As someone that lives in Toronto and is moving out in the middle of the month to go back home near family. The idea that Toronto is going to focus on "affordability" is laughable. It's one of the most expensive cities to live in in the world, and the incompetent city council, mayor and all the way up to the provincial government are doing absolutely everything they can to keep it that way - mostly without even realizing it. They have absolutely no clue what they are doing or the basics of market economics.
The federal government is also considering to step in to try and "solve" the problem, and this only means the problem is going to get worse.
I am not joking when I say that when the Canadian real estate markets crash - it is going to be absolutely disastrous for this country as it is basically the tent-pole keeping the entire thing propped up. Our debt to GDP is out of control. Our federal government keeps borrowing and spending on things that are completely inneffective (and bragging they spent the most than any other country). My gloom and doom prediction is our currency is going to be absolutely worthless in two years time.
>>It's one of the most expensive cities to live in in the world, [...]
Toronto was ranked as the 98th most expensive city in the world; not even in the top 50, even though it's the 4th largest city in North America.
Perhaps it's more accurate to say that Toronto and Vancouver are unaffordable and expensive cities for domestic Canadians to live in.
>>Our debt to GDP is out of control. Our federal government keeps borrowing and spending on things that are completely inneffective (and bragging they spent the most than any other country). My gloom and doom prediction is our currency is going to be absolutely worthless in two years time.
Canada's debt-to-GDP is 88%[2], but the USA's debt-to-GDP is 127%[3] and climbing. You remember the ol' saying: when America sneezes, Canada catches a cold. The largest destabilizing factor to Canada's economy is likely to be problems with their largest trading partner.
A cursory look at condo prices on any website* shows that most condos are well below $1M CAD. A 1 bedroom can be had in the downtown core for 600-700k, and significantly lower if you don’t mind commuting from Scarborough or Etobicoke.
Also, interest rates are 1% lower in Canada (albeit on shorter terms), and property taxes are roughly half.
This isn’t to say that homes are “cheap”, but there’s more to the story.
(Aside, I have lived in both cities for a considerable number of years.)
My understanding is that there's a lot of foreign capital getting parked in real estate in Toronto. I believe they were going to implement a vacancy tax similar to Vancouver next year to try to curb that
There’s not a lot of evidence that it’s not the locals creating a bubble because of speculation and lax lending. If you don’t believe me look up how nicely private mortgage debt in Canada correlates with the growth in housing prices in Canadian cities. Canadians hold one of the highest rates of personal debt in the OECD.
That's actually a really good point to ponder about. I've seen a number of news articles about predatory practices among real estate agents (I believe many hog anywhere from 3 properties or more to ride the bubble, there's unethical abuse of dual representation, there's bid secrecy, etc)
No doubt, there's also a great deal of greed and wealth signaling from the general population (especially among upper middle class) as well. Competition around high ranking school areas comes to mind. Not to mention rental properties are pretty much the go-to choice of passive income building that most people go for.
I would bet that if multiple property ownership was penalized by high taxes, real estate prices would come down real fast.
Our of curiosity, is $250+k genuinely a fairly common salary in SF, or are you exaggerating to make a point? Surely that must only account for a very small number of the total residents who work in particular industries.
The US situation is bad but also unique because of guaranteed demand for the dollar for at least the short to medium term. So you can’t really compare the numbers. Other countries don’t control the printing press for the world reserve currency.
>Perhaps it's more accurate to say that Toronto and Vancouver are unaffordable and expensive cities for domestic Canadians to live in.
Yes, the numbers in that first link are in the context of expats. But even with remote work likely becoming more common, it's more meaningful in general to think about cost of living with respect to local salaries because that's what people living in a city are earning.
>>Toronto is often ranked near the top of least affordable cities.
When the only factor is home ownership, which is the focus of URI's study, this is absolutely correct. But then I think back to how absolutely unaffordable housing was across the GTA in the late 80s, after which point people were able to buy back in again when the housing market corrected 40% in most of the GTA, with certain areas of Toronto (not the GTA) dropping by over 50%.
Homeowners generally want housing prices to rise indefinitely, but this is in direct opposition to younger cohorts wanting affordable entry points to home ownership.
The URI study also doesn't mention anything about renting. There are rumbles that Toronto developers have built too many properties (condos primarily), so perhaps an oversupply will benefit both renters and potential homebuyers if/when property prices correct.
Condos built in Toronto are mostly terrible for anyone that’s not single. They’re basically Airbnb speculation boxes in the sky. The city suffers badly from “the missing middle“ problem because of bad zoning. It’s a big part of why I moved away after living there 8 years.
Speculation up in the sky isn't really a problem since a) it's a tax base b) it's not hurting you since it doesn't take up land c) a condo is strictly cheaper than a house on the same land.
If housing is expensive it's because there aren't enough houses or the land is too expensive, and it's true that much of this is due to zoning and similar restrictions like parking minimums.
It is hurting families because mostly only small 1 bedroom apartments get built which are more attractive to Airbnb investors. However zoning is probably the biggest problem, yes. Far too much of the city is zoned for single family housing.
As far as I can tell, the affordable housing movement has been broadly co-opted by developers who leverage grants and incentives to expand their portfolios of rent generating assets.
Regulations which include language like "X% of units must be for renters making <80% AMI" appear positive, but often favor larger-scale, high-capital projects which exacerbate bifurcation in the housing market and drive even more stock towards the rental/high-HOA model, bundled with big-box retail and other commercial real estate nearby.
There is a genuine affordable (and equitable) housing movement, largely built on urban equity-cooperatives and community land trusts, but those promising efforts have been very effectively redirected into boosting opportunities for "master planned" real estate corporations.
> "Regulations which include language like 'X% of units must be for renters making <80% AMI' appear positive, but often favor larger-scale, high-capital projects..."
yes, regulatory capture at work. any time a stipulation is prescriptive rather than (largely) descriptive, it's quite likely a mistargeted regulation. being numerical makes it seem objective, but despite that, it doesn't lead to the implied/explicit intent, which is more equitable housing. it's a token gesture meant to veil the true intent of benefiting, and concentrating power among, cronies. oftentimes, the rationale behind writing regulations this way is to create a clear delineation of what's acceptable and not, but the line is nearly always drawn in the wrong place and is hopelessly incomplete in scope relative to objective.
it's the same class of deception as citing selective (i.e., incomplete) statistics.
what we need is to explicitly encourage human-scale ownership and development everywhere, through every means available, including zoning reform and tax policy.
> what we need is to explicitly encourage human-scale ownership and development everywhere, through every means available, including zoning reform and tax policy.
People focus on the zoning a lot, but it really is the tax policy.
Look around Vancouver and you'll see little three story walk up apartments all over. They stopped making them in 1993 because the incoming Liberal government adopted an incredible deficit slaying austerity approach which was in vogue at the time. The federal government completely got out of participating in housing at all. Beneficial tax policy that encouraged small apartment development was ended and since '93 pretty much the only thing that was built after was condos.
Effectively the current housing affordability crisis in Canada can be traced back to this early 90s austerity decision. Nothing filled the void left by the government pulling away from housing development.
The relatively much more spendy contemporary Liberal government has made lots of noises about housing investment, but they really haven't done much at all to undo the damage of the '93 Liberals.
>>They stopped making them in 1993 because the incoming Liberal government adopted an incredible deficit slaying austerity approach which was in vogue at the time.
What was "in vogue" at the time was a Conservative (sic) Mulroney government routinely outspending revenues resulting in Canada's federal debt crisis in the early 90s[1][2] which helped usher in the Cretian government and Paul Martin's austerity measures. I think the austerity measures helped put Canada back on track.
If you want to avoid rent seeking, then you should advocate for affordable housing that people can afford to buy.
In California, only 1/3rd of the population has enough income to afford a house. San Francisco is much, much worse.
Subsidizing developers to build (likely high-crime) housing so they can extract income from people with < 80% AMI doesn’t sound like a sustainable path to improving income disparity.
Instead, they should subsidize (or at least stop actively blocking) construction of new homes that the average person can afford to purchase, and then put them up for sale, not rent.
> Regulations which include language like "X% of units must be for renters making <80% AMI" appear positive, but often favor larger-scale, high-capital projects which exacerbate bifurcation in the housing market and drive even more stock towards the rental/high-HOA model, bundled with big-box retail and other commercial real estate nearby.
I get that this model favor large-scale, high-capital projects, but, given that it explicitly set's aside X% for the <80% AMI, I don't see how it is also increasing inaffordability?
Doesn't more density + some X% set aside for affordable units generally positive? Maybe we need to play around with that X% better, but what's the alternative?
Inclusive zoning (the X% of a building must be affordable) is good because it's important to mix different economic classes in the same area. It makes the poor people richer and it makes commutes shorter.
When it gets high it's not a giveaway to developers. It's actually a backdoor way to ban housing construction; NIMBYs love to claim they want "real affordable housing" and then set the IZ requirement so high nobody can afford to actually create any.
The Fed Gov and BoC have no choice but to keep interest rates at zero and continue to play with numbers to keep the ponzi going so the whole Country doesn't collapse. You also have to take into consideration that there is no where else to find any work but in the big cities.
The whole damn situation is a mess with no way out. Feel sorry for the kids who finish a degree in STEM from Waterloo or UoT and end up working for 40k a year. They will never be able to afford a house and now all of Southern Ontario is getting pricey. Even houses in Barrie (an hour outside of Toronto) are over 500k.
Article
A down payment on a Toronto house should take 24 years to accumulate
I can’t speak for every industry, but many Bay Area technology employers have set up satellite offices in Toronto and Waterloo and are paying significantly higher wages (note: I represent one of them). This is having a net effect of driving wages up; I see it in the candidates we lose to other companies who are doing the same. Consider looking for a new gig.
Unrelated to the post, at a previous gig, we used Sentry.io. Other than the first 45min wait time when you first hook it up to Sentry's API, it was a smooth experience. How do you like working at Sentry?
I'm not Ben, but I have worked with him for the last 2+ years at Sentry. The whole Toronto office is super positive, and I love working with them every chance I get. Not to derail the thread too much but thanks for giving us a try and hopefully checking out the jobs page Ben linked to :)
Maybe they should consider doing an early cap on property taxes and property values before it becomes like the Bay Area where even if you work at Google you can't afford a house.
There is rent control where I live, but no buy-house control, and there's almost nothing available below $2M USD.
Google doesn't have an office in Toronto but Amazon employees don't make enough to buy houses. It doesn't matter though because most people in Toronto now make more money on real estate appreciation than they make from their jobs. Real estate gains are tax free so a modest 10% home price increase (it was 30% last year) is like earning at least an extra 150k pre tax
That's kind of sad though. It seems people own houses to sell them, instead of owning houses to own them.
I feel like the whole point of owning a house is to customize it into a fairytale home of your dreams and never want to sell it. Otherwise I'd just rent.
You should read Henry George because you have the effect of LVT/property taxes exactly backwards. LVT is better than property taxes though, which have bad effects like sometimes motivating people to destroy their buildings to save on taxes.
>>Feel sorry for the kids who finish a degree in STEM from Waterloo or UoT and end up working for 40k a year.
The starting salary for STEM grads seem to be well above 40K CAD, perhaps even >65K CAD [1].
>>A down payment on a Toronto house should take 24 years to accumulate
When you pair your linked article with the fact that the GTA has experienced net-positive population growth every single year since 1971[1] then it makes a little more sense why property prices have risen and continue to rise inexorably over the years.
I also note that in your linked article a GTA condo downpayment can be accumulated within 4 years at the assumed 10% savings rate for a HHI of $124K CAD, and that's a 2-bedroom condo. If a new grad wants a starter property in the city then perhaps start with the purchase of a studio/1-bed.
>If a new grad wants a starter property in the city then perhaps start with the purchase of a studio/1-bed.
This lacks the history on what people used to be able to purchase, not just in Toronto but in all of Southern Ontario, and now even as far away as the Maritimes.
The purchasing power for the average Canadian to afford things that actually mater (like housing), is dropping like crazy.
Allow me to give you my own anecdote. 12 years ago, I purchased a "starter home" in Waterloo for $249,000 in the neighborhood I grew up in. Detached with a single car garage, on my "new community college grad" salary of 47k/year with 25k of savings that I had.
Today, with say a 60k/year salary, a new grad in my city could afford to live in a small "starter condo", a huge downgrade to ones expectations who wants to raise a family. The standard of living and affordability has objectively dropped for young people today.
Last week a house on my street that is actually smaller than mine just sold for $780,000. I wonder what their mortgage is like?
But according to some people, hey you can still get into the market! Just buy a condo!
Now lets get to the meat of the issue. Why is this happening (and in many Western countries)?. Economic crashes are literally a built in guaranteed feature of our money system, but our government has found a way to kick the can down the road through mass immigration. As long as they can bring in half a million people in every year willing to take on debt, they think they can avoid a market correction, and they aren't wrong, they have avoided a correction for 12 years now thanks to the people they bring in on a daily basis in Canada. But this was not without a great cost, even if they can continue this nonsense for another 10 years, they have destroyed the purchasing power of your average Canadian to afford things that actually matter, like housing.
I would argue that they found a way to avoid a crash by substituting that with a gradual decline of our standard of living. They stole from the young to pay for their pensions and nest eggs to avoid facing the music.
Unfortunately, in many forums you can't bring up the elephant in the room if you are against mass immigration for its many downsides (including wage stagnation), you get denounced as a racist, or you get attacked by people who want this ponzy scheme to continue because after all, the economy now depends on it! They would rather you blamed the city for not building more condos (that noone wants to live in), and NIMBY's. But don't you dare bring up mass immigration.
13 years ago in 2008 the 5 year fixed interest rate on a mortgage was 4.45%. The following year in 2009 it was below 2% because of the great recession.
Assuming you had that lower interest rate, I just want to illustrate that you may have been fortunate to have purchased at the exact best moment to buy property in North America, as home prices hadn’t yet adjusted to the new purchasing power consumers had (in the form of lower interest rates).
Also, unemployment was pretty high at the time, so while the job might seem meagre compared to today, you likely had a significant advantage vs. your underemployed peers in the region.
Looks like I was quoting variable rate figures, and not 5 year fixed interest rates, which were substantially higher than their variable counterparts (7.15% in 2008, 5.79% in 2009).
>>The standard of living and affordability has objectively dropped for young people today. [...] But according to some people, hey you can still get into the market! Just buy a condo!
I remember the frenzy of the '89 housing bubble & early 90's bust especially in Toronto when mortgage interest rates were in the low teens and everybody and their dog was flipping property. The subsequent crash was painful but also allowed new families to get into a more affordable market.
I stand by my comment that it's still possible to buy something for a new family even if it's smaller than what they grew up with. The driver for the reduced affordability is, as you eloquently noted, because of our very liberal immigration policy that allows for continued regional growth coupled with low interest rates.
If you're a homeowner, you want the value of your property to continue to rise. But then this crowds out a younger demographic looking to purchase their first starter properties (condos or houses). We can't have it both ways.
I've lived in both Bay Area and Toronto. Toronto has become absurdly expensive. You can get a 3-4 bedroom modern townhouse in Dublin/Pleasanton for 850K USD. It's common for a senior software engineer to make 200-230K. You can't buy an equivalent housing in Toronto for 850K CAD. Crappy townhouses in Richmond Hill go for 900K - 1M+ and similar housing will be 1.2 - 1.4M. it's also extremely difficult to make 200K+ CAD in Toronto (senior engineers make ~140K). A relative of mine does mortgages so has accurate statistics on how much people make.
(I'm actually immigrating to Toronto later this year.)
I understand your frustrations over immigration policy, and it's certainly not racist to wish for Canadians to enjoy the fruits of Canada. I just want to gently bring up the historical context that you've left out, but of which you are likely aware. ~5% of Canadians are indigenous, and most humans in Canada descend from recent immigrants who came to pursue a higher standard of living. Barring other humans, born in a slightly different time and place, from that same pursuit: doesn't that seem to be in tension with history?
Don’t listen to this guy. I’m Canadian and lived in Toronto for eight years. Toronto housing is expensive because of lax lending, bad zoning, and bad regulations. That’s it, Canadians are to blame for this. For an example Berlin is a similar physical size and population as Toronto, and has similar rate of high immigration, but has a lower cost of living relative to salaries. This is guy may not be racist, but he’s doing the classic lazy thing of blaming newcomers when its really the locals that did this to themselves.
I am blaming our immigration policy, not the "newcomers" as you say. Newcomers are obviously just doing what is best for them personally. Also, more than half of Germany's population rents housing. Most Canadians would not be satisfied with that.
And your still wrong. Too much of Toronto is zoned for single family homes which is the main driver of lack of affordable housing. When you walk around midtown Berlin you don’t see any single detached houses with big front yards. What you see are mid rise apartment blocks that the city of Toronto literally makes illegal to build in large parts of the city. Then you have the federal government that has totally failed to pump the brakes on lending. This is 100% above bad planning by Canadians, stop blaming immigration it’s a lame cop out when the city only has a population density of about 4500 per sq km which is quite a bit on the low side for a major city. Look in the mirror.
Look you can use whatever mental gymnastics you like to insist why we should all be content living in tiny condos and literal commie blocks but as I stated nobody wants to live in that because we have better standards. People want affordable single homes to raise a family. The solution is so absurdly simple yet you grasp at straws to avoid it.
Population growth is too high to meet demand for proper housing. Therefor, the solution is you cut back immigration, within a couple years demand for housing will fall dramatically. But no, you don't want to see prices fall, or you have something to gain with the immigration rate being high.
I suppose you don’t read anything about population demographics in Canada. If you did you’d realize we have a very low birth rate. Without immigration Ontario and Canada will fail, like Italy and Japan we’ll be stuck in economic stagnation and ever increasing debt load, until we can’t pay for basic social services or people are forced to work 80 hour weeks to get by.
When did your family come to Canada? Why do you think you should be the abetter of when it’s full? It’s been growing for 200 years and and at any point people could point to a Canadian city and say it’s full because that’s completely subjective in a country that could easily fit the world’s population.
You’re also completely missing the mark on what I’m saying a increasing density. I’m not talking about shoving people in tiny condos, I’m saying the housing that’s zoned for single detached houses should be zoned to be five story walk ups with beautiful courtyards like London, Paris, or the city I live in now, Amsterdam. These aren’t small condos, they’re large flats that families can live in, it’s not uncommon for families to have multiple floors. You know what people and kids do that don’t have back yards, they walk to a local park and interact with their community, and it make a much healthier and social community. Compared to most European capitals Toronto is a bland shithole, keep your ugly McMansion, keep your ugly car depended suburbs, keep your obesity, and bad food, keep your lame two weeks of vacation where you come to visit European cities you refuse to learn lessons from. Honestly get fucked, I’m over it, people like you are so ignorant it makes me never want to come back to Canada. There, are you happy, Toronto minus one person.
It is not a contradiction and it is not wrong for immigrants themselves to want to lobby for strict new limits on immigration numbers. The rest of your question/argument sounds like an appeal to emotion or guilt.
Why would you expect a city to remain affordable forever? Like if my grandparents bought a home in lower Manhattan I should be able to too?
Cities come and go in desirability and some stay very desirable. Some cities undergo a transformation from swaths of single family homes to nothing but condo towers that cost more than homes.
Toronto is not a world class city like NYC, as much as it wishes it was. Toronto buckling under the weight of immigration numbers is due to the artificial population growth the government has mandated every year since 1988.
We airdrop a population the size of Waterloo region (500-600k) of people into the country every year. They need somewhere to live. I don't think I need to say much more. I am aware that there can be other factors, but this is the (as I said) elephant no one wants to discuss publicly.
The 2020 stats say it's 250k, so not quite 500k/600k. But that's only the nominator, the population is aging and dying, and the birth rate is low, so the fact that 250k immigrants come in per year doesn't actually mean there is a need for more housing.
So we have 300k deaths each year, 350k population growth of which 250k is immigrants, for a 1% YoY population increase.
So you'd expect a need to grow housing by 1% and that would flatten prices, but it doesn't, so I feel there's more to it.
> but this is the (as I said) elephant no one wants to discuss publicly
I just did like 30min of googling, and almost all articles discussed immigration as a factor for Toronto high prices. So I'm not sure it's an elephant, it just doesn't seem like the simple explanation people want it to be. It isn't obvious at all that just lowering the number of immigrants the country accepts per year would have a drastic impact on Toronto prices. It seems there's many other factors at play. And you also need to consider all the other impact to the overall economy that lowering the number of migrants would have as well.
I think people just don't really know, it's a hard problem, there's no clear solution, and so no one can come up with actionable remediations.
One thing that I saw which might be a bigger elephant is the fact that old people don't downgrade, they stay occupying the single family residence they've owned for their entire retirement and end of life. Making no room for others. When they most likely no longer take advantage of the city or the extra space afforded by their home, and that limits the pool of homes dramatically. Especially considering Toronto has issues building more since land is scarce, and taxes are high for construction + zoning. I feel the thought was always that when you retire, you cash out your Toronto home, and downsize somewhere else cheaper, making room for others in Toronto, but this doesn't seem to be happening. And this is compounded with life expectancy growing year over year.
Keep in mind that your numbers do not include international students as an immigration pathway and the number of people here on 10 year residency which can include "temporary" foreign workers. For example in 2019 there were 640k international students in the country, a significant percentage of them will also choose to stay here or are here on 10 year visas and they are not counted in the stats you gathered. There are an additional 550,000 TFWs here, many on long term visas. Again, not counted in your stats, nor are illegals.
The government also obfuscates the number of foreign buyers of housing because it only takes 6 months to gain permanent residency, and those with permanent residency are not counted as foreign buyers.
Saying "we just don't really know", and "its a hard problem" is troubling to me, its basically saying that we shouldn't bother getting to the root of the issue because you'd rather we didn't. So far with your stats that you googled, the one possible cause you offer is that elderly people might be holding onto their homes. Really?? Not, for example, speculators who can capitalize on the fact that we have guaranteed, consistent, artificial, foreign population growth since the 1980's? And why was this done? The conservative party ramped up immigration to gain favor of the immigrant voting block, and all other parties adopted the same approach.
I'm interested in real facts, thesis, explanations with substance.
There seem to be many variables whose correlations and effects are not well understood. You claim you've figured it out, that the only effect of increased housing price in the Toronto metro is simply due to migrants, foreign students and foreign investors. Okay, well I'm not against that explanation, but you got to back it up with something. Otherwise it's as good as any other, such as what I pointed too, the large number of single family unit being held by the retired or soon to be retired boomer generation.
My personal opinion, neither are the whole equation, the market of housing is complex, and I think we're far from understanding it, which is why there are simply no cities with landlocked and high populations that have figured out how to slow prices and make housing affordable yet.
But I'm totally willing to hear out anyone whose done some deep analysis and got some good thesis around it.
Personally, I wish politics allowed for testing policies and let people experiment with them a little more loosely without worry of saying ok this failed we're rolling it back and trying something else. If that was the case, I think it be curious to try something like stop taking migrants for a year and measure impact. Honestly the migrant argument is always being brought up, so if anything, it would confirm or deny more clearly that variable, and we could hopefully move on.
Also, you did get me curious into the data, but to be honest, the stats are hard to fully get clarity on what they include and do not. Like there are 600k foreign students, but that's the absolute total it seems, not a year over year increase. And students stay for a while, so it's not like each year there are 600k new students, it's often the same returning students. So we'd need to look at the year over year increase.
Finally, with these type of things, the flip side must also be considered. Based here: https://www.international.gc.ca/education/report-rapport/imp.... foreign students create 80k jobs in Ontario and provide substantial income to the local government. So that would need to be accounted as well if say we decided to restrict their numbers further.
The solution is so simple, our population growth rate is too high relative to housing production, so the quickest, most immediate and obvious solution is to reduce immigration significantly. Within a couple years you will see housing demand fall and with it, prices! This isn't rocket science. And our economy must be able to sustain itself on a steady state population or we have a serious structural problem. You can still have immigration, but it must not be detrimental to the people living here.
> The solution is so simple, our population growth rate is too high relative to housing production, so the quickest, most immediate and obvious solution is to reduce immigration significantly. Within a couple years you will see housing demand fall and with it, prices
From my perspective, your rationale is a logical fallacy of the single cause.
If you're not familiar with it, I recommend reading:
Now what happens with this fallacy isn't that you're for sure wrong, but that you have determined for sure that you are right, yet there are multiple probable cause at play here, but you single one out and attribute that one as a sufficient cause without justification.
And personally, even if it was the single simple cause of high house prices in the Toronto metro, you still haven't addressed the opportunity cost. We don't have immigration out of generosity, most migrants are selected through a thorough application process, and we pull in people with labor skill that we need, or with wealth that we want them to bring over. This is true of foreign investors and students as well. There are reasons why we do so, because most analyst see it as a net positive for our economy. I'm with you where I would like our economy to sustain itself without any external investment, but what I would like and reality are two different things. Right now it doesn't seem like it would. So what are we going to do about that? If you cut out foreign investment, immigration and students you need a strategy for that or we'll just take a huge hit financially.
Also, keep in mind we have a decreasing workforce. Based on this article https://thoughtleadership.rbc.com/from-a-baby-boom-to-a-reti... the foreign workforce we're taking in isn't enough to fill the workforce gap we have due to an aging population. We're losing workers, this isn't steady state. That's why we ramped up immigration:
> For Canada as a whole, the challenge is to become more competitive even as we lose these established workers. Immigration is helping to grow our talent pool. We welcomed more than 300,000 new immigrants last year, about 60% of whom are skilled workers. The immigration minister has described this as “the new normal.” Yet it still doesn’t cover the annual retirement rate, so we’re going to have to get more creative.
It's going to be hard to manage without immigration, we just didn't have enough kids, and we didn't educate, teach and train our kids properly to be able to replace our workforce in a steady state. That's the other side of the problem. We take a few refugees as a feel good pat on the back, but the truth is, most immigration we take in is so that we can sustain our workforce, keep our businesses competitive and prevent our economy from crashing down. At least, that's the reason why we do so. Now maybe that's also a wrong conclusion, maybe there is another way, maybe people overblow the impact of not taking immigrants would have to our economy, but economics is hard, figuring out what is best for the economy isn't simple, in my opinion at least.
I don't disagree that this is a possible hypothesis, but I have a problem with weasel words like "typically". Is this the case in Toronto? And is it the case that it is in large enough quantity and that they have the money to put the kind of pressure to single handily raise the prices of housing to the levels we have today?
That this contributes slightly to the the high prices of some specific neighborhoods in Toronto sounds reasonable to me. But that it is the single cause of prices in the entire Toronto metro, or that without it the prices would halve themselves accross the board, I just don't feel convinced of. The data doesn't add up. There's clearly a lot more at play here.
> Research in Canada has shown that the overall impact of immigration on housing markets is modest at best in most cases. The effect could be substantial in the case of wealthier immigrants destined to select neighbourhoods. The more important realization is that an absence of immigration would result in a declining population and ageing of the workforce, which could have a much larger negative impact on Canadian housing markets.
I'm not saying that this conclusion is the right one, but I just feel it's actually a much more difficult ECON problem, and cause/effect and figuring out what is best overall is non trivial, and I don't know if wealthy immigrants and high-paid worker immigrants are the simple straightforward explanation we'd all want it to be.
If you're posting "Econ 101" or "supply and demand" in response to a question about people, whether it's labor or immigration, it means you're getting the wrong result. People who do this always forget to consider both supply and demand instead of just the one that makes things look worse.
(Immigrants are a positive demand shock because they increase your customer base.)
Canada is crazily underpopulated compared to the UK for example - which is about the geographic size of.. what, Ontario alone maybe, but has double the population of all of Canada.
So immigration is actively encouraged, which is perhaps unique among developed nations (depending only on our definition of 'actively encouraged' I suppose) which is probably 'correct' and could be massive for GDP, but.. shouldn't there also be deliberate attempts to build new cities? My outsider's limited perspective is that it seems to be mostly left to natural progress, which means.. immigrants gravitate towards Vancouver & Toronto, and everywhere that exists just gets slightly bigger and much more expensive.
Why isn't there massive intentional city building to go along with it?
I would guess because most of the land in this country is not arable (fertile) or hospitable, so even though we have lots of land, only the southern strip is worth populating.
I don't think that's the reason. Barrie has a ton of farmland and it's just a hop away from Toronto. It's just that there's nobody incentivizing companies to put down headquarters in these smaller municipalities.
Several decades ago, north of Steeles was prairies and farmlands. The IBM headquarters was moved to that area in the 80s. CGI headquartered in Markham as well. Nowadays there are condos going up all over the place along the 407 and hwy 7.
If more companies did this instead of coveting to be as near union Station as possible, I believe the metropolitan area could still expand horizontally a great deal more before ever coming anywhere near permafrost.
It doesn't even take that much willpower either. Milton, for example, could easily attract companies by offering tax breaks. A lot of talent already commutes from there.
Milton doesn't necessarily have more capacity or willpower to offer tax breaks than Toronto, and the incentives for companies are stacked.
Perhaps decades ago I'd be content with commuting out to the middle of nowhere by car to work for a large company as a lifelong employee. Perhaps those circumstances still exist, but there is a comparatively large number of people living downtown that won't touch transit-poor suburb offices with a 10-pole stick. If you're setting up shop in the suburbs, you will get a pick of only suburb residents.
On the other hand, if you're setting up shop in downtown, you get a pick of both downtown and suburb dwellers. The latter will drive anyway, so it matters comparatively little whether you drive from Mississauga to Milton or from Mississauga to Toronto. Plus a lot of people can find a GO station somewhere and get downtown that way. Good luck commuting to a Milton campus by train from Markham.
Furthermore, with Toronto in the centre of the population bell curve, it's not even just downtown employees vs. suburb employees. It's also that by building on one edge of the municipal area, you will have a harder time to attract people from the other edge. Mississauga to Milton isn't too bad, Ajax to Milton is twice the distance vs. to downtown Toronto.
So in the end, it all goes back to making a choice between locations with relatively broad appeal and a lot of competition, or niche locations that work great for a considerably lower potential selection of employees. Large international companies are finding that they are competitive enough to win employees in the downtown job market while still benefiting from the broad base of talent available there. You'd have to give them unprofitably high tax breaks to make them give up their talent pool.
Smaller shops may try out the niche strategy in the suburbs and may find it to work well for their purposes. But I guess those were not the target of your call for suburban HQs. They're also not at a size at which Milton would consider giving out tax breaks.
There can always be exceptions, although as a general tendency the house is stacked against suburb HQs. Maybe with a drawn-out WFH trend this could change, but for now I still don't see it happening.
> Maybe with a drawn-out WFH trend this could change
What's interesting is that the two companies I mentioned are both very large (offices in multiple cities) and don't have butts-in-seat cultures (people already worked from home a lot even pre-pandemic).
The point about Ajax to Milton being a very long commute is quite valid though Ajax could also try to attract companies of its own. The go train point is fair, but not critical IMHO. People can and do move. And for better or for worse, these municipalities do have very strong car cultures as of today. Living in Scarborough to commute to Markham is a pain in the neck by public transit, but trivial by car (and consider that downtown traffic and parking story isn't great compared to free parking virtually everywhere in Markham, so there's some amount of mutual exclusion there). Also IMHO, the infrastructure follows demand. Some stretches of Hwy 7 have public transit lines now; there's clearly a desire to build out a local scene that isn't centered around downtown Toronto.
I think defending the idea of cramming downtown more and more is more based on status quo, and ultimately it's not going to be sustainable. Downtown Toronto has already grown upwards quite a bit; at the pace condos are going up, it's eventually going to run out of parking lots to convert to vertical space. I think developing new talent-attracting centers is going to be important regardless; better to get the ball going before it becomes an unavoidable necessity. </two-cents>
>>What would that growth be after 25 years of constant 1% growth/year?
1.01^25 = 1.282 or 28.2% growth. Sounds like a good bet to try to grow economic activity in the region if the immigrants are typically educated and are net-positive contributors.
Canada's total fertility rate (TFR) is 1.47[1] which is well below the natural replacement rate of 2.1. I'm not blindly advocating that we grow at any cost, but it's important to note that as bad as the job situation seems to be across the country today, it feels like it would be much worse if our population continues to shrink indefinitely.
Japan's stagnation over the past couple of decades seems to be one possible path that would have awaited us if Canada hadn't take steps to increase the population.
And if 28% population growth over 25 years results in insane housing affordability for younger generations, why are you still fine with that? I really don't understand this argument. You value total population growth and total economic growth over standard of living? Because with current trends it should be obscenely obvious that this approach isn't working.
Population growth (at a much lower more sustainable rate) can be incentivized by literally paying people more money to have Children. And did it occur to you that perhaps our low birthrate has something to do with the increasing lack of opportunity to improve in this country?
Finally, I am actually against the concept that the country must have constant population growth. Population growth comes in natural waves where some decades it will be high, and in others it will be low. The drop in birthrates many believe will cause a "sky to fall" scenario, which simply isn't true. It is parasitic to expect and demand constant population growth, especially at the cost of people's standard of living.
>>Population growth [...] can be incentivized by literally paying people more money to have Children.
Some countries tried this approach with mixed results.[1] Given that we're both worried about the debt-to-GDP (i.e. profligate deficit spending by the federal and some provincial governments) I think the budgets are better spent attracting immigrants with skills, education and in many cases capital assets they bring to the country rather than baby bonuses.
Quebec still pays a baby bonus[2] but a Stats Canada study[3] showed their fertility rate over four decades was only 1.59 vs. Ontario's 1.46 -- still well below a steady-state no-growth replacement rate of 2.1.
>>And did it occur to you that perhaps our low birthrate has something to do with the increasing lack of opportunity to improve in this country?
This plays a role, but a lot of economic thinking (rightly or wrongly) finds a strong correlation between how developed a country is and declining TFRs even when there is a boom period of economic growth and opportunity.[4][5][6]
I am not sure what you are showing other than that you believe our population growth from mass immigration needs to continue despite the negative outcomes.
In 1985 our population was 25 million, and today it is now 38 million. Most of that population growth can be attributed to mass immigration. But we have no new cities or towns. We are simply crowding ourselves out of the minimal amount of cities and arable land along a southern strip that we can inhabit.
Also I don't think Japan is a negative example of population decline. They are an example of a country being able to maintain its standard of living, productivity, and its economy despite a stagnant population.
I strongly believe that if population growth through mass immigration continues (and mostly likely will), standards will continue to worsen across most of the country.
>>I am not sure what you are showing other than that you believe our population growth from mass immigration needs to continue despite the negative outcomes.
Perhaps to put a more human perspective, I graduated with a STEM degree during a recession and it was horrible. Many classmates had their careers set back by many years.
If I have to choose again between prosperity and economic growth that seems to be strongly correlated with a growing and educated population via immigration vs. affordable housing coupled with few economics opportunities, I'll choose the first option almost every time.
There's no point being able to afford housing if there are no economic opportunities in the area. Detroit at its peak in the 1950s had a population of 1.8M and was the 5th largest city in America, but is now a shadow of its former glory due to various factors and it's population only 680K (37% of its peak). Incidentally, nearby Windsor seems to have experienced very gradual population growth (less than Toronto) but its economic prospects still look pretty bleak.
It seems like you believe something like that could never happen to Toronto because the Golden Horseshoe is one of the few habitable places to live in Canada, in which case we'll just have to agree to disagree on this counterfactual.
You are resting your pov on the assumption that more people = more and better jobs. This isn't necessarily true if there is an oversupply of workers to employers.
"A down payment on a Toronto house should take 24 years to accumulate", reading the article this seems to be based on a severe case of dyscalculia. If the apartment costs 1 million and you want to save until you have 6% (which is 60k), and you only save 10% of your annual 170k salary, meaning you save 17k per year so after 3 years plus you have the down-payment. In addition to proper math one also should probably save a bit more per year.
So, 23 years instead of 24? Or 3.5 years instead of 3? Your correction without conclusion doesn’t seem helpful in deciding which calculation is least wrong.
The math is $1,000,000 is the average price of a house in Toronto[1]. You usually need 20% down for a house at $1M or more[2]. Therefore you need $200,000 downpayment, which at $11K / year is about 18 years, assuming no compounding (which at least today is basically the case currently in Canada with interest rates where they are).
It should be noted though that it is pretty rare to reach $175K salary in the GTA before turning 30 (Average household income in Toronto is sub $100K[3]). Therefore for the majority of people it will take more than 18 years to build up that down-payment, which could be where the number in the article came from.
Actually if you really want to save 60k with a net annual salary of 111k, you could do it in prob 2 years (cancel you Amazon account). Ard 6,500 CAD per month should be enough to live by, shouldn't it.
Not sure where you got the numbers but to buy a 1m condo in Toronto would require closer to 250k not 60k. And that isn’t taking into consideration the condo will also be up 8-10% next year.
I don't think you can get a mortgage with a 6% downpayment anymore. Canadian real estate is a scam. Banks would lend to anyone with a 5% downpayment. The mortgages are insured by the government (CMHC), so essentially all the taxpayers are on the hook if the real estate market implodes. Banks will be fine though as usual.
Anything over a million requires a 20% down payment. Also, prices doubled over the last 5 years so if trends continue then a million dollar home today will take a 400k down payment if it takes 5 years to save
"Past performance is no guarantee of future results"
The housing market can only grow as far as people are willing and able to pay for. Sure, you may have a few international investors distorting the picture, but for the wider masses of homes you still need a strong local base to prop up the average price.
My impression is that in Toronto, we went from a market that's affordable enough for lower-to-mid-income households to a market that's only affordable to high-income households. Apparently there are still enough people to finance this. But with another doubling of prices vs. salaries, I feel like even high earners wouldn't be able to buy in en masse, and that's where there's a limit to price growth. Not sure about the exact number, but we're probably not far off from it at this point.
There's also the issue with interest rates, which may be able to fall a little further and dip into negative territory when the next regression comes, but we probably won't be able to replicate the decrease in rates over the last 10 to 30 years. And lower rates are really what drove up housing prices in the recent past.
Of course, if companies start to approach Bay Area salaries, we'll raise the price growth limit as well. Personally, I don't worry too much about housing options for software developers and more about the gap between us and the low-wage retail, restaurant, underpaid or underemployed rest of the city. Who cares about home ownership when your friends are moving back to their parents in the prairies.
I understand what your saying and it would be correct if prices were stable. The problem is that prices increase so rapidly and there is severe stagnation in salaries that you can't keep up. In OCT 2019 a Condo in a CO-OP I was looking at was selling for 350k. By Jan 2020 they were selling for 500k. It is not unusual for your 1-2 million dollar house to go up by 10-20 % a year.
> You also have to take into consideration that there is no where else to find any work but in the big cities.
Where does that idea come from? Even before COVID-19 the job data was indicating that the hottest job markets were in (certain) small town/rural areas and that gap widened further once COVID-19 hit. The big city, especially Toronto with it being on lockdown for many months now, is where you're more likely to struggle to find work.
However, with all the people leaving the cities(it was an issue even before current 'work at home' situation, but even greater now) they push out local buyers.
Wages outside the cities have stayed fairly stagnant(asides min. wage). And buyers simply can't compete with 'big money' coming from people having sold their property in a city.
A quick glance at this makes one woozy. It feels after the '08 crisis just about everyone lost their lunch. However this modern crisis, it feels like upperclass got out ahead while lower classes simply lost.
https://img.take-profit.org/graphs/indicators/money-supply-m...
> The whole damn situation is a mess with no way out.
I think there are definitely ways out, just not ones that please everyone involved.
I for one don't even understand what Toronto as a city does (I've lived here for 20+ years).
What valuable services does Toronto provide? I see bank skyscrapers downtown, some tourist attractions and a whole lot of people sitting in offices that need not be downtown, doing dubious work that largely need not be done or that can be automated with a bit of effort.
Am I way off here? For me, it's not just real estate that's gone mad, it's the world economy that enables this crazy existence of cities that produce nothing and yet millions of people live in them.
That's been my impression as well, but it feels like a terribly inefficient setup.
It's almost like trying to write software with every member of the team spending 9/10 of their time jockeying for power, with the product being an afterthought no one gives much credence to.
That's what living has felt like thus far - people are completely engulfed in making sure they get theirs (work at FAANG on these forums), followed by making sure their kids get theirs. At some point, there's got to be someone who says hey, you know this rat race is human made and we can totally try something else right?
These same kids can come to the United States and get paid decently with a currency that is 25% more valuable and generally lower taxes (also look at Chicago vs Toronto condo prices...), that is how a government creates a brain drain of young professionals.
The entire concept of "affordable" housing makes no sense when even people with average incomes struggle to afford a decent quality of life. The government acts like people who only make 50-60k or less are middle class, but they don't even make enough to rent without roommates right now. Charity prices for minimum wage workers should be the last thing on their mind.
The Canadian government is working as hard as they can to divide the country into owners who have homes that make more money than they do, and a permanent underclass of renters that can't possibly catch up with the price increases no matter how much of their money they save. Canada (or at least Southern Ontario and BC) is at a point where being born 5-10 years earlier is a bigger quality of life difference than the difference choosing to be a customer service worker or a lawyer.
Toronto homes were up 30% through 2020. They doubled in the 5 years before that. Being born 5 years earlier is the difference between renting with roommates forever, and being a home owning real estate millionaire. It's going to start creating really weird social dynamics soon.
Some cities do have good governments and high popularity ratings, to the point where politicians get fairly re-elected for decades straight. Mississauga (part of the GTA) is apparently one of them, because Hazel Mccallion served as mayor for 36 years straight and only stopped because she was 93. I'm not exactly sure why she was so popular (I'm not from there), but her endorsement is still mayor 6 years later, so they must be doing something right.
Is it really that these cities are poorly managed or just that everyone feels entitled to live in the most expensive and desirable places? I don’t get the point of building up more - it’s just going to induce more demand (a common argument used by urbanists when it comes to road infrastructure). The real fix is that people need to spread out, and stop feeling like there are only two places to live in across such a large land. But no one wants to hear that they’re not entitled to have the exact job/city/pricing/conditions they feel they deserve.
>(a common argument used by urbanists when it comes to road infrastructure)
This just proves that you don't know how housing works. I'm not even talking about the market itself. I'm just talking about the concept of being allowed to live in a building for money. You have to pay rent to live in a house/apartment. Alternatively you pay a mortgage or you buy the house outright.
None of this applies to road infrastructure, you don't pay toll to use a wider road. It's a direct subsidy to people who like driving. You would have to be extremely stupid to not understand that wider roads will lead to more driving. There is nothing preventing you from using public infrastructure wastefully precisely because it's free. Free suffers from tragedy of commons, everyone knows that.
If you use housing wastefully like by keeping it vacant you personally pay for this loss yourself. You're on the hook for your own behavior. People also get to decide whether they want denser apartments meanwhile the city planner forces road construction upon you whether your neighborhood really needs it or not.
> People also get to decide whether they want denser apartments meanwhile the city planner forces road construction upon you whether your neighborhood really needs it or not.
This isn't really right, you're confusing 60s style city planning with the modern approach. 60s style "urban renewal" built a lot of freeways everywhere without asking and destroyed many poor neighborhoods. This caused a backlash and the start of urban environmental activism (e.g. SF getting rid of the Embarcadero highway), and urban planning switched to the exact opposite approach it uses now, which is to never do anything without 5000 community meetings.
The result of this is… nothing ever happens, because the only people who show up to community meetings are retirees who don't want anything to change; nobody else has any free time. These people are less against roads than they are against houses though, because they mostly have no opinions other than hating traffic and liking free parking.
In Seattle it’s the opposite. Retirees are a minority at these meetings. Young urban or leftist activists are the majority, for example socialist housing advocates and homelessness advocates. They are well organized, seemingly have tons of time (potentially jobless?), and are aggressive, often staging protests outside city hall hearings and ensuring anyone else is shouted down. In many cases no one else is able to sign up on time to even speak, because the organizations these activists belong to are very disciplined about brigading the sign up page right on time. And who’s missing? The middle group - people with families or jobs.
No one votes in municipal elections. It's what, a 25% participation rate? Cities like Toronto are run by a collection of special interest groups evenly divided into the developer-backed and BANANA-activist cliques, resulting in decades of deadlock.
Isn't it the case everywhere in the world, in the post 2008 crisis world, to have society's prosperity tied directly to the real estate bubble? Most exacerbated in metro areas.
Only the most stupid politicians would want to kill the peoples' prosperity by popping the bubble, wouldn't they?
I don't think it's just a Canadian thing, I do live in Toronto and I do hear this rant all the time - however, I also heard this exact same rant when I lived in NYC, Seoul, Edinburgh.
There are literally thousands of threads that repeat the same arguments over and over. The original poster may as well be quoting any of them without any new insight into the economics behind it.
Once you’ve been on reddit for a while, you realize how pointless it is to engage in these discussions since people only bring in their emotions and not much data.
Of 3 million residents, maybe a few thousand - at most - will be full-time politically committed and active.
The problem isn't the numbers, it's breaking into the patronage and power networks. That's not a numbers game. It's a relationship, influence, and networking game. And some elements will be corrupt, while others will be about carefully cultivated appearance management.
We were so close to having ranked ballots for Toronto which is exactly what we need to improve accountabilituy, but Dougie scrapped that for all Ontario cities. Hopefully we'll get things back on track. https://www.unlockdemocracy.ca/123ontariohttps://www.rabit.ca/
Becoming actively involved in politics is a quixotic endeavour with a high personal cost and very low chances of success. Moving out has much lower cost and much higher chances of solving your problem.
Thank goodness some people get into politics anyway, but it is not a rational choice for a utility-maximizing actor.
It's actually not hard to get into local politics and you can certainly get things done. There's not a lot of competition or money involved and most people haven't figured out you can do it yet. Mainly what happens is older people will scream at you when you say you want a bike lane.
It does take a lot of patience though; you won't get much done in the first year or two.
Forgive my naivete but yes, that's how change happens?
If we look at social movements of the past century, they weren't easy on the members but many of them were successful in bringing about change.
I don't know when it became fashionable to only do things that guarantee success within your lifetime and openly dismiss any other way of life but that's not how people who actually make a difference live.
It's a million times easier to just move away than it is to change anything about a global problem in a city with millions of people. Making a difference doesn't solve personal problems.
Toronto has a history of planning to do something with its waterfront (Port Lands / Quayside etc), and then never enacting those plans due to short-term politics vs actual vision. This is just more of the same.
This article is reading far too much into Google. I suppose it is the trend to get eyeballs by hating on tech giants.
(For those not in the know - Rob Ford was a former mayor of Toronto, whom was not known for being a particularly smart or nice person; Rob Ford died a few years ago. Doug Ford is his brother, and is the current Premier of Ontario. Doug is definitively less of an embarrassment, but only "less".)
Planners think the problem is a lack of planning, but the things that make the city great are the unplanned ones. Most desirable places in the city are the ones that were mostly left alone. It has become a city of busybodies and corrupt developers. The growth in Toronto is going to come from foreign capital flight, not endogenous growth, and it these days it might as well be an extended international airport where people and capital just pass through. We should rename it Greater Pearson.
The planning we have today has been anti-restaurant, anti-patio, anti-car, anti-nightlife, and anti-street-life. Street level retail is dominated by money laundering operations run out of nail salons, massage parlours, and tattoo shops, and the rents are so expensive it's too much risk to start something unique, so we get a bunch of overcapitalized global franchises on every corner. The condos are just cells masquerading as display cases for shallow consumer lifestyles for people who won't have kids.
The best possible solution to the waterfront would be to fence it off and leave a few thousand storage containers for people find and inhabit, and in 10 years you will have a real local culture based on an equilibrium of desire.
This is a city with real people in it, not a new gadget Google can throw out of the window like half of its projects two years later.
When it comes to the physical environment of people 'untested' in particular of the tech sector variety is a very legitimate criticism in an of itself.
It may be the point for Google, but not for Toronto citizens, who surely want a better city more than they want to be a science experiment. I'd say the usage is purposeful and correct.
This is still missing the point. The sentence is about Toronto's current priorities. While the world surely benefits from guinea pigs, any individual guinea pig may not want to be one.
Nothing wrong with "testing" imho. But like in any grand real-world experiment -- except tech, which has split from science in terms of ethics norms, perhaps in its own meta-experiment of sorts -- in experiments, the public should have ability to consent or withhold consent to be tested on. The Sidewalk Toronto public consultations did not have a way to say "no" and withhold consent.
The consultation was of the format of "getting to yes", which is all-too-common but the low bar for public consultations. It's the sort that property developers run hand-in-hand with cities who really want to just build something. Initiatives running meaningful and fair public consultations don't do that.
tl;dr - The fact that there was no lever to decline to participate was a major criticism of the whole effort.
The point is to improve our city and its residents' quality of life, actually.
Edit for clarity: This was a project _of the city of Toronto_. It is _only incidentally_ an Alphabet project _as well_. The City of Toronto has no fiduciary obligation to Alphabet's shareholders.
This was a big point of its critics: the City was ostensibly a partner, but had very poor literacy and so Sidewalk Labs was essentially taking lead. When the City did seek their own third-party supports, they naively sought only supportive tech partners. There were whole classes of consultants they never engaged with, as they were naively focussed on sealing the deal.
They lacked certain diversity of views that would have allowed them to better see where this plan was flawed. They got caught up in their good intentions.
“To bet the farm on technology that redesigns our entire streets and relies on apps and sensors doesn’t really jive with how human beings actually use public spaces – and how they want to live in cities.”
I'd take issue with "betting the farm". Toronto proper is, per Wikipedia 243.32 sq mi, and the land in question totals 12 acres. Granted, Google may not have been the best partner but foregoing the opportunity to build a technology centered city seems like a lost chance to determine whether or not that particular form of architecture is viable - not only for Toronto for other cities as well. A fear of failure and a fear to experiment will end up limiting future horizons.
“We’re often easily distracted by the idea of something new and flashy, but then we learn it’s quite hard to deliver on those promises”
From one new and flashy fad to the next. In 10 years, when this plan fails, they will point out that they “learn it’s quite hard to deliver on those promises”:
“Instead, the new plan centres on affordability, low-carbon design and an emphasis on local and minority-owned businesses.”
Vancouver and Toronto really suffer because they're the warmest parts of a huge cold country and everyone wants to live there. Maybe global warming will mean more people will want to live further North or inland. Ideally the government would try harder like not tax people who live in smaller cities.
Let me start with the reminder that global warming means wider, less predictable swings. Not just warmer weather.
But more to the point, taxing people less doesn't always help. Alberta, with it's no provincial sales tax, is a place I'm leaving for the exact reason that there's no money for infrastructure or services.
Without taxes there are no backstops for me to fall back on (like a robust transit system). To me, that's more financial insecurity, not more.
Selective lowering of taxes doesn't imply less money for infrastructure for the affected areas. Gov could (should imo) tax big cities more to develop underdeveloped cities.
The Federal government will assist with highway and road maintenance, but they are technically and legally the responsibility of the provinces and territories [0]
As Alberta collects less tax revenue (in PST & GST) than several other provinces [1], they have less available to spend on infrastructure. My life is made worse (through rock chips and potholes) due to the government of Alberta not collecting more taxes.
While you're right the feds could make up the difference, that seems extraordinarily unlikely - their argument, to my knowledge, has always been that provinces should help themselves (that is, collect tax revenue approximately equal to the other provinces) before demanding more from equalization payments. I would assume they'd take a similar stance regarding other spending.
Please correct me if I've misunderstood or assumed incorrectly though :)
Isn't this the issue then? Assuming a north province can have taxes equal to e.g. BC and Ontario seems erroneous. What's the incentive in living in harsher climate, less populated area?
Toronto needs to build more housing, period. It doesn't need to be "smart", it doesn't need to be "iconic", there just needs to be a lot of it and it needs to be close to amenities and jobs. As far as I can tell, the reason this is so difficult is a combination of powerful people making boatloads of money off the restricted supply, and inertia in favour of the low-density zoning that covers most of the city.
It is also unhelpful that transit in Toronto is packed to the gills, and so outer areas that are on a transit line that could also take development are basically full.
I will believe that the hemming and hawing over whatever the Ontario Line/Downtown Relief Line is going to be is over when there are shovels in the ground, but until then, Line 1 is packed to the gills, and the future extensions north are not helping.
When politicians say "people-centred vision", they really mean "lobbyist and special interest group centred vision". To them, "people" just means "whoever shouts the loudest".
Most of the work of good public consultation facilitators is (1) stopping those loud/frustrated/opinionated/entrenched people from distorting process, and (2) allowing many people to feel heard. (This is in addition to, of course, the more obvious: actually integrating that feedback, repeating it back, and acting on it.)
Perhaps surprisingly with (2), public consultations are sometimes almost like public therapy -- allowing people to feel heard so they can then take a step forward, even if it's not a step fully in the direction they prefer. People can make better compromises when they feel heard, they just need to be contained so they don't take speaking time/attention from everyone else.
Disclosure: highly engaged in public consultation process, civic tech, and consensus-building technology through my interest in https://github.com/compdemocracy/polis
In Canada, "public consultations" tend to be far from good. They're almost always held -- or rather, were pre-COVID -- during regular business hours, with very predictable effects on demographics. The last one I attended had over 100 people; about 60% were retirees, and around 15% were college students. I was the only male between the ages of 25 and 60 -- because working-age males overwhelmingly spend their weekday afternoons at work.
To make a sweeping and definitely falsifiable statement: My understanding is that public consultations are almost always total garbage in individualist nations :) The bread and butter of those who run them are mostly done around civic land use, and property developers unintentionally capture most of the industry and distort it.
Collectivist countries like Taiwan seem to have a much stronger consultation professional culture, probably because it's not just governments that hire them, but generally lots of businesses seem to find need for mediation/consultation
The good consultations cover a lot of slots. The one you or I go to will always have a skew. It usually doesn't mean the consult is bad. Different "weirdos" show up for different times :) Public consultations always seem to have powerless people who gravitate toward them, and this is sometimes the only platform they're ever given. A good consultation professional knows how to manage them imho
I was weirdly amused that the article want into so much detail about the Google plan (when it's been dead for a year) and gave just meaningless buzzword puffery about what they're going to do instead.
Politicians like these are why innovation is so slow. Google was primed and ready to try something new but it was just too different for these people to handle. I don't even like every aspect of the Google city plan but it would have been an invaluable experiment.
Sorry, but the politicians were largely on Google's side, sharing your absolutely ignorant enthusiasm. It took a massive, years-long grassroots campaign of engineers, residents, security researchers, urban planners, ethicists, etc etc, for us to finally amass enough political capital to pressure our elected representatives into actually, you know, representing us.
> it would have been an invaluable experiment.
That's the point. There are proven solutions to the problems this city faces, with long histories of being researched in universities and implemented elsewhere. These are the things we need, not "experiments". We are the fourth largest city in North America, not a test ground for American "innovation".
Why would we want our city, homes and public places, to be turned over to an "experiment?" And not just an experiment, but an experiment conducted by a corporation? And not just a corporation, but a foreign corporation that doesn't even have any significant presence here offering us decent jobs (and is instead one the leading causes of our "brain drain" problem)? Even if this experiment is invaluable (I can't imagine how it is), the majority of the value from experimenting would accrue to Google (experiments are valuable if they can be repeated many times after learning something new, and while Google could learn from the mistakes and repeat the experiment in a different city, Toronto would not be able to tear down the "smart city" to repeat the experiment). No great city in this world has been built on gimmicky technologies that will become obsolete. Just look at "smart homes" that were built 20+ years ago (e.g. installing speakers throughout the house etc), all the technology becomes an obsolete eyesore that eventually gets ripped out.
It's not that it was "too different", it's that it was "too evil". Google was trying to use public resources to build a Google-owned neighborhood where they controlled the lives of everyone within, and were interested in being able to levy their own taxes and exempt themselves from existing laws.
> proposed taking a portion of Toronto property taxes, development fees and increased land value to build a smart city on the eastern waterfront [...] which would amount to an estimated $6 billion over 30 years
6 billion dollars isn't astronomical for a major urban development project.
And Google being paid based on increases in property taxes gives them an incentive to increase the value of the land, which is the exact incentive the city would want them to have.
There's a huge gap between the article you link and OP's claim that Google was "interested in being able to levy their own taxes and exempt themselves from existing laws".
> Google being paid based on increases in property taxes...
... isn't what the article or Alphabet were talking about. They were discussing being paid property taxes, period, not simply taking the property tax delta caused by their real estate development.
And anyway, if I buy a house and pay property taxes, then improve the property so that my property taxes increase, I don't get to keep that increase. Why should Alphabet? But _even this_ is less radical than what Alphabet was proposing, as I've explained above. Alphabet was directly seeking a subsidy from the city, to be taken as a percentage of property taxes.
You may not think of this as unacceptable, in which case I wish you luck attracting such an offer to your own city. But over here, we don't want it.
Just like the wonderful experiments of Fordlandia, EPCOT, and Pullman? Hell, if you want to look at the broader theme of companies running entire countries, look at the mismanagement of the British East India Company.
The history of such projects rather weighs against the Google project being any better, particularly given the proclivity of many in the tech world to have the arrogance to believe that they know more about other fields than those who work in those fields.
Ever notice that for every problem, Google's first answer is 1. big data, 2. apply AI?
I don't even mean to be snarky. If you're a hammer company full of hammer experts, you're going to see a lot of nails.
One of the interesting city planning concepts I've seen is to build the houses with their backs to the roads. You still have a place for cars/deliveries/logistics, but it also forms a walkable neighborhood that's designed for people. I've seen some small developments based on this--it feels like a big park, and the only real side effect was the coffee shop needed a second public facing door.
There's lots of cool stuff from architects and material scientists that's worth building, but the longer I work in software, the more I'm convinced that sometimes we should look at a thing and conclude we are not the most qualified people to improve it.
> One of the interesting city planning concepts I've seen is to build the houses with their backs to the roads. You still have a place for cars/deliveries/logistics, but it also forms a walkable neighborhood that's designed for people. I've seen some small developments based on this--it feels like a big park, and the only real side effect was the coffee shop needed a second public facing door.
My cousin lives in Dubai in a similar neighborhood design of sorts. The front entrances face the general roadways to cars (which are mostly empty and lifeless), etc, but the back entrances face a central small sized park, in a cluster of maybe 12 homes or something. Essentially the park becomes the local meeting ground with lawns, play areas and barbecue spots, and the venue for celebrations of all sorts.
Why do you think corporations using black-box technology on human guinea pigs in a city-size scale is an exciting ‘experiment’?
Innovation is slow because science is constantly commoditized and recommoditized using violent means by a partnership between capitalist politicians and capitalist firms; the ‘intellectual property’ system is the tool (trade secrets > copyrights > patents).
Innovation is slow because many of the new technologies aren't that transformative.
Some technologies are very transformative. The Internet in 1990s killed much of the paper based printing. When was the last time someone bough a physical accounting ledger? A newspaper? A printed calendar? An encyclopedia? But, it doesn't take long for people to internalize the change, and go about their daily lives. Not thinking about what happened.
Most technologies are just incremental changes. Or, new digital technologies slapped onto old brick and mortar hardware, as upgrades.
We're fairly far into the Internet era at this point but I imagine that even many of the people who lived through the transition appreciate just how different the world is today from the mid-1990s, 25 years ago.
Most didn't have Internet--and for those who did we're mostly talking about things like Usenet. Many didn't even have cell phones, much less Gen 1 smartphones. Most were still navigating using paper maps and written directions. There was very little ecommerce. Many didn't even have home computers, much less broadband. TV was mostly still something you watched in a scheduled way unless you programmed your VCR. Etc.
> When was the last time someone bough[t] a physical [..] newspaper?
Sorry to sound like I'm stuck in a timewarp but we pay for our local newspaper to be delivered three days a week, it's waiting on the doorstep at 6am, I read it as I drink my first coffee.
I could also read the articles online, but the actual physical version is definitely better for our purposes.
Those plans were smart, they made Google richer. Not sure why people can't see this, that what a company wants is getting richer. They don't care about you.
Some people know this but want to out-cheat Google. The results are always the same. They are the pros, not you.
Cool, so after ten more years of planning and twenty to thirty years of phased development, this will all have made exactly zero difference to Toronto or anyone who lives there.
Which is Waterfront Toronto’s actual mandate, clean up the land, build the infrastructure, sell it to developers aligned to the vision. Instead they got all whimsical and got the idea in their heads that they are going to change the world. Fooled by the FAANG. They need to get back to their knitting, not become social justice eco-warriors. Otherwise this whole project will fail and we will end up with a damned casino with a monorail.
Ironically Toronto already had a floating restaurant called Captain Jacks. At the base of Yonge St. The Port Authority and the Owner could not come to an agreement on money owned for use of the slip. The owner packed in after a good run for a couple of decades. The vintage ship was towed away, and hacked up for scrap. Toronto was left without a good restaurant on the water.
The man was a crook and the restaurant was terrible, but he was very successful at not paying taxes. After years in dispute, I was there to cheer the tug to tow that dump away. Then the city erected a monument to commemorate him!
From what I remember, there was a a group of investors that wanted to purchase the boat, modernize it, make it into a really swanky, multi-purpose, venue, on the water. But by that point the Port Authority and owner had been fighting for so long that mediation/intervention wasn't possible.
It could be argued the Port Authority was charging him too much, perhaps just to get him to go. And that the owner was getting old, the best days of his restaurant were 30 years ago.
Not the OP, but in Europe, Ursula von der Leyen is a great example. Even though she isn't a green eco warrior, but a colorless Merkel ally. She screws up and keeps getting higher and higher positions.
I live on an area that was toxic wasteland. Its just paved over and lots of condos built, full of families. Its like living in a shopping mall, you're so removed from the dirt it isn't really an issue.
There is a third option: a fully automated, smart sensor city that isn't built by an ad company that wants identity-linked behavioral profiles above all else. It's just as technically possible as the Google-shadow-profile one.
Sadly I don't think those will be built in my lifetime.
The biggest driver of poor housing affordability in Canada is immigration, with 300,000 people migrating to the country annually.
Here are the top 10 migrant sources:
Philippines
India
China
Iran
Pakistan
United States
Syria
United Kingdom
France
South Korea
Migrants from the poorer countries on this list are moving to Canada to undercut the wages and conditions of local workers, whilst driving up the cost of housing and increasing congestion for infrastructure and Government services.
Meanwhile, the most common response for Canadians when asked about immigration is that they want it reduced.
It seems like the entire Anglosphere - USA, UK, Canada, Australia, NZ - has lost control of its borders, and the populace is now being completely sold out - for the benefit of capitalists and landowners.
Too bad that from 2010 to 2020 Toronto experienced its lowest population growth ever. But go on and keep believing that it's somehow the immigrants fault...
The federal government is also considering to step in to try and "solve" the problem, and this only means the problem is going to get worse.
I am not joking when I say that when the Canadian real estate markets crash - it is going to be absolutely disastrous for this country as it is basically the tent-pole keeping the entire thing propped up. Our debt to GDP is out of control. Our federal government keeps borrowing and spending on things that are completely inneffective (and bragging they spent the most than any other country). My gloom and doom prediction is our currency is going to be absolutely worthless in two years time.