Housing Bubble II: The Quest To Build Enough Homes Where People Actually Need Them - Page 61

whatnext · #**1201** Posted **Mar 15, 2024, 6:28 PM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by yaletown_fella

Home prices in the Lower Mainland is driven by cheap money , anti development fees/policy, and intrinsic land value/ geographical scarcity.

Prices in the GTA are driven by cheap money , anti development policy/fees, and artificial land scarcity driven by the greenbelt.

If you don't believe me compare condo & home prices from each region between the years 2000-2005 (before Places to Grow had any effect)

While someone like me obviously prefers transit oriented urban midrise or highrise living, I don't want suburbanites being forced to compete with me to live In a condo as this would ultimately force me into overpaying or renting.

Let the free market determine how people want to live.
Getting rid of SFH will just artificially inflate the value of townhomes and condos .

Sellers soliciting offer dates on entry level condos for sale are a disgusting symptom of a dysfunctional housing system and disprove the myth that it's a buyers market.

I'm not sure what is meant by cheap money? You mean interest rates?

Housing prices in Vancouver are driven by offshore money. While everyone touts the various foreign buyers taxes nobody points out how the cash still comes in from astronaut parents who have placed their kids in Canadian schools or secured permanent resident status.

And then there was little bombshell that was ignored by Canadian media:

HSBC Mortgage Fraud: Has It Affected The Housing Affordability Crisis?
�� Last Updated: February 26, 2024
✏️ Written by: Maidina Kadeer, BA
��️ Fact-checked by: Caitlin Wood, BA
HSBC Mortgage Fraud: Has It Affected The Housing Affordability Crisis?

In a startling expose, a whistleblower brought to attention a mortgage fraud scandal involving over 10 HSBC branches in the Toronto area since 2015. This prompted investigations by the Bureau and Fintrac, uncovering a complex money laundering scheme.

The aftermath of this fraud extends beyond the illegal activities, impacting housing prices and leaving both regulators and homebuyers grappling with the consequences of a widespread mortgage fraud scheme.

Though HSBC fired the individuals involved in the money laundering concerns, fraudulent mortgages point to a systemic failure in the banking sector. As millions of Canadians grapple with the persistent housing affordability crisis, the question arises: Can banks be relied upon to conduct thorough due diligence?

he HSBC mortgage fraud unfolded through a series of deceptive practices. Beginning in 2015, more than 10 HSBC branches in the Toronto area were implicated in fraudulent mortgage activities. The whistleblower, identified as D.M., disclosed that HSBC had issued over $500 million in mortgages to foreign buyers who were leveraging fake documents with exaggerated incomes.

This led to an investigation by The Bureau and Fintrac who analyzed over 48,000 transactions during the pandemic. These transactions revealed a dark and complex money laundering scheme orchestrated through the HSBC branches....

https://loanscanada.ca/news/hsbc-mor...ated%20incomes.

Tvisforme · #**1202** Posted **Mar 15, 2024, 6:33 PM**

News out of the US, from the New York Times:

Quote:

Powerful Realtor Group Agrees to Slash Commissions to Settle Lawsuits
The National Association of Realtors will pay $418 million in damages and will amend several rules that housing experts say will drive down housing costs.

The settlement stems from a series of lawsuits and will eliminate the standardized 6% commission in real estate transactions, along with several rule changes:

Quote:

....It bans N.A.R. from establishing any sort of rules that would allow a seller’s agent to set compensation for a buyer’s agent, a practice that critics say has long led to “steering,” in which buyers’ agents direct their clients to pricier homes in a bid to collect a bigger commission check.

And on the online databases used to buy and sell homes, the M.L.S., the settlement requires that any fields displaying broker compensation be eliminated entirely. It also places a blanket ban on the longtime requirement that agents subscribe to multiple listing services in the first place in order to offer or accept compensation for their work....

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/15/r...ettlement.html

Xelebes · #**1203** Posted **Mar 15, 2024, 8:10 PM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by Changing City

I can help - you started me down a rabbit hole. This CMHC site has the Annual data reports back to 1921. (Obviously not in any useful data format, so I copied them one by one). They have starts, completions and under construction at the end of every year.

Starts and completions evened out over the decade are obviously similar. (Only in the 2010s are completions lagging starts a bit - presumably as buildings got taller and projects bigger, so taking longer to build). Here are the decade averages:

In the 1950s it was 115,000 a year, with 68,000 under construction
In the 1960s it was 150,000 a year, with 100,000 under construction
In the 1970s it was 230,000 a year, with 175,000 under construction
In the 1980s it was 180,000 a year, with 105,000 under construction
In the 1990s it was 150,000 a year, with 80,000 under construction
In the 2000s it was 200,000 a year, with 150,000 under construction
In the 2010s it was 200,000 a year, with 218,000 under construction

Peak house starts in the 1950s were in 1958 at 164,000. The 1970s had the most, with 268,000 in 1973 and 273,000 in 1976, but 2021 saw 271,000, so we're there again.

In terms of the numbers under construction, CMHC recently stopped posting data for the whole of Canada, only for CMAs, so the 353,000 under construction I noted earlier is just CMAs. The last 'all of Canada' number I could download was the end of 2022, when it was 378,000 units. That's easily the biggest number, ever, in Canada. It's more than doubled since 2011, when just 175,000 were being built. The previous peaks in the 1970s only saw 200,000 or so under construction.

So it looks like the development industry is genuinely firing on all cylinders, with more under construction than ever before, but they're taking longer to build, in many cases because they're more complex to construct in taller (so slower to complete) towers in many cities.

I prorate this by population to give us a picture of what that kind of construction would look like today. So in 1958 was the peak starts per person.

So the data looks like:

1950s: 0.59 sites/start
1960s: 0.67 sites/start
1970s: 0.76 sites/start
1980s: 0.58 sites/start
1990s: 0.53 sites/start
2000s: 0.75 sites/start
2010s: 1.09 sites/start

ssiguy · #**1204** Posted **Mar 15, 2024, 10:19 PM**

PP does have a solution by putting up for sale THOUSANDS of unneeded gov't lands and buildings in/around our cities and turning them into housing. He would force cities to get building immediately lest they lose infrastructure funding of all types. He would force CMHC to approve applications within 4 months and not doing so would put the managers on the chopping block.

Remember, it is Trudeau who is 100% responsible for the doubling of our housing/rental prices during his tenure. He allowed wholesale foreign buying and when pressured stopped it but having so many loopholes that it is effectively useless. It was Trudeau that opened the floodgates of immigration/TFW/students/refugees/family reunification knowing it would cause a severe housing crisis but viewed such concerns with supreme indifference. He didn't even have a housing plan until last year when it was clear that his plunging in the polls was directly due to our housing crisis and overall unaffordability issues. Marie's 18th century "let them eat cake" has morphed into Trudeau's 21st century, "let them buy a tent". His complete disregard for the suffering of Canadians is a true reflection of his Patrician attitudes.

Now Ottawa is having to spend tens of billion to undue the damage that he has caused. Whether you love Trudeau or hate him does not change the fact that that housing catastrophe is COMPLETELY Trudeau's fault and now Canadians are paying the price for his indifference and arrogance.

Tvisforme · #**1205** Posted **Mar 15, 2024, 11:01 PM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by ssiguy

PP does have a solution by putting up for sale THOUSANDS of unneeded gov't lands and buildings in/around our cities and turning them into housing....

It's not so much a "solution" as it is yet another of Poilievre's glib statements made in search of votes. According to the Directory of Federal Real Property, there are roughly 38 thousand buildings on 20 thousand properties comprising 41 million hectares of land. That's a lot, and of course, there's probably some excess space that could be repurposed. However, once you filter out all the buildings that represent federal presences in thousands of individual towns across the country, the land in remote and inaccessible areas, buildings in places unsuited to residential use, and so on, it quickly becomes clear that Poilievre's "grand plan" is not going to do much at all to help reduce housing costs in the major urban centres. Sure sounds good on the news though.

whatnext · #**1206** Posted **Mar 15, 2024, 11:41 PM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tvisforme

It's not so much a "solution" as it is yet another of Poilievre's glib statements made in search of votes. According to the Directory of Federal Real Property, there are roughly 38 thousand buildings on 20 thousand properties comprising 41 million hectares of land. That's a lot, and of course, there's probably some excess space that could be repurposed. However, once you filter out all the buildings that represent federal presences in thousands of individual towns across the country, the land in remote and inaccessible areas, buildings in places unsuited to residential use, and so on, it quickly becomes clear that Poilievre's "grand plan" is not going to do much at all to help reduce housing costs in the major urban centres. Sure sounds good on the news though.

Glib quotes? Like "the balance will budget itself"?

On that front:

A federal budget two weeks after fiscal year begins – what’s the excuse?
DON DRUMMOND AND WILLIAM ROBSON
SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED MARCH 13, 2024
FOR SUBSCRIBERS

Don Drummond is Stauffer-Dunning fellow at Queen’s University and fellow-in-residence at the C.D. Howe Institute, where William Robson is chief executive officer.

Federal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland has announced that the 2024 federal budget will be delivered on April 16. That is more than two weeks after the April 1 start of the budget year: fiscal 2024-25.

Late federal budgets have become a pattern. The 2023 budget was delivered March 28 – just three days ahead of April 1, and nowhere near early enough for Parliament or anyone else to even consider the fiscal plan before the year started. In both 2022 (April 7) and 2021 (April 19), the government also failed to get the budget out before the new fiscal year began. Go back a year earlier, and the situation was even worse. There was no budget.

It should be clear: Timely budgets with their tax and expenditure plans are good. Late budgets are not. This institutionalization of tardiness is hard to understand. Everybody affected by the annual federal budget – households, businesses, provinces and territories, government departments – should know the effects of the federal budget on their finances before the fiscal year begins so they can plan accordingly.

Budgets presented and passed after the fiscal year has started mean that the government is already spending money before Canadians and their elected representatives have seen the plan.....

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/busi...t-fiscal-year/

urbandreamer · #**1207** Posted **Mar 16, 2024, 2:15 AM**

JT is in control of nothing, as is Make Canada Crap Again PP.

Real estate prices and rents have doubled or tripled all throughout the West.

It's the wealthy lobbiests, builders, corporations and real estate industry who have planned this mass immigration scheme.

GenWhy? · #**1208** Posted **Mar 16, 2024, 2:30 AM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by urbandreamer

JT is in control of nothing, as is Make Canada Crap Again PP.

Real estate prices and rents have doubled or tripled all throughout the West.

It's the wealthy lobbiests, builders, corporations and real estate industry who have planned this mass immigration scheme.

When you artificially restrict a good (housing) it becomes more expensive.

This restriction comes from local voters / homeowners.

As someone who works for developers we've been actively lobbying for a free market for years with little success against homeowners for years.

Truenorth00 · #**1209** Posted **Mar 16, 2024, 3:45 AM**

Anybody who thinks PP will be their saviour on housing should look at Ontario and BC. Ontario has a conservative Premier ignoring most of the market liberalization recommendations made by the Housing Taskforce his government launched. BC has an NDP government that is actually making policy of most of the things recommended in Ontario. I don't think being a conservative, or liberal or dipper actually guarantees a pro-housing position.

casper · #**1210** Posted **Mar 16, 2024, 4:19 AM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by Truenorth00

Anybody who thinks PP will be their saviour on housing should look at Ontario and BC. Ontario has a conservative Premier ignoring most of the market liberalization recommendations made by the Housing Taskforce his government launched. BC has an NDP government that is actually making policy of most of the things recommended in Ontario. I don't think being a conservative, or liberal or dipper actually guarantees a pro-housing position.

Does not matter if it is site-C, new bridges, COVID, or housing. This BC NDP governments tends to do studies, then generally follow through on the recommendations. This government tends to be very systematic and disciplined. It gets very little backlash because of it. While I would have like a more middle of the road political agenda I think they are doing extremely well.

I am not following what is going on in Ontario that closely but I get the impression it is more focused on doing what is going to be popular.

Tvisforme · #**1211** Posted **Mar 16, 2024, 7:14 AM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by whatnext

Glib quotes? Like "the balance will budget itself"...

You're absolutely right, Poilievre's statements should get the same sort of reactions that Trudeau's "budget balance" did. Glad to see you're on board with actively challenging Poilievre's misleading and dishonest claims instead of blindly accepting them.

ssiguy · #**1212** Posted **Mar 17, 2024, 6:11 AM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tvisforme

You're absolutely right, Poilievre's statements should get the same sort of reactions that Trudeau's "budget balance" did. Glad to see you're on board with actively challenging Poilievre's misleading and dishonest claims instead of blindly accepting them.

Most people, including myself, don't love PP or many of his policies but that doesn't change the fact that he couldn't possibly screw up the housing file more than Trudeau has. Seriously, we were already in an affordability crisis and then he decides the only way to remedy the situation is to bring in another 1.2 million people to house. A 5 year old could tell you that is a recipe for disaster and, as shown by memos now made public, he knew it but couldn't have cared less if he tried.

Nite · #**1213** Posted **Mar 17, 2024, 8:35 AM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by ssiguy

Most people, including myself, don't love PP or many of his policies but that doesn't change the fact that he couldn't possibly screw up the housing file more than Trudeau has. Seriously, we were already in an affordability crisis and then he decides the only way to remedy the situation is to bring in another 1.2 million people to house. A 5 year old could tell you that is a recipe for disaster and, as shown by memos now made public, he knew it but couldn't have cared less if he tried.

Your statement don't match up with reality however
here is the last 10 years of average house prices in Canada (until Jan 2024)

https://wowa.ca/reports/canada-housing-market

for Trudeau Prime Ministership (Nov 2015 to Jan 2024) house prices rose: 45% (454k to 659k) not 100% as you claim

The largest increase happened from April 2020 to Feb 2022 (488K to 817K)
During this time Canada took in probably the fewest migrants in its history due to travel restrictions, but interest rates did fall to 0%

The period in which Canada took in record level of migrants, which you are blaming for high house prices, saw house prices fall 24% from 816K to 659K (Feb 2022 to Jan 2024)

PS average hourly ages rose 31% during the Trudeau Prime Ministership as well. ($27.01/hr to $35.54/hr)
while total inflation was 24.5% during the same timeframe

yaletown_fella · #**1214** Posted **Mar 18, 2024, 2:01 PM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by CanSpice

Proof needed please.

If you replace a single $2m SFH with four $1m townhouses, isn't that new housing more affordable?

You're misunderstanding me. Both the $2m SFH and the four townhomes should be allowed without all the costly permits and fees. You don't need to trade one for the other.

I support scrapping the Places to Grow Act/Greenbelt in favor of a free market for housing. Places to Grow is a huge artificial inflator of land value. This is proven when you compare housing prices in Toronto vs Vancouver from 2000-2005, when both had proportionately equal levels of immigration and desirability for work/living. Toronto was much more affordable back then because before the Greenbelt, there was no artificial inhibitor of growth. In the case of Vancouver it was always restricted by the mountains.

I personally prefer townhomes & stacked towns as they use land more efficiently, but I dont want families who would otherwise be in the market for a $2m detached home outbidding me for a stacked townhome because regulations have banned the construction of estate homes.

whatnext · #**1215** Posted **Mar 19, 2024, 12:08 AM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by GenWhy?

When you artificially restrict a good (housing) it becomes more expensive.

This restriction comes from local voters / homeowners.

As someone who works for developers we've been actively lobbying for a free market for years with little success against homeowners for years.

So governments should act against "homeowners" ie. the people who pay them the most taxes? Why not just shut down Justin's runaway immigration train.

GenWhy? · #**1216** Posted **Mar 19, 2024, 1:34 AM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by whatnext

So governments should act against "homeowners" ie. the people who pay them the most taxes? Why not just shut down Justin's runaway immigration train.

What do you mean by "act against"?

whatnext · #**1217** Posted **Mar 19, 2024, 5:17 PM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by GenWhy?

What do you mean by "act against"?

You're original post makes it sound like that's what you're advocating. If you've been lobbying governments for years to do something "against homeowners".

Quote:

Originally Posted by GenWhy?

When you artificially restrict a good (housing) it becomes more expensive.

This restriction comes from local voters / homeowners.

As someone who works for developers we've been actively lobbying for a free market for years with little success against homeowners for years.

GenWhy? · #**1218** Posted **Mar 19, 2024, 5:39 PM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by whatnext

You're original post makes it sound like that's what you're advocating. If you've been lobbying governments for years to do something "against homeowners".

Yes it's worded a bit funny on my end. Hyper localized housing policy, to a large degree, homeowners have prevented a free market for housing - which affects everyone - and I would expect governments to act in the general publics best interest, as we are seeing now.

So I guess governments would be acting against those local homeowners (removing public hearings, rezonings, allowing multiplex outright under a BP), but they would be acting for the public at-large.

GenWhy? · #**1219** Posted **Mar 19, 2024, 5:40 PM**

it would be, how I see it, the government working FOR the general population. More housing, lower prices, shorter commutes, etc.

whatnext · #**1220** Posted **Mar 19, 2024, 6:00 PM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by GenWhy?

Yes it's worded a bit funny on my end. Hyper localized housing policy, to a large degree, homeowners have prevented a free market for housing - which affects everyone - and I would expect governments to act in the general publics best interest, as we are seeing now.

So I guess governments would be acting against those local homeowners (removing public hearings, rezonings, allowing multiplex outright under a BP), but they would be acting for the public at-large.

Again, I question why the government should be taking action to make things less democratic (ie. eliminate public hearings etc). Even more problematic it is punishing those taxpayers and voters who are here now in favour of people the government wants to import.