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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
111 points (93.7% liked)
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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.