Shadow Inventory, by @SteveSaretsky. "The new construction condo market is totally dead. "This will ensure housing starts continue to plummet before sowing the seeds for the next supply shortfall. "Maybe it’s just me, or current market sentiment, but that feels a long ways away." #vanre #vanpoli #bcpoli Rennie report. stevesaretsky.substack.com/p…

The #GTA housing market is being influenced by a myriad of forces — demographic shifts, lower immigration, fewer international students and non-permanent residents, trade tensions and tariffs and shrinking household sizes. At the same time, the federal-provincial new home HST rebate and municipal development charge reductions are providing some support. Most of these factors are temporary. As BILD President & CEO Dave Wilkes writes in the @TorontoStar, when they end and more normal market conditions return, the region will need more housing of every type — from condominiums and rental apartments to townhomes, semis and single-family homes. With October’s municipal election approaching, keep in mind that housing supply and land-use policy matters. thestar.com/business/opinion…

📩 Over 500 scientists, practitioners, and public health and environmental officials have raised concerns about the rapid pace for the Food and Feed Safety Omnibus, the EU Commission’s proposal to loosen #pesticide regulations. pan-europe.info/blog/over-50…

Canada’s Plan To Fix Housing? Just Change What Affordable Means #ToRe #VanRe betterdwelling.com/canadas-p…

Great piece by UBC prof. emeritus David Ley: "What is puzzling to residents is that on significant housing issues... (all) @CityofVancouver councillors have accepted, without evidence, the argument that more housing supply means more home affordability" Ley is the author of Millionaire Migrants, Housing Booms in Gateway Cities and an officer of the Order of Canada. #vanpoli #vanre #bcpoli vancouversun.com/opinion/op-…

For years, the climate movement ran on the promise that, if we all rally hard enough, we could have it all: continue with our current system and save the planet. Yet the events of the past few decades have shown that this isn’t quite the case, and in fact, climate is just one crisis among many produced by our growth-at-all-costs system. This raises the question: What happens when a culture built on the certainty of progress has to confront its own uncertainty? In this episode, I'm joined by philosopher and author Sarah Wilson for an exploration of the emotions that come from learning about, processing, and then embodying the full extent of the metacrisis. Watch: youtu.be/irXf-dvH8hw

All true. Bring it back. Best for renters. Best for owners. Best for city citizens.

Ottawa was once so boring and safe that some said the most exciting thing about it was the road to Montreal. But the landlord of 252 Argyle Ave. is afraid he’ll lose his tenants because of the crime and drug use nearby. Let’s not kid ourselves: reckless federal immigration policies helped bring this about, with a massive intake of permanent residents, temporary workers, international students, and a skyrocketing number of asylum claimants, many with very questionable claims. Things veered totally out of control during 2022 and 2023 when Canada accepted over one million newcomers each year, in an apparent implementation of the Century Initiative’s agenda. The CI, which claims to be in favour of “responsible population growth” (LOL!), celebrated this development in its 2022 annual report, in which its CEO wrote: “In 2021, the federal government satisfied Century Initiative’s long-standing calls for more ambitious immigration targets, and for new pathways to permanent residency for essential workers and international students. This was renewed in the 2022-2024 Immigration Levels Plan; and expanded upon in the 2023-2025 Immigration Levels Plan…Our efforts have yielded significant results. In 2022, Canada’s population grew by more than one million people, setting a new record as the country welcomed more immigrants. For the first time, Century Initiative has assessed that Canada is on track to achieve the goal of 100 million Canadians by 2100.” Wonderful! In January 2025, about 60% of Ottawa’s homeless shelter population consisted of newcomers. And the impact on Canadians and landlords like this one? Who cares! Industrial-scale immigration is making the right people rich. Sorry if you’re not among them. [Image from Google Maps captured October 2024 when things were better] youtube.com/shorts/peDGTyADw…

Prime Minister Carney just named Dominic Barton as the chair of Invest Canada. Why does that make us feel nervous? Because Dominic Barton is the co-founder of the Century Initiative, specifically created to advocate for a Canadian population of 100 million. Barton headed Justin Trudeau’s Advisory Council on Economic Growth that promoted the ramping up of Canada’s immigration levels to the stratosphere, leading to housing, unemployment and food crises. It just makes us a bit leery about whose interests Barton will serve in his new position. darpanmagazine.com/news/nati…

MORE! Housing Sprawl and Land Rent Land price, not what planners imagine, decides where housing goes. High central area land Rents push families away from jobs and services, exacerbating auto dependence. Planners now try to gain affordability with more allowable units; but the windfall goes to the landowner. Per sq. ft. costs stay the same. Market value for homes gets capitalized immediately or eventually in land Rent. So the buyer—and the developer who must sell to that buyer—follows cheap dirt to the edge. If land were not the dominant driver, central sites would house more people, closer to work. Land Rent decides the map. Zoning mostly follows The same land-Rent-fuelled sprawl dynamic shaped every advanced market economy in the English speaking world. In the United States it was especially strong, because several forces combined to shove the city wildly outward at enormous taxpayer expense. After the Second World War the United States pushed sprawl to extreme limits via policy. Sprawl was sold as defense—harder for the Soviets to flatten—as industrial policy—“What’s good for General Motors is good for the country”—and as the American Dream, complete with Capra’s "It's a Wonderful Life” cultural propaganda. Interstates pulled a flood of once-“worthless” land into the city’s orbit. Cheap lots, cheap cars, the GI Bill, the mortgage-interest deduction, and the redlining of older streetcar districts flung the urban edge far beyond what some other countries allowed. Average densities in older U.S. metros often fell to a fraction of their pre-war levels—in Boston, to less than one-fifth its pre war average. That surge in available housing land cheapened land under the old streetcar suburbs. In some Rust Belt cities, notably Detroit, those land prices are still low. In jobs-rich coastal cities, the districts that escaped urban renewal have more than recovered. The pattern is the same across the English-speaking world; only the degree changes. Typical metropolitan densities now run about 1,500–2,000 people per square kilometre in the United States, 2,000–3,000 in Canada, 1,500–2,500 in Australia, and about 2,000 in New Zealand. Set against Dhaka at 40,000, or even Istanbul at 11,000, those differences are small. The shared story is the same: when the highway frontier closed, well-located urban land became a fertile field for rent seeking. ` The suburban frontier and more equitable divisions between capital and labor bought three decades of relief from land Rent. When the frontier closed, Rent returned — first at the metro centre, then across the metro suburbs themselves — and with it returned the old pattern of progress that produces poverty.

Shirley Kher pulls no punches in identifying overpopulation as the main factor keeping India mired in poverty. India’s is a story of “what happens when a country refuses to reckon with population as an economic variable,” she says. After savaging the political and economic leadership of India, Kerr even pours cold water on any celebration of its declining fertility rate. “The decline is dramatic in the educated south and stagnant in the impoverished north,” but because his political base is in the northern states, Prime Minister Modi has no incentive to make family planning an issue there. India, she says, “is a country choosing, through democratic inaction and political cowardice, to remain poor.” Which could explain why so many Indians seek better opportunities abroad and provide so much fodder for the cheap labour markets in Western countries. medium.com/the-geopolitical-…