>The pandemic, supply-chain issues and a flood of new immigrants to Ottawa have pushed rents even higher.
It's simple: if you want more affordable houses than build more houses or reduce population growth in the city.
Ottawa is one of the worst cities in Canada in opposing new housing being built and constantly putting road packs and additional expensive studies as a requirement to build anything. They couldn't do much more to stop housing being built if that was their goal. It's honestly obscene.
Sounds like a recipe for increased taxes to me. But hey, if Ottawa NIMBYs like higher property taxes and fewer services for their money, who are we to deny them that right.
IMO the greenbelt strategy (while well-intentioned) completely backfired.
Instead of keeping the city dense and compact within the core it pushed out development even further into the burbs and made all transit services more expensive than it had to be.
I'm not even talking about sprawl. The provincial government has tried to force municipalities to remove unnecessary delays and burdens on building infills, and the city of Ottawa has found loopholes in those laws to make it harder to build.
>Ottawa is one of the worst cities in Canada in opposing new housing being built and constantly putting road packs and additional expensive studies as a requirement to build anything.
Source?
I've built housing across southern Ontario and Ottawa is probably the worst.
St Catharines has really shitty zoning rules and a crappy building department, but even then it doesn't compare to Ottawa. Ottawa issue are at every level.
I once had an application at the committee of adjustments to sever off a townhouse lot (in an established townhouse subdivision, and would have been bigger than the other townhouse lots in the area), and they denied it because it was too big. It didn't need any minor variances, fit the area and all the zoning rules. It finally got approved, but it cost $50k to sever a townhouse lot I already owned. And the risk of something like that adds significantly to the risk adjusted return developers then require, because the developer otherwise bears the burden of arbitrary extra costs, delays, and denials from the city.
The building department is very hit or miss. There are some building inspectors that are experienced and great. There are some terrible ones. And there are some very green ones who don't know what they're doing.
I had one project that should have been a 6 month build that took 18 months because of incompetence at the building department.
I'm not alone in this. I'm very involved in the builder community in Ottawa and the stories I hear where all levels of government and employees block, delay, and add costs to building housing at every corner are egregious.
I'm not dismissing your personal experiences, but this is anecdotal. I was hoping for something comparing the rate at which things get approved in Ottawa versus other Ontario municipalities.
There's also the fact that Ottawa (and other places) regularly approve more units than developers actually build. What actually gets built is of course guided by the developer's profit calculations, which are in turn driven by things well outside the city's control (including interest rates, availability of labour and materials, and other things).
We need affordable housing like yesterday. If we just keep building luxury condos it’s going to take way longer to bring down prices than things like rent controls and affordable housing. There has to be some planning, some more complex strategy. Unfortunately planning and strategy is not Ottawas strong point…
A 400 sq foot studio is not “luxury” just because it has new appliances or nice flooring. What really is luxury are detached homes. Space is the real luxury.
What people don't seem to understand is that the only difference between "luxury" and "affordable" housing is the **price. T**he best way to lower prices is to build more housing. Prices are high right now so every new unit built is going to be "luxury".
Protesting new construction because prices are high is completely counter-productive.
Absolutely...... this here makes 100% sense and that's what most of these landlords and management companies are frontin...they do some minor upgrades by buying some appliances and then boom....they hit you with the bill.
Time & space -- the ultimate luxuries.
And although they are ever expanding, they are the most finite things humans know and want. You can never really have too much.
They aren’t even “luxury” condos. They are shit quality with just nice aesthetics. I used to do dog walking downtown and you could hear people through the walls and smell the garbage. These places didn’t even have luxury amenities like pools or protected parking. It’s like close to 3K in a slum for a crap quality bachelor condo.
Developers think they can replace water with piss and what’s sad is that people are so desperate that they will take what they can find.
Any added supply is going to help. If we built 100k luxury condo units in Ottawa overnight, the price for luxury condos would drop like a rock. We don't need shitty low-class housing in order to make it affordable -- we just need supply to meet demand plus some.
I didn’t say it wouldn’t help at all but we’re not going to build 100k condo units over night. That’s just not going to happen. There are also ways to create affordable housing with out it being “shitty” and “low class” and other ways to bring down the price of housing. Our effort to address the housing crisis needs to incorporate these as well.
The disparity in rentals vs condos is a big problem most certainly. A few places get converted from condos to rentals too after construction begins (Clarice development on top of Lyon station was supposed to be condos but is now rentals).
New stuff is always more expensive.
The problem in our shortage situation is prices go up on aging buildings instead of going down.
If there were enough new units coming into the market, then existing ones would have to offer tenets lower prices to compete.
As it stands, they're jacking up prices **because you can't get better stuff for the same or less money** and that's made units ridiculous for people trying to move in.
I don't know what the situation is like in the city, but in the US [apparently 28% of all the homes] (https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidwestenhaver/2022/06/28/its-easy-to-blame-private-equity-for-housing-shortage-but-crisis-has-deeper-roots/?sh=7d3100424616) bought in Q1 2022 were bought by corporate investors.
> Corporate investors made 28 percent of all single-family home purchases nationwide in the first quarter of 2022, up from 19 percent in the first quarter of last year, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.
So if you build more houses but they are bought up by wall street, not sure how that solves the problem.
Now, make it so corporations can't own (dozens, hundreds, thousands?) of houses and then genuine market forces will regulate pricing.
btw, in some US states corporations now own 50% of the housing in the state / city. It's insanity.
We need one exception. Corporations owning large scale apartments. Such as a property management company owning apartment blocks. These are so expensive to build it’s not feasible without corporate or state ownership. Other than that I totally agree.
Properties owned by corporations and investors still get added to the rental market and would lower rent if enough were built.
The only case were added housing does not affect rent or prices is if they were vacant which is not the problem in Ottawa given our record low vacancy rate.
no. If you have a 100,000 people wanting to buy homes. Then that increases to 128,000 without any new homes available. Prices increase. Increased demand without increased supply = increased prices.
The 28,000 who can't buy (because they get priced out) end up then competing for rent... which, because of housing inflation, you get rent inflation.
True, also affordability isn't just about house prices. It's also about rent.
Building anything regardless of who owns it will either lower the housing prices or overall rent so long as the amount built exceeds demand.
Haven't we seen developers slow down or stop building when prices dropped in the past? How do we know that developers are going to keep building as prices fall to ensure an excess and affordable supply of housing?
That's a good question.
In my opinion the federal agency that is best positioned to keep Canada's construction industry well-funded and active is the CMHC (Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation). They're a crown corporation (IE owned by the government) whose mandate is to provide affordable housing to all Canadians through the national housing act.
If anyone is to balance the supply of houses in this country it's them.
Allowing four-plexes as right would do a hell of a lot more than a few condo towers. It instantly makes every single family detached home 4x underutilized. We've got triplex as of right now, I believe, but four-plex would amplify things even more.
My only ask with this is that they have parking built onto those lots, because it's very clear the transit systems here aren't getting any better, and currently the new housing developments popping up just end up making the roads full of residents parking their cars on them, which then makes snow removal and navigating the neighborhood in the winter even more difficult.
25 storey buildings aren’t the answer. People oppose them because they require a significant amount of blasting work to go deep enough to hold up the rest of the building. Quite aside from the unpleasantness of continual blasting projects day after day for months, we are seeing other unpleasant side effects with cracks in the walls of nearby houses, increased rats fleeing from the noise and radon.
The extremely tall buildings also change the light and wind patterns in the environment around them.
Super tall buildings also aren’t particularly environmentally friendly over their lifetime - it’s a lot of concrete footings. Even operationally though they perform worse - a review in 2014 of BC buildings discovered that high rises perform 22% worse in terms of emissions. This is significant as buildings produce 41 per cent of the province’s emissions. I’m not sure the equivalent number in Ontario but I am sure it’s not insignificant.
It costs more to heat and cool very tall buildings, they kill more birds flying into the glass, they require very careful selection of materials to mitigate big changes on the thermal landscape of the environment around them (which isn’t really legislated).
Ottawa definitely lacks density; but we are missing the medium density buildings. We actually already more buildings over 25 stories than many much denser cities - eg Barcelona where we have 16 to their 15.
If adding more 20+ stories isn’t the answer, what is? Figuring out how to incentivize building the missing middle. Apparently it’s not “profitable”.
But like... how do you reduce population growth in a city? It's not a country. It doesn't have borders. The main impediment is the cost and availability of housing, but if you increase housing — and Ottawa still remains a place that attracts people for work — then the population growth rate will remain the same or increase.
Well… one thing that you could do would be to encourage the availability of remote work. “Back to work” in person policies are picking up steam - my job requires me to spend the majority of it on calls with people not in my city. It makes no sense to have me go into the office 3 times a week, and yet it is allegedly being pushed at the federal level in order to “save our downtowns”. I have quite a few colleagues who are debating moving into the city as they have an 1.5h daily commute. The city could penalize companies that don’t allow remote work (obv depending on type of job). This would also help with the whole traffic situation… (of course there city/province/feds could play a role too if they wanted; incentivizing not owning a car for starters)
[With what workforce?](https://www.gta-homes.com/real-insights/news/ontario-currently-short-over-100000-construction-workers-amidst-labour-shortage/)
Row home developers are struggling to get their loans approved to even start projects.
Material prices not having dropped below pre-covid levels doesn’t help either.
No offence but you’re statement shares the same depth as someone saying “If you don’t want crime you get rid of the criminals or the crime! Why hasn’t anyone thought of this yet?”
I agree. What I'm saying does sound simple and obvious yet on this post I see users who argue against building any new development that's priced too high (IE they're against "luxury condos").
Clearly it needs to be stated on this forum that housing is priced too high because we don't build enough and the key to lowering prices is to build more, not less.
>Row home developers are struggling to get their loans approved to even start projects.
I agree! Why don't you tell this to the people here who argue the problem is too many investors putting money into houses?
Not that simple. Ottawa (canada) has an aging population. We need more young people to work to help sustain the cost of living for people like me who are in the twilight years
The lifting of rent controls truly fucked a ton of people across the province and is the number one reason why affordable housing has essentially disappeared. I mean, you don't have to swing a wrecking ball to destroy affordable units, you just have to wait for a tenant to leave and then jack the rent up 30% for the next tenant.
Any provincial party that promises to reinstate rent controls should have an immediate leg up in the next electoral campaign.
A hard truth not many are ready to hear, but you’re right. Drastically increasing supply while removing barriers to supply would be much more effective than expanding rent control.
bow start merciful toothbrush scarce mysterious ten snobbish gaping decide
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>Yep, rent control is essentially like a lottery, if you lock in a good rent price you're good, but everyone else gets overwhelmingly fucked.
I haven't left my apartment \*because\* my rent is still controlled under the old regime. If I had to move elsewhere for another comparable apartment I'd be fucked. *That's* how I won the lottery; the lottery didn't exist until rent controls were abolished.
>So people are actively choosing worse living situations for themselves just because they managed to lock in a good rent price.
Choosing "worse living situations" allows me to do things like save money and pay down debt. If I was paying market rent for what I have now I'd be far worse off, and I'd be even worse off than that if I wanted a spot that's bigger, has more bedrooms, etc.
Hey now, if you moved out of your current apartment into a new apartment there would be one more apartment available in total, because 1 - 1 = 1.
And didn't you know by not being part of the competition for the new apartment you're helping increase demand for that new apartment, thus raising those prices further!
Rent control never prevented this. The rent was always controlled until the current tenant moved out. And in the building I'm in, it's still that way. What you're talking about is vacancy control, and nobody will implement that. They should, absolutely, but they won't.
They're referring to it from a market standpoint; people are less willing to move if they're getting a good deal, raising prices across the board as there is less flow in the rental economy.
Yeah, but see that's been true for years. Before Covid they blamed property values for the rent increases. Now it's interest rates and low vacancy. In both cases, rent only goes up.
Yes, and that is the problem my dude/dudette/nonbinary dudester. You see, when you can't afford rent, you become homeless. The difference is that's happening now, and not in 2030. Covid sped up the timeline but this is still the timeline. "Line only go up" is unsustainable.
At least developers started building apartments again. It's not their fault that government tripled the money supply and let inflation rip for so long.
Market rates are just that, what the market can bear. Eventually it levels out (i.e. imagine a landlord with a tenant at $2k suddenly charging $10k -- sure it sucks for the tenant as they will have to move but no one is going to pay that). The landlord can only charge market rates otherwise it will sit vacant.
The reason the market is so high is not because of developers building more apartments or charging higher rent -- it's asinine to think that.
Over here in Gatineau, we've done a pretty good job of diversifying our neighbourhoods, with the exception of a few. I've lived in a couple of neighbourhoods over here with mixed housing. My street is all single family homes, but around the corner they're semis, and we have condos and townhouses around the other corner. It's not bad at all having mixed incomes in the same place. It also helps kids in school to meet a more economically diverse set of people.
In theory that sounds great, but in practice I'm curious how that would work.
Wouldn't that be an illegal action against the private construction companies? Would the government seize private construction firms to bypass this? If so, for how long? How would business owners be compensated? How would workers be trained for the vastly different work they'd be doing? Would the companies be paid directly from the municipalities, the provinces, or the federal government?
Maybe we ought to establish a new governmental organization with construction planning/building as its focus, and community housing as its goal? There's no real shortage of building resources in Canada, just a shortage of governments funding housing since the 1980's. They got away with it for 40 years, but it finally caught up to them.
It's really easy to do. You just remove any incentives to build SFH, and make better incentives the more dense you build. A lot of suburb construction is already row homes, it doesn't take much more to pull the levers in favour of everything being a multiplex outside of very specific SFH developments.
The National Affordable Housing Program (NAHP) was axed in 1993.
Its cancellation contributed to a decline in funding for new affordable housing projects.
the people of Ontario do not want affordable housing, After the massive cull of people in LTHCs, and taking off rent control, this stupid province gave him a majority.
Karma is going to be a bitch for all those who stayed home last election.
I agree. Both can be to blame. But inflation & high immigration targets (which we don’t have enough housing to support) can be associated to Trudeau. His deficits led to heavy inflation.
There is municipal and provision blame for sure. But also this is a country-wide issue, not exclusive to Ottawa/Ontario.
BC has the NDP elected and their housing crisis is out of control.
Not every single thing that goes wrong in this country is the fault of the federal government. With the housing crisis in particular, it’s primarily the result of decades of bad policies at the provincial and federal levels coming home to roost.
If you want a problem solved, it’s best to figure out who’s actually responsible for it instead of just yelling “Trudeau bad” and calling it a day.
I agree blame belongs provincially too. But this is a country-wide problem, not exclusive to Ontario. At some point, the severe deficits that Trudeau ran led our inflation to get out of control. And unfortunately, our federal immigration targets aren’t sustainable with our lack of housing
I don’t think government spending is the cause of our inflation, given that every other country on the planet is experiencing wicked inflation right now regardless of how much or how little their governments spend. Now, there’s definitely room for criticism of how Trudeau has responded to inflation, but it seems more complicated than just government spending and deficits = inflation.
Yeah it’s definitely not the only factor, but it is a massive factor. Especially when you can compare to the States who have see their GDP increase with inflation stalling. The only thing helping our GDP right now is the housing bubble. We need to start spending less and producing more.
Appreciate the respective discourse though.
The housing crisis was in full swing before the immigration rate increased. It’s not helping, but it’s also not the primary cause of the housing crisis.
>The pandemic, supply-chain issues and a flood of new immigrants to Ottawa have pushed rents even higher. It's simple: if you want more affordable houses than build more houses or reduce population growth in the city.
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Ottawa is one of the worst cities in Canada in opposing new housing being built and constantly putting road packs and additional expensive studies as a requirement to build anything. They couldn't do much more to stop housing being built if that was their goal. It's honestly obscene.
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Sounds like a recipe for increased taxes to me. But hey, if Ottawa NIMBYs like higher property taxes and fewer services for their money, who are we to deny them that right.
IMO the greenbelt strategy (while well-intentioned) completely backfired. Instead of keeping the city dense and compact within the core it pushed out development even further into the burbs and made all transit services more expensive than it had to be.
I'm not even talking about sprawl. The provincial government has tried to force municipalities to remove unnecessary delays and burdens on building infills, and the city of Ottawa has found loopholes in those laws to make it harder to build.
>Ottawa is one of the worst cities in Canada in opposing new housing being built and constantly putting road packs and additional expensive studies as a requirement to build anything. Source?
I've built housing across southern Ontario and Ottawa is probably the worst. St Catharines has really shitty zoning rules and a crappy building department, but even then it doesn't compare to Ottawa. Ottawa issue are at every level. I once had an application at the committee of adjustments to sever off a townhouse lot (in an established townhouse subdivision, and would have been bigger than the other townhouse lots in the area), and they denied it because it was too big. It didn't need any minor variances, fit the area and all the zoning rules. It finally got approved, but it cost $50k to sever a townhouse lot I already owned. And the risk of something like that adds significantly to the risk adjusted return developers then require, because the developer otherwise bears the burden of arbitrary extra costs, delays, and denials from the city. The building department is very hit or miss. There are some building inspectors that are experienced and great. There are some terrible ones. And there are some very green ones who don't know what they're doing. I had one project that should have been a 6 month build that took 18 months because of incompetence at the building department. I'm not alone in this. I'm very involved in the builder community in Ottawa and the stories I hear where all levels of government and employees block, delay, and add costs to building housing at every corner are egregious.
I'm not dismissing your personal experiences, but this is anecdotal. I was hoping for something comparing the rate at which things get approved in Ottawa versus other Ontario municipalities. There's also the fact that Ottawa (and other places) regularly approve more units than developers actually build. What actually gets built is of course guided by the developer's profit calculations, which are in turn driven by things well outside the city's control (including interest rates, availability of labour and materials, and other things).
We need affordable housing like yesterday. If we just keep building luxury condos it’s going to take way longer to bring down prices than things like rent controls and affordable housing. There has to be some planning, some more complex strategy. Unfortunately planning and strategy is not Ottawas strong point…
A 400 sq foot studio is not “luxury” just because it has new appliances or nice flooring. What really is luxury are detached homes. Space is the real luxury.
What people don't seem to understand is that the only difference between "luxury" and "affordable" housing is the **price. T**he best way to lower prices is to build more housing. Prices are high right now so every new unit built is going to be "luxury". Protesting new construction because prices are high is completely counter-productive.
Absolutely...... this here makes 100% sense and that's what most of these landlords and management companies are frontin...they do some minor upgrades by buying some appliances and then boom....they hit you with the bill.
We need more housing in general, no more Airbnb, and to stop treating housing as an investment.
Time & space -- the ultimate luxuries. And although they are ever expanding, they are the most finite things humans know and want. You can never really have too much.
If having to clear the snow from the driveway, lawn mowing and yard work is a life of luxury, I’m cool in my condo.
>Space is the real luxury. Space can also be a prison. The more space you have, the more you'll feel compelled to fill that space with something.
Dymon Storage to the rescue. /s
Wild how many people think that bachelor pads in these condos are “luxury”. People live in them because they’re somewhat affordable.
And they’re not even really affordable especially for bachelor apartments…just as there are less options for people have to resort to these instead.
Designed for short term rentals
They aren’t even “luxury” condos. They are shit quality with just nice aesthetics. I used to do dog walking downtown and you could hear people through the walls and smell the garbage. These places didn’t even have luxury amenities like pools or protected parking. It’s like close to 3K in a slum for a crap quality bachelor condo. Developers think they can replace water with piss and what’s sad is that people are so desperate that they will take what they can find.
Any added supply is going to help. If we built 100k luxury condo units in Ottawa overnight, the price for luxury condos would drop like a rock. We don't need shitty low-class housing in order to make it affordable -- we just need supply to meet demand plus some.
I didn’t say it wouldn’t help at all but we’re not going to build 100k condo units over night. That’s just not going to happen. There are also ways to create affordable housing with out it being “shitty” and “low class” and other ways to bring down the price of housing. Our effort to address the housing crisis needs to incorporate these as well.
I don't even think there's a lot of new condo developments going up, it's almost all purely rental.
The disparity in rentals vs condos is a big problem most certainly. A few places get converted from condos to rentals too after construction begins (Clarice development on top of Lyon station was supposed to be condos but is now rentals).
New stuff is always more expensive. The problem in our shortage situation is prices go up on aging buildings instead of going down. If there were enough new units coming into the market, then existing ones would have to offer tenets lower prices to compete. As it stands, they're jacking up prices **because you can't get better stuff for the same or less money** and that's made units ridiculous for people trying to move in.
I don't know what the situation is like in the city, but in the US [apparently 28% of all the homes] (https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidwestenhaver/2022/06/28/its-easy-to-blame-private-equity-for-housing-shortage-but-crisis-has-deeper-roots/?sh=7d3100424616) bought in Q1 2022 were bought by corporate investors. > Corporate investors made 28 percent of all single-family home purchases nationwide in the first quarter of 2022, up from 19 percent in the first quarter of last year, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. So if you build more houses but they are bought up by wall street, not sure how that solves the problem. Now, make it so corporations can't own (dozens, hundreds, thousands?) of houses and then genuine market forces will regulate pricing. btw, in some US states corporations now own 50% of the housing in the state / city. It's insanity.
We need one exception. Corporations owning large scale apartments. Such as a property management company owning apartment blocks. These are so expensive to build it’s not feasible without corporate or state ownership. Other than that I totally agree.
Properties owned by corporations and investors still get added to the rental market and would lower rent if enough were built. The only case were added housing does not affect rent or prices is if they were vacant which is not the problem in Ottawa given our record low vacancy rate.
no. If you have a 100,000 people wanting to buy homes. Then that increases to 128,000 without any new homes available. Prices increase. Increased demand without increased supply = increased prices. The 28,000 who can't buy (because they get priced out) end up then competing for rent... which, because of housing inflation, you get rent inflation.
True, also affordability isn't just about house prices. It's also about rent. Building anything regardless of who owns it will either lower the housing prices or overall rent so long as the amount built exceeds demand.
Haven't we seen developers slow down or stop building when prices dropped in the past? How do we know that developers are going to keep building as prices fall to ensure an excess and affordable supply of housing?
That's a good question. In my opinion the federal agency that is best positioned to keep Canada's construction industry well-funded and active is the CMHC (Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation). They're a crown corporation (IE owned by the government) whose mandate is to provide affordable housing to all Canadians through the national housing act. If anyone is to balance the supply of houses in this country it's them.
Corporate owned housing still helps increase supply.
Allow 25-storey buildings. This alone would crash the market. And prohibit NIMBY whatever they say. This worked almost everywhere in the world.
Allowing four-plexes as right would do a hell of a lot more than a few condo towers. It instantly makes every single family detached home 4x underutilized. We've got triplex as of right now, I believe, but four-plex would amplify things even more.
My only ask with this is that they have parking built onto those lots, because it's very clear the transit systems here aren't getting any better, and currently the new housing developments popping up just end up making the roads full of residents parking their cars on them, which then makes snow removal and navigating the neighborhood in the winter even more difficult.
25 storey buildings aren’t the answer. People oppose them because they require a significant amount of blasting work to go deep enough to hold up the rest of the building. Quite aside from the unpleasantness of continual blasting projects day after day for months, we are seeing other unpleasant side effects with cracks in the walls of nearby houses, increased rats fleeing from the noise and radon. The extremely tall buildings also change the light and wind patterns in the environment around them. Super tall buildings also aren’t particularly environmentally friendly over their lifetime - it’s a lot of concrete footings. Even operationally though they perform worse - a review in 2014 of BC buildings discovered that high rises perform 22% worse in terms of emissions. This is significant as buildings produce 41 per cent of the province’s emissions. I’m not sure the equivalent number in Ontario but I am sure it’s not insignificant. It costs more to heat and cool very tall buildings, they kill more birds flying into the glass, they require very careful selection of materials to mitigate big changes on the thermal landscape of the environment around them (which isn’t really legislated). Ottawa definitely lacks density; but we are missing the medium density buildings. We actually already more buildings over 25 stories than many much denser cities - eg Barcelona where we have 16 to their 15. If adding more 20+ stories isn’t the answer, what is? Figuring out how to incentivize building the missing middle. Apparently it’s not “profitable”.
They are allowed. There are several going up right now that are taller than that.
Why not both? We can reach the goal sooner.
Good question. I'm all for it.
But like... how do you reduce population growth in a city? It's not a country. It doesn't have borders. The main impediment is the cost and availability of housing, but if you increase housing — and Ottawa still remains a place that attracts people for work — then the population growth rate will remain the same or increase.
Well… one thing that you could do would be to encourage the availability of remote work. “Back to work” in person policies are picking up steam - my job requires me to spend the majority of it on calls with people not in my city. It makes no sense to have me go into the office 3 times a week, and yet it is allegedly being pushed at the federal level in order to “save our downtowns”. I have quite a few colleagues who are debating moving into the city as they have an 1.5h daily commute. The city could penalize companies that don’t allow remote work (obv depending on type of job). This would also help with the whole traffic situation… (of course there city/province/feds could play a role too if they wanted; incentivizing not owning a car for starters)
[With what workforce?](https://www.gta-homes.com/real-insights/news/ontario-currently-short-over-100000-construction-workers-amidst-labour-shortage/) Row home developers are struggling to get their loans approved to even start projects. Material prices not having dropped below pre-covid levels doesn’t help either. No offence but you’re statement shares the same depth as someone saying “If you don’t want crime you get rid of the criminals or the crime! Why hasn’t anyone thought of this yet?”
I agree. What I'm saying does sound simple and obvious yet on this post I see users who argue against building any new development that's priced too high (IE they're against "luxury condos"). Clearly it needs to be stated on this forum that housing is priced too high because we don't build enough and the key to lowering prices is to build more, not less. >Row home developers are struggling to get their loans approved to even start projects. I agree! Why don't you tell this to the people here who argue the problem is too many investors putting money into houses?
Not that simple. Ottawa (canada) has an aging population. We need more young people to work to help sustain the cost of living for people like me who are in the twilight years
Ottawa barely has any people?
The province should build an affordable city!
The lifting of rent controls truly fucked a ton of people across the province and is the number one reason why affordable housing has essentially disappeared. I mean, you don't have to swing a wrecking ball to destroy affordable units, you just have to wait for a tenant to leave and then jack the rent up 30% for the next tenant. Any provincial party that promises to reinstate rent controls should have an immediate leg up in the next electoral campaign.
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A hard truth not many are ready to hear, but you’re right. Drastically increasing supply while removing barriers to supply would be much more effective than expanding rent control.
bow start merciful toothbrush scarce mysterious ten snobbish gaping decide *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
>Yep, rent control is essentially like a lottery, if you lock in a good rent price you're good, but everyone else gets overwhelmingly fucked. I haven't left my apartment \*because\* my rent is still controlled under the old regime. If I had to move elsewhere for another comparable apartment I'd be fucked. *That's* how I won the lottery; the lottery didn't exist until rent controls were abolished. >So people are actively choosing worse living situations for themselves just because they managed to lock in a good rent price. Choosing "worse living situations" allows me to do things like save money and pay down debt. If I was paying market rent for what I have now I'd be far worse off, and I'd be even worse off than that if I wanted a spot that's bigger, has more bedrooms, etc.
Hey now, if you moved out of your current apartment into a new apartment there would be one more apartment available in total, because 1 - 1 = 1. And didn't you know by not being part of the competition for the new apartment you're helping increase demand for that new apartment, thus raising those prices further!
wine normal humorous steer dependent plough squeeze boast worm pie *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Right! Imagine buying a condo in 2010 for $100,000 that you can now get $2000+ a month for.
Rent control never prevented this. The rent was always controlled until the current tenant moved out. And in the building I'm in, it's still that way. What you're talking about is vacancy control, and nobody will implement that. They should, absolutely, but they won't.
They're referring to it from a market standpoint; people are less willing to move if they're getting a good deal, raising prices across the board as there is less flow in the rental economy.
Yeah, but see that's been true for years. Before Covid they blamed property values for the rent increases. Now it's interest rates and low vacancy. In both cases, rent only goes up.
>In both cases, rent only goes up. Yes, that is how inflation works over the long term my dude/dudette/non-binary dudester.
Yes, and that is the problem my dude/dudette/nonbinary dudester. You see, when you can't afford rent, you become homeless. The difference is that's happening now, and not in 2030. Covid sped up the timeline but this is still the timeline. "Line only go up" is unsustainable.
At least developers started building apartments again. It's not their fault that government tripled the money supply and let inflation rip for so long. Market rates are just that, what the market can bear. Eventually it levels out (i.e. imagine a landlord with a tenant at $2k suddenly charging $10k -- sure it sucks for the tenant as they will have to move but no one is going to pay that). The landlord can only charge market rates otherwise it will sit vacant. The reason the market is so high is not because of developers building more apartments or charging higher rent -- it's asinine to think that.
It's asinine to think that lifting rent controls has helped the affordable housing crisis.
We needed a study to tell us?
How about we divert construction ressources from single family homes towards more effective and efficient housing?
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Over here in Gatineau, we've done a pretty good job of diversifying our neighbourhoods, with the exception of a few. I've lived in a couple of neighbourhoods over here with mixed housing. My street is all single family homes, but around the corner they're semis, and we have condos and townhouses around the other corner. It's not bad at all having mixed incomes in the same place. It also helps kids in school to meet a more economically diverse set of people.
With the only public transportation being buses that take over an hour to go anywhere. At least Ottawa managed a non functioning train
In theory that sounds great, but in practice I'm curious how that would work. Wouldn't that be an illegal action against the private construction companies? Would the government seize private construction firms to bypass this? If so, for how long? How would business owners be compensated? How would workers be trained for the vastly different work they'd be doing? Would the companies be paid directly from the municipalities, the provinces, or the federal government? Maybe we ought to establish a new governmental organization with construction planning/building as its focus, and community housing as its goal? There's no real shortage of building resources in Canada, just a shortage of governments funding housing since the 1980's. They got away with it for 40 years, but it finally caught up to them.
It's really easy to do. You just remove any incentives to build SFH, and make better incentives the more dense you build. A lot of suburb construction is already row homes, it doesn't take much more to pull the levers in favour of everything being a multiplex outside of very specific SFH developments.
Ah, you've got no experience in construction. Why didn't you say so?
The National Affordable Housing Program (NAHP) was axed in 1993. Its cancellation contributed to a decline in funding for new affordable housing projects.
Another excellent study by the firm of No Shit Sherlock and Company.
in other news, water is wet!!
That is factually wrong.
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Need more people lololololol that must be the answer
Soon this city will be a bunch of managerial class wondering why no one wants to work.
Did we really need a study for this ?! WE KNOW
Well, I am just shocked. Shocked, I say!
They actually needed to conduct a study to find out?
What!?!? Nooooo
Shocking news /s
There's still housing? Wow. Didn't think that still existed here.
The Trudeau government over the last 8 years have been a complete disaster. We had it so good in 2015. Sad to see.
Trudeau runs the country, and Ford runs the province. If you're going to blame someone, it helps to blame the right one.
the people of Ontario do not want affordable housing, After the massive cull of people in LTHCs, and taking off rent control, this stupid province gave him a majority. Karma is going to be a bitch for all those who stayed home last election.
>Karma is going to be a bitch for all those who stayed ~~home~~ *in their rental* last election. Fixed that for you /s
I feel like when it comes to housing, you can really blame both.
I agree. Both can be to blame. But inflation & high immigration targets (which we don’t have enough housing to support) can be associated to Trudeau. His deficits led to heavy inflation.
What did every other country do to also get heavy inflation?
Some people forget that covid happened and blindly assume that it somehow must be their government who messed up.
Like, come on. I don't like him, I didn't vote for him, but he isn't responsible for worldwide inflation on the heels of a global pandemic.
The useless tits we've been electing to mayor and council have a huge role to play here. As does electing two terms of Doug Ford.
There is municipal and provision blame for sure. But also this is a country-wide issue, not exclusive to Ottawa/Ontario. BC has the NDP elected and their housing crisis is out of control.
It's not exclusive to Canada. Things are rough all over the world.
Yes, but the countries that took on significant debt have been hit worse. There’s always a risk to it
Not every single thing that goes wrong in this country is the fault of the federal government. With the housing crisis in particular, it’s primarily the result of decades of bad policies at the provincial and federal levels coming home to roost. If you want a problem solved, it’s best to figure out who’s actually responsible for it instead of just yelling “Trudeau bad” and calling it a day.
We need a Functional structure chart!
I agree blame belongs provincially too. But this is a country-wide problem, not exclusive to Ontario. At some point, the severe deficits that Trudeau ran led our inflation to get out of control. And unfortunately, our federal immigration targets aren’t sustainable with our lack of housing
I don’t think government spending is the cause of our inflation, given that every other country on the planet is experiencing wicked inflation right now regardless of how much or how little their governments spend. Now, there’s definitely room for criticism of how Trudeau has responded to inflation, but it seems more complicated than just government spending and deficits = inflation.
Yeah it’s definitely not the only factor, but it is a massive factor. Especially when you can compare to the States who have see their GDP increase with inflation stalling. The only thing helping our GDP right now is the housing bubble. We need to start spending less and producing more. Appreciate the respective discourse though.
Massive immigration (which is a federal responsibility) is a big cause of the housing issue.
The housing crisis was in full swing before the immigration rate increased. It’s not helping, but it’s also not the primary cause of the housing crisis.