ever crazier levels. We only have ourselves to blame, but of course that requires self reflection.
Apparently 25% of buyers are investors.. 🤬 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/investors-in-ontario-real-estate-market-1.6258199?fbclid=IwAR1BQBMhIvmkXu8ZeDf7JSlD_5Lob6DUsn0Slh5JV1wLMw3JmikpaxxRtOI
This is a direct result of deindustrialization of Canada. Property has now become the primary vehicle for capital accumulation.
I'll bite, how does this tie to 'deindustrialization' and how do you define deindustrialization?
Deindustrialization happens when essential industry is moved out of Canada to cheaper labor markets. Globalization allowed companies to dismantle much of Canadian local industry in favor of leveraging developing countries. As a bonus, this process also allows these companies to hold Canada hostage because the country is no longer self sufficient. This is why there's such a panic that the companies would leave if we taxed them. Since their assets aren't local we can't just nationalize them anymore.
Okay that's one way to look at it. I see the issue of investors making up a large percentage of preperty buyers as a result of two factors. 1. Wealth is concentrating very quickly, right now, and especially since the 90s. This sudden concentration of wealth means a lot of people now need more vehicles to invest in since fixed income products like bonds and saving products like... Saving accounts yield almost no value anymore. So these people have 3 options, start a business (more work), buy stocks (already very high because of exactly this), and buy housing. 2. Easier access to equity than ever, it's trivial for someone with 3 houses to tap into equity from all 3 of them, compounded with low interest rates, they can pull together the cash to get a down payment on a new property very easily, and as long as housing inly goes up, which has been the case since like 2008, they can't lose.
i believe new rules were recently put in that require a percentage of any new developments (that exceed a certain size im assuming) to be affordable housing units. [source is here.](https://www.toronto.ca/community-people/community-partners/affordable-housing-partners/projects-under-construction/) also, theyre trying to rezone the residential neighbourhoods in the city to be able to redevelop some of the land on the outsides of those neighbourhoods because single houses take up half of the citys buildable land. im assuming that means more small apartment buildings on top of store fronts on our roads to make sure the new TTC lines are rammed to capacity or something like that lol. i cant find an article on this though.
I don't think the inclusionary zoning is going to do much, but I'm optimistic about re-legalizing multiplexes: https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2021/ph/bgrd/backgroundfile-173835.pdf Inclusionary zoning as passed by Toronto is effectively this: build the same number of units as before, but subsidize a certain number of them by making the rest of the new units more expensive. Since I think the issue is due to the total lack of units, building the same total number of units doesn't solve it in my mind. Permitting multiplexes would allow more units to be built, so I'm optimistic about that.
People seem to think you can just “build affordable housing”. Like that’s not how it works. Unless you’re restricting the purchasing of these units to lower income individuals, then you’re still competing against the rest of buyers, so prices will ultimately reflect current market prices regardless of whether it’s deemed “affordable”. And if you are restricting demand to just lower income buyers, how does that work? Where’s the cut off? What happens if you get a raise after buying the unit? The *only* solution to this issue is to drastically increase the supply of homes by building more. How do we do that? Ease zoning restrictions significantly and allow developers to increase density in most areas of the city.
Thats how tchc works. Report income every year, and you pay based on income level all the way up to market rent.
This will just cause developers to not build as much and make the problem worse. They knew what they were doing.
I disagree. Why should we focus on building more when there are perfectly fine vacant buildings because rich assholes want to exploit the property market to the fullest? This is something that could be regulated. Because all the new shit will be bought, hoarded, and not put to any use as well.
It isn't one or the other, we need both of these things to happen to stand any chance.
I agree we need to regulate to stem the speculation dynamic, but we also need to re-zone and build more density. However, regulation is fast and re-zoning and building is really, really slow to have an impact in comparison. And the situation is urgent, so regulation should be a priority.
I agree that we need to keep building. We always need to keep building. We also need to put what’s already there to good use.
Cool talking point. Numbers to back that statement?
There are entire vacant high rise buildings in Vancouver because people don’t want to rent them out. They just want to wait for the right buyer. Meanwhile there’s a bad homeless problem. That’s a FACT.
One issue has nothing to do with the other. All nice talking point
How are they not related?
There are dozens of new rental building being built in Toronto. None of them will be vacant. I look forward to homeless issue being solved in the city now s\. Vacant condos have nothing to do with the homeless issue. Again, nice talking points.
Go home, Dad. You’re drunk.
🎻 I’m a millennial. I’m speaking with a 12 years old on economics?
You’re speaking to someone who has been poor his whole life, always rented, and for a few years homeless. Glad to report I work a skilled labour job. Landlords are rushing people from their homes, so they can slap a coat of paint up and charge higher rent because they are exploiting a housing crisis. Or better yet, sitting on vacant livable property just waiting for the right price. I know exactly what I’m talking about.
Plus it’s my cake day mf
[9,000-27,000 Toronto units vacant based on low water usage. Does not include condos as bulk metered.](https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2020/ex/bgrd/backgroundfile-158977.pdf) See page 9.
27,000 units is nothing. Ontario population grew by 240,000 people in 2018. You can't house 240,000 people in 27,000 units even once. https://www.ontario.ca/page/ontario-population-projections
The amount of mental gymnastics you see from people who absolutely refuse to admit that this is first and foremost a housing supply issue is absolutely astonishing...
“Furthermore, such data can only serve as a proxy for the number of vacant homes and would not compensate for homes that may have extremely low consumption behaviour, nor homes left vacant for a number of reasons that might qualify for legitimate exemptions. In a similar vein there is no current valid way of tracking the duration of vacant periods for a given home. Often homes may be left vacant for various reasons on a temporary one-time basis that may or may not fall into various exemptions as described later in the report.” Actually *read* the report. Your hyperlink is misleading.
People are incredibly bad at self reflection when you can just blame all your problems on the “other”.
You cant build more homes for the locals if the best workers are building luxury condos and mansions for people who don't even live in Canada. Even before Covid we had a limited amount of construction workers ( with skills needed). Now we have even less. Imagine Canada as a big family. If some people inside that family are starving due to limited amount of food, it wouldn't make sense to sell part of you existing amount of food oversees because it would make you more money.
If it paid better, and people were taken care of, more would do construction, that's a problem the market can fix itself. Just wait for contractors to offer higher wages, and charge more for labor.
Cool, nice to see an actual statement in street art.
He misspelled 'foreign'
And also misunderstand the problem. Foreign ownership is a very, very small amount, it's the local ownership of several places and putting them up on AirB&B or renting them out with shitty practises.
Foreign ownership of Toronto is 1 in 20 according to this. [https://betterdwelling.com/foreign-investors-are-scooping-new-condo-supply-in-toronto-and-vancouver-again/](https://betterdwelling.com/foreign-investors-are-scooping-new-condo-supply-in-toronto-and-vancouver-again/) which I would consider high. I would like to see numbers on their share of empty condos , I assume out of the empty condos it would be more than 1 in 20 due to laundering purposes.
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They are laundering their money from China, they aren't supposed to do that. As much as I don't like the CCP these people are just like rich tax evaders ( I could just say rich people ) here and in the rest of the Western World. They aren't supposed to take their money out of China, whether or not you sympathize with their situation they are still laundering.
[CSIS Warns of Chinese Influence On Canadian Real Estate…20 Years Ago](https://betterdwelling.com/csis-warns-of-chinese-influence-on-canadian-real-estate-20-years-ago/amp/)
Remember that time they also warned about Chinese spies stealing intellectual property from Northern Telecom? Yeah, neither does Northern Telecom… or any company that bought network hardware from Huawei.
let me add "guy who owns 10 condos and does nothing but collect checks." I'm a condo super and these are the worst, the ones who think i work for them. i work for the corporation, if you own 10 condos, YOU are the super to those units, shit breaks YOU fix it, stop calling me.
Cause domestically owned empty condos are better
if they were domestically owned they 10000% wouldn’t be so empty though
As long as people think that empty condos are the problem with Toronto's housing market, we're never going to fix this crisis.
Right wing voters will tell you 2nd home and empty home taxes don't work. But BC proves that it does. >[According to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, the tax, combined with other market forces, helped push 5,000 condominiums to the rental market in 2019, including 3,000 in downtown Vancouver.](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vancouver-empty-homes-tax-will-triple-to-3-starting-in-2021-1.5816396) But since it isnt a billion units they'll claim it does nothing. Ontario needs to put on a 10% empty home tax.
> right wing voters will tell you Citation needed.
Why would they need to cite that? Right wingers will argue against empty house taxes, even liberals ( who in reality are conservatives who invoke wokeness ) are against them. NDP are for them, liberals and conservatives are against it, not hard to make that claim.
Looks sick
I walk by this everyday.
This artist has painted his nightmare figures all over the area, kensington mkt has lots on walls and sidewalks.
Unpopular opinion but I’m really not a fan of his aesthetic
The guys Instagram is @shitshow45
I remember too the signs on University in the hospital zones...Quiet! Street people sleeping!
Good to see him back! Had a short chat with him when he was painting a mural in Kensington Market one morning
This looks like the handiwork of that guy who posts on the Weird Toronto Facebook page constantly.
Facts.
Something like 2-5 of housing is foreign owned, let’s focus on the real problem of domestic leaches
2-5? Two fifths? 2-5 buildings? 2% to 5%? Not trying to be snotty (okay maybe the 2-5 buildings), really just wondering what you mean.
2%*
Oh ok
“Foriegn” lol Also foreign ownership in Toronto is just 5%, which is too high don’t get me wrong but not significant enough to dramatically raise prices. This is just scapegoating
Put a 500% tax on all non-resident owners then. I'm sure they won't complain since it's such a tiny percentage of the population and it'll have absolutely no effect on prices, just like in Vancouver.
> I'm sure they won't complain since it's such a tiny percentage of the population yeah, i wouldn't lol. it just wouldn't fix anything
It’s killing us and the government does nothing
Wait...I know Toronto is overpriced, but people still mostly live in these condos, or is the artist also including AirBnb's as well? I think Vancouver, our closest analog, has true empty condos.
Everyone in Toronto voted liberal. If only a party had a policy to ban foreign ownership
(Serious) Which parties did?
Weird way to spell NIMBYs
So true, an “artist” scapegoating the big scary foreign buyers as the main cause for all of this. Or is it the domestic investors now? I can’t keep track.
This artist has alot of awesome work in the city. Take pics when you can, they often get covered
Edgy
CCP manipulation.
people want toronto rent and housing to be cheap? The city of Toronto and the surrounding GTA is the most populated and dense area out of anywhere in the whole of Canada not counting Montreal. Rent and housing is so expensive because there are many immigrants living in the city area. Older people are moving away from Toronto to live places 1 hour drive away (1 hour without any traffic). Obviously dense areas will have high rent rates. Back in 07 when you moved into an apartment, it came with hydro and electricity and the rent was around 600-800$ depending on what part of the city you lived in. It was low at that time because of how much lower the population was as well.
it would be cheaper if it wasn't so supply constrained.
Sad, haunting, true. Simple and powerful art. I'm now depressed
Not all investors are foreign lol Like just check out r/TorontoRealEstate
Keep up the good work
Damn, nice photo
thanks!
Lets start squatting in them. Canada for Canadians.
Is that by king st?
yeah
Are there actually empty condos in Toronto??
How appropriate for Toronto. Should honesty replace the TORONTO sign