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The numbers don’t lie: The housing crisis is not caused by a supply shortage
(www.policyalternatives.ca)
this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2026
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It's not a housing shortage, it's a pricing issue.
If you do the math based on statscan data, there are FAR more bedrooms in Canada than people, even if you assumed couples never slept together and kids never shared a room.
People are splitting rooms to make it more affordable, not because rooms don't exist.
There are retired couples, or families with a single kid, living in 4-5 bedroom houses in Vancouver, because they either don't want to downsize, or they can afford the space so they buy more than they need.
The problem ais the distribution of housing, some people have too much, and some people don't have what we would reasonably consider enough.
There is also some distribution issues around where those houses are located compared to the desires of where people want to live. If someone has a house in Edmonton, but wants to live in Vancouver in a similar house and can't afford it, is that a housing shortage in Vancouver? I would argue it is not.
Where we define that "reasonable" line is where an ACTUAL shortage would come in. How much housing is reasonable for each person, and how reasonable is the location they want that much housing in?
However, I don't believe we have crossed that line. In my opinion we need to regulate the market better in order to have the distribution more aligned with overall social benefit. Of course we need to continue building more units with the population and to replace buildings over time, but policy could re-distribute the existing housing more fairly without needing a single one of those today.
It absolutely is. Houses aren't fungible; they don't fucking move! A house in Edmonton is not a substitute for a house in Vancouver!
I argue it is not, because unreasonable desire shouldn't be part of "housing" conversations.
If every single person wanted a detached house on Robson Street, that's clearly just stupid and should be ignored. It's not a supply shortage. If everyone wanted a 3-bedroom condo unit overlooking Kits beach, that's also clearly unrealistic. It's not a supply shortage.
Think about it this way, if you earned the same amount you currently do, and condos and houses were $1000 per bedroom each to buy outright anywhere you wanted. What would you end up with? I suspect it wouldn't be a 1 bedroom condo in a bland area of town. You'd probably have a house somewhere near your work, a condo downtown, maybe a cabin up at a lake.
You may not want 10 different places, so the demand for housing is not infinite, but it's orders of magnitude greater than anything that's realistic to supply.
If we use that logic, we will always be in a supply shortage no matter how much we build, because there will never be enough inventory available to push prices down to $1000 per bedroom.
Which is why I don't consider that original situation a supply shortage in Vancouver. Once you bring "reasonable" into the conversation, there's already enough supply to meet the reasonable needs of the population. As I said before, the problem is the price and current distribution.
You're right that it's stupid, but that's what the laws attempt to do! It Is literally illegal to replace single-family houses with denser housing in the vast majority of Toronto, Vancouver, etc. That means everybody who doesn't fit in those houses is physically displaced to the exurbs, never mind that the increasing demand with no accompanying increase in supply makes prices skyrocket.
I don't care about your nonsensical attempt to redefine what words mean; that's objectively a shortage!
Shortages are what restrictive zoning laws are designed to do, and they are working exactly as intended. If you don't like that outcome, the only sane thing to do is abolish them.
You haven't been keeping up with the changes in the law. There is no such thing as single family zoning inside cities in BC anymore.
The provincial government made it so that essentially any property in a municipality over 5000 people is allowed to have 3 units if it's under 280 square meters, or 4 units if it's over 280 square meters.
If it's greater than 280 meters near frequent bus service(15 minutes or better during daytime hours), it goes up to a minimum allowance of 6 units.
Any property within 800 meters of a rapid transit exchange or 400 meters of a regular transit exchange also gets automatic zoning allowing a massive upgrade to number of stories for condo/apartment buildings.
Again, there's no shortage, there's plenty of housing available, it's just that there's a lot of over-housed people who are hogging properties they don't reasonably need.
In other words, they capped supply at a slightly higher level than it was before. Whoop-de-fuckin'-do, it's still a cap!
(Also, BC policy does fuck-all for Ontario.)
Again, that is factually untrue. You're so Hell-bent on finding scapegoats you can't even think rationally.
"slightly higher level"
They quite literally multiplied it by no less than 3, everywhere.
How much supply are you looking for here?
No, it isn't, and it's very easy to double check.
https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2021/dp-pd/prof/details/page.cfm?Lang=E&SearchText=ontario&DGUIDlist=2021A000011124%2C2021A000259%2C2021A000235&GENDERlist=1&STATISTIClist=1%2C4&HEADERlist=20
Go look at the section of that statscan data that shows number of total units by bedroom count. Even if you assume that 4+ bedrooms is only 4, the total bedrooms in Canada is about 40.5 Million and that data was as of 2021, when the population from Statscan was a little under 37 million.
Like I said before, even assuming nobody ever sleeps in the same room, and using the worst case for counting bedrooms where no house has more than 4, there are still 4 million excess bedrooms in this country.
Once you account for couples, it's probably close to 10-15 million excess bedrooms with nobody sleeping in them.
Even if you look at just BC data, it's the same thing. If you switch BC out for Ontario, guess what.... At least 15.1 million bedrooms, and 14.2 million people in 2021.
You need to stop spouting off about "factually untrue" when the facts don't support your argument. There is more than enough housing available for everyone at the moment if it were distributed equitably. Homeowners and politicians are lying to you to keep profiting off your stupidity.
Nobody gives a shit about housing in bumfuck nowhere exurbs. It simply does not count because pretending people can be warehoused there when they can't does not solve the problem.
Quit citing irrelevant bullshit and talk only about housing within commuting distance of downtown Vancouver or Toronto (or in general, urban centers where people actually want to be), because that's what actually matters.
You can look up the data even for cities specifically, it's not significantly different. You aren't doing that because you don't want to be proven wrong.
Continue tilting at windmills my friend. I'm going to go after the actual monsters.
Across Canada maybe, but Vancouver is not like that. When a place comes up for rent landlords have mentioned they have 50 applicants the first few hours that day and have to take the ad down.
This metro area is building high density housing on previous forest and farm land, and they are always snapped up quickly. I forget that stats, but something like 1000 new people move to metro area every month from other countries and provinces.
The rent is high here because of a lack of units available. Among the financial BS with banks.
In Vancouver people build a minimum 200 sq foot outbuilding in the back yard and as long as it has bicycle storage it is considered a rentable housing unit.
Let me ask you a simple question. It has a very obvious answer too.
What if 5 million units magically appeared overnight in Vancouver and they were all available at "affordable" rates, so no more than 3x median annual household income. So around $150,000k for a 1 bed condo, and around $270 for a 3 bedroom townhouse.
How long would it take for those units to be snapped up by buyers?
I'll tell you the answer, they would be sold as soon as people could talk to their bank.
People would straight up abandon their lives elsewhere for those units. From Halifax to Hope, there would be a migration like never seen before.
And the next day, Vancouver housing prices would still be higher than those new rates, because there would still be more demand and not enough available units driving the prices up.
This is the eternal problem with supply in desirable areas, there can never be enough of it.
Greater Tokyo has 40 million people, and even with the entire country losing something like a half a million people, Tokyo's population is stable because of constant inbound migration from other areas. The moment costs drop, or jobs become available, someone else moves in to take it.
This isn't a random side take either, Greater Tokyo has about 3x the density of Greater Vancouver. Tripling the current Vancouver population would be around 6 million new people.
Do you know how Tokyo stays somewhat affordable for housing? The per-person average square footage for housing is like 150-250 square feet. There are entire 4 person families living in 500 square foot apartments, and singles living in units so small you can touch the walls on both sides.
It's not about a lack of supply, or rather, there is no possible way to reach a supply level that would reduce housing prices to affordable levels.
Instead, and here's the genius trick, you change the demand. You introduce a tax on EVERYONE in Vancouver, not a small tax, a large tax, but you don't tax the people, you tax the land they use. Maybe $100,000 a year for a detached house in the City of Vancouver, Maybe $10,000 a year for a condo in Vancouver. That money gets refunded to all Canadians equally, even to the people who live in Vancouver. This gives people an incentive to live outside of Vancouver, and the people who do get to live there subsidize the people who don't get to live in such a desirable location. People who want a lot of land, pay for the privledge. People who are happy to share the land pay less, or even benefit from others who don't want to share.
Exactly, that's why the stats of housing as an average across Canada, don't affect Toronto or Vancouver, its a supply and demand problem locally. The other bank , rates, foreign ownerships don't help, but we just have too few homes out here, and more and more people arrive
Did you even read what I said.
It's not a supply and demand problem locally. In fact, it's the opposite of that. It's a local supply problem, with a national demand issue.
That's why all this nonsense about supply building is so fucking useless. You can't supply all of the houses in Vancouver that are desired from the 41 million Canadians across Canada.
By all means keep building more, but unless you tamp demand down it will not matter.
That's what I'm saying too. People keep moving here, because who wants to live in Winnipeg. And so Winnipeg has open units and we have to create more. Empty homes in undesired locations skew the country wide average too look like we have open housing everywhere and therefore house prices aren't a supply/demand problem. But supply and demand is exactly what drives prices up her and low in less nice regions
Except that's not what the data says, there are more bedrooms in BC than people, not even accounting for the fact that lots of people are couples and share a room.
It's true for every location I've ever checked in Canada, including Metro areas like Vancouver and Toronto.
There's a lot of excess bedrooms that are not being used for housing people.
Yeah and no. In metro area most homes are allowed to divide basement into 2 legal suites, to maximize density. These aren't empty.
Owner above may have a spare room when kid moves out. What I have seen is East and South Asians will often rent a room out, but whitefolk seem to prioritize single family only. That is a Western hangup.
So empty bedroom doesn't really equate to an indendant unit on the market.
Anecdotally we have downsized as the kids moved out. We had 3500sqft place at one time , now in 800sqft condo as empty nesters.
That's what I'm saying, there's too many people in houses that aren't the right size for them. It's not a supply issue, it's a distribution issue.
If you make 1100 dinners, and there are 1000 people, but you give two dinners to 400 people you're going to run out before everyone gets a dinner. There's no shortage of dinners though, it's simply a distribution issue.
People don't have to stay in a house that's far too large for them. Allowing or encouraging them to do so is actually a huge problem.
My parents are a perfect example of this, they have a house with 4 bedrooms, and a suite with 1 more bedroom. They had the suite rented out, but decided they didn't need the money so they stopped. It's literally just the two of them in a 5 bedroom house. They also have a one bedroom cabin elsewhere. Was that 4 bedrooms useful when they were raising my sibling and I? Sure, but we haven't lived there in 25 years.
We need policies that encourage scaling house size to family size, so that the distribution issue gets resolved. We need policies that encourage essentially force density in desirable locations. Those are the only way we solve the housing issue. We cannot, no matter how hard we try, build our way back to affordable housing.
The government should scrap capital gains if you downsize to an appropriate sized house (and can prove you lived there with a larger family and they've moved out, to discourage house flippers just overbuying)
There's nothing to scrap, Capital gains taxes are already already waived for selling your primary residence in Canada.
My preference would be a policy that taxes all properties (just the land, not the building) and then refunding that money to every Canadian citizen (and maybe people who are on a PR track working towards citizenship) equally. That way if you have a big property with a high land value, and only 2 people living there, you're not getting most of your tax back, but if you've got 3 kids and 2 adults in a 5 bedroom house in a suburb, or the same in a townhouse closer to the core, you're breaking even, and if you choose to live as a couple in a 1 bedroom apartment (low land value per unit) or a larger place but further out of town where property is cheaper, you may even get a little bit of extra money back each month.
That way people are paying everyone else for the amount of desirable land they want to consume. You want a mansion in downtown Vancouver, go right ahead, pay everyone else for that privledge. You don't need as much and are happy to have a small apartment just outside the core? Thank you for your sacrifice, here's some cash from Mr. Mansion.
This scales nicely and encourages people to only use what they need at a given time, and also encourages development of density of properties that have high land values because people want to live there.
It also directly taxes non-citizens who want to own land here. Paying every Canadian for the fact that they're consuming land in Canada.