By Tom Parkin
May 15th, 2025
BURLINGTON, ON
Ontario needs a significant plan to reverse the trend in housing construction and today’s Ontario budget is unlikely to deliver it.
Only 67.6 new housing units per 100,000 population were built in the first quarter of 2025, the lowest level since the Q1 of 1996, according to Statistics Canada.
PCs plan: push harder with approach that hasn’t worked
Yet, the province’s most recent legislation, Bill 17, introduced Monday, offers no reason to believe it will succeed where the many earlier iterations of the same approach have so evidently failed.
The legislation continues to play with development charges and approvals processes. Streamlining approvals is fine, but off-target in a province where very few are seeking project approvals.
Two-thirds of Canadians choose to buy their housing and many more would like to own.
Construction of single-family housing, typically owner occupied, has collapsed due to a lack of demand under current unaffordable prices. The average price of a benchmark home in the Greater Toronto Area rose from $757,000 in Jun 2018 to $1,313,000 in June 2022. Prices are since down, but financing costs are up from the low levels of 2020-2022.
The result has been a market stand-off with investors holding back supply, trying to maintain price levels, and buyers unable to pay the prices being demanded.
The condominium sector is in utter collapse not because there’s a lack of housing demand but because developers built for demand from owner-investors, not owner-residents.
An investor buying a “dog crate” condo of less than 500 or 600 square feet could churn enough tenants through at high rents to pay a low finance cost mortgage. But with higher finance costs and falling asking rents, demand from owner-investors has evaporated.
Now the Toronto condo model premised on investor-ownership no longer makes financial sense. The result is a massive supply of terrible quality housing on the market at distressed prices. They make no sense an as investment and few people want to buy one for occupancy.
Can the home ownership dream be rebuilt?
The result of market failures has been that perhaps the only housing sector holding up has been apartment buildings construction for corporate ownership. While Ontario needs all the housing it can get, more corporate rental units do not provide the same benefits as housing ownership, either of a house or condo.
Security of tenure, the possibility of one day living both rent- and mortgage-free, the end of dependance on unreliable maintenance — there are many good reasons two-thirds of Canadians choose to buy their housing and many more would like to own. They are not wrong.
Home ownership shouldn’t be a get-rich plan, but it should be a reasonable and attainable goal for far more people. While focusing on the rights of tenants and protecting affordable rents is critical, Ontarians want political leadership that helps them meet their dreams.
The Ford PCs and their federal Liberal allies have crushed those dreams. The NDP in Ontario and federally have mostly ignored them. Perhaps the social democrats should consider that protecting renters while rekindling the home ownership dream is not a sell-out or contradiction.
They can build them but who can afford to buy them? First time buyers are faced with the choice of stacked townhouses or tiny condos. The bottom is falling out of the condo market, not surprising really. Young people don’t want to start their families in a box, they want a house with a garden but at prices around the million mark what chance do they have? It’s not just availability that’s a problem, it’s affordability.
The price people pay for the Trudeau government’s plan to open the doors to record numbers of immigrants without any plan on how to house them.
And we elect them again.We will get what we deserve.
If I was a potential immigrant I would look elsewhere.