Quote:
Originally Posted by misher
Honestly we're seeing that decreasing prices, increasing government taxes/intervention/rules, increased regulation, etc. are causing developers to cancel or leave when combined with the mortgage rules and interest rate increases at a time that we need more housing to be built. Housing starts have dropped across Canada 23%, likely due to mortgage rules. However, BC leads this at 43.3%, likely due to the triple whammy of mortgage rules+taxes+legislation which is insanely bad for our economy and housing supply. We've screwed people [real estate businesses, developers, Owners, etc.] too much and now they've lost trust in BC as a place to do business.
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2018/10/09/housing-starts-canada-population-growth_a_23555468/
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We're not seeing a drop in Housing Starts. There's actually an increase.
As the article you cite notes, there's a huge variation from month to month, and a change from one month to another is pretty much meaningless. The article is also talking about BC data, not Vancouver data.
If you get the latest data from
CMHC's 'Housing Now', from September for Vancouver, you'll see that year-to-date (so in 8 months of 2018) there have been 16,813 housing starts in Metro Vancouver, 361 more than the first 8 months of 2017. To put that in context, 2017 saw more housing starts than any of the previous 10 years - and so far this year we're building more than last year.
There were 43,684 units under construction in August, which is 3,510 more than were under construction in August 2017.
And if it's the City of Vancouver, rather than Metro Vancouver that you're concerned about, then it's worth noting that there have been 4,848 starts so far this year, compared to 1,838 in the first 8 months of last year, and more than any other municipality - more than double the starts in Surrey (2,332) and nearly triple the starts in Burnaby (1,754) or Richmond (1,702).
As this thread was initially about rental units, it's worth noting that those are up a lot as well; there have been 4,464 rental units started in Metro Vancouver this year, compared to 2,928 this time last year. Over half those are being built in the City of Vancouver - 2,501 units (compared to 1,210 in the first 8 months of 2017).
So the sky isn't falling (yet), and the new construction hasn't slowed down at all.
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