Some folks on here have been repeating this garbage as well
Housing has skyrocketed due to governments allowing essentially unrestricted purchases by foreign entities and investment groups for the use of investment properties. Not even accounting for money laundering issues, we are watching the rich gobble up all the assets and forcing individuals into situations where they have to rent
That doesn’t explain why prices have held stable outside of agricultural areas. Why would foreigners care that someone happens to produce food next door?
The answer is far more obvious: Dairy and poultry producers are using their government-granted money printers to buy up all the land around urban centres at inflated prices, which has largely forced urban dwellers to compete for what land is already established as being urban, or to go toe to toe with the farmer to try and buy vacant land (which means only the rich can try).
Historically, farmers were poor and couldn’t afford to buy land for more than pennies. Urban areas thereby were able to buy up cheap farmland to sprawl into in order to keep costs affordable, but that has become exceptionally more expensive amid the farmland boom. With the US backing away from farm subsidies since 2007, with a greater focus on market farm stability, farm profitability in Canada has gone up, most notably in the two farm sectors which were given special government assistance to help with those olden days – which have turned into money printers in this new landscape.
You can even map home prices to the desirability of the farmland. Of course, not all farmland is equal. The more attractive the farmland surrounding a given urban area is, the higher the prices homes will be in that urban area.
I think this is a symptom and not the problem itself.
The issue is that residential zoning only allows for single family homes to be built. No mixed use, no apartments/condos. Just a house for one family with a front and back yard. I mean, who even uses their front yard? I used to live in a house like that and I’ve never seen anybody actually use their front yard aside from mowing it. It’s a chore to keep people busy designed during the cold war to prevent people from noticing any commie propaganda or thinking that the establishment as it is might not be the best thing for them. A surprisingly useful HAI video You can build an entire house in the space of a front lawn.
If the zoning restriction didn’t exist, you could build two or three townhouses on a single plot of land, or even an apartment building by combining two plots. We would litterally have more than a million new homes if we simply replaced all the single family houses with low-rise apartments. Make that a mix of mid and high-rises and we can house the entire Canadian population in Toronto or Vancouver.
Despite how dense Toronto seems, there are huge tracks of land that are completely underutilized, and I’m not talking about parks. Leaside Business Park alone is a good hectare and there is almost nothing but one-story buildings, most of which have empty yards not doing anything. This isn’t the only place Toronto (and near the middle of the city at that) has.
Despite how dense Toronto seems
In what way does Toronto seem dense? It is laughably sparse. It struggles to fill 4,000 people per square kilometre. If we look at an actual city, there are over one million people per square kilometre. Even the wannabe cities of the world have 40,000 people per square kilometre. Toronto is a wannabe farmer’s field. Which is no doubt why its people are always calling for the TTC to deploy more tractors.
Which, all of that, is to say that you’re right, but prior to 2007 it didn’t matter because you could just keep sprawling for basically no cost. Until the people of Toronto get past wishing they were farmers, which is unlikely to happen… ever, they will be at the mercy of those who are actually (dairy, poultry) farmers with a government granting them free money. Good luck.
