Opinion: Instead of blaming foreign buyers for unaffordable housing, our governments have to stop looking for scapegoats, and remove the obstacles they’ve put in place.
Unfortunately, in many other Canadian cities, including large Quebec cities, supply has not tracked demand, due to the difficulty of building new units in many places.
This is just what economists observe when they look at the question of housing prices. Places where it is easier to build new units to meet demand are the ones where price increases are the most modest, or even non-existent when expressed as a percentage of citizens’ average income. We need to look at institutional barriers — those notorious stumbling blocks that governments more or less intentionally strew across the paths of developers. Just think of provincial land-use regulations, municipalities’ strict zoning rules, or the panoply of bureaucratic requirements that need to be satisfied before the first shovelful of earth can be moved.
Each regulation comes with its cost, either in the form of a tax or in the form of time and associated consultant fees, which complicates the construction process and reduces the supply of new housing.
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