Each day I receive hundreds—no, thousands!—of emails from readers hungry for more posts and wondering why I haven’t posted in a few months. The explanation is that I have some articles in the hopper and ideas for a lot more, but I’m waiting for all of the data from the 2021 Census to be released so I can incorporate the… Read more »
In a previous post dated August 5, 2020, I compared the percentage of households which are renting to the percentage of workers who use public transit to commute in Ontario’s ten largest cities and ten selected smaller cities. In this post, I add commute duration (measured as the percentage of workers who spend an hour or more commuting to the… Read more »
In this post (a follow-up to my post dated November 4, 2020), I use housing data from the Census and CMHC to separate rentals into purpose-built and non-purpose-built for the GTA’s major cities, adding owner-occupied units. The number of non-purpose-built rentals by type is calculated by subtracting purpose-built rentals from total rentals. The charts below show the results. The most… Read more »
One of the more obscure data points in the Census is what Statistics Canada calls “mobility,” the number of people who moved or didn’t move. In the Census this is measured as the number of people who were living at the same or a different address one year before or five years before, and, if they moved during that period,… Read more »
That’s the question. What’s the answer? Most people when they think of rental housing they think of tall concrete apartment towers clustered in Toronto or Mississauga. It’s true that in most of Ontario’s larger cities multi-unit apartment buildings constitute the bulk of the rental supply, but many cities it’s a much smaller part of the supply than we realize. So… Read more »
Altus Group recently prepared a report for the Building Industry and Land Development Association, or BILD, which you can download the report from the link below: https://bildgta.ca/advocacy/reports According to Altus, the report is intended to “undertake a study of several factors that may be contributing to housing affordability issues in major housing markets across the Greater Toronto Area, such as… Read more »
One thing I’ve been wondering about for months is where exactly landlords think they will go for new tenants if there are mass evictions from apt rental units. This is cold comfort for people facing eviction. But it’s a basic structural issue I’m not sure people and perhaps landlords have fully internalized. When it affects a small subset of renters… Read more »
This post is a follow-up to my recent post (dated September 10th) which looked at Census data which showed what types of dwellings (houses, townhouses, apartments, etc.) Niagara’s households were living in. This post takes a look at similar data but focuses on renter households in an effort to answer the question, What are renters renting? The following tables reproduce… Read more »
How much housing will be needed in the future? That’s the most important question for developers and lenders who want to know if the new housing projects which they’re proposing to build will be needed. Obviously, it’s impossible to answer that question with much accuracy, since by definition the future is impossible to predict. That hasn’t stopped Ontario’s Ministry of… Read more »
We’ve all heard the phrase “too much house,” which we generally understand to refer to people who own or occupy much larger houses than they need. Is this a real phenomenon which is supported statistically, or is it just an urban legend sort of thing? Recently, while preparing a report for a client, I noticed something interesting in a set… Read more »