By Staff
February 18th, 2022
BURLINGTON, ON
Burlington continues to see historically low inventory and record high pricing.
The average sale price was $1,662,096. During the month of January properties sold for an incredible 120% of the listed price. Properties sold in an average of 7 days compared to 10 days the month prior.
The lack of supply and strong demand has continued to drive prices, however we are starting to see inventory grow, it just doesn’t stay on long enough to tip the scale in any way, it lists and sells before any sort of momentum is made.
perryb.
How many of these empty McMansions do you think there are in the City of Burlington. 10 to 15 total at best in a City of 200 thousand people? Remember each one of these houses that where built, created hundreds of high paying jobs in this community. Careful when you throw out fake numbers to the uninformed. For the highly informed will educate you and them very quickly with the truth. “Bananas”. Peter you never cease to amaze. Congrats.
Most arguments hinge on finding spaces, any spaces, where people can be stacked in as densely as possible. Of course nobody actually wants to live like this, so there is a built in resistance with developers and sultans in Queens Park wanting to force something on people who don’t want it. So you get unintended consequences like the ADI military barracks at Aldershot GO with no parks and no parking and no schools. Or the teardowns replaced by uninhabited McMansions waiting to land a wealthy buyer from Toronto or Beijing.Or the lip service to affordable housing which somehow never comes to pass, in favour of elegant tower condos again populated by investors from elsewhere. The system is broken, folks. Doing more of the same won’t change that. Time to get outside the box and recognize reality.
“Of course nobody actually wants to live like this”
All of these projects currently built are sold out. Developers as a rule require at least a 50% pre-sale before they even start a project, and with sa.es momentum showing they will recoup the expense of building, so I highly doubt your statement that no one wants to live in them.
To the rest of your points, Burlington is built out. Meaning there is no more development land left. The only way Burlington grows is through intensification. That means taking a street like Ghent Ave. that once was single family homes with 200’+ lots that are now 3 story townhomes. Taking a site like the Strata Condos on Maple Avenue, which was abandoned for many many years before it was developed. So from 0 units to a few hundred units. This is the only way the housing crisis will end and prices stabilize.
As to where a buyer comes from, it should not matter because once they purchase a home in Burlington, they are now a resident and taxpayer of Burlington and should be just as welcome no matter their ethnicity be it from Asia or another part of Canada. I’m not a statistician but I would hazard a guess that a great many of the citizens of Burlington at one point either were born elsewhere or migrated to our city from somewhere else so McMansions should be marketed to anyone wishing to buy one. There is a housing crisis in Canada. That is a fact. NIMBYism is not going to change that, that is also a fact.
Where we agree is that doing more of the same won’t change that and its time to recognize reality. The provincial government already has recognized it and if Burlington council doesn’t recognize it and start to work with developers to get the best development possible, developers will continue going over their head to the Ontario Land Tribunal and the citizens will continue losing the fight against good development.
This is why the City Council and more so the Mayor need to stop with their anti-development parade, and acknowledge the need for loosening up development acitivity which they froze for the last 4 years, and also to get the Official Plan finalized and fully approved and in line and dovetailed with the provinical land use authority and legislation. The province is taking some very aggressive steps to deal with local nimby politicians under its fresh report titled “Ontario Housing Affordability Task Force”. In that report, there are strong suggestions that most if not all local interference be eliminated in the land use planning and development processes. This is a very serious matter called a “HOUSING CRISIS”, and the report contrasts completely with what is happening at Burlington City Hall. In the report there is also a sister term to Nimby; it is called Bananas; Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything. This mayor is going to have a rough ride in this year’s election because the province has had enough of the local She nanigans.