The exodus

Pulling out all the stops, realtors popped a new survey this week claiming that the young want out of Dodge.

“The housing crisis is driving young Ontarians out of the Greater Toronto Area,” they said, “with 72% of residents aged 18-34 planning to leave in the next five years due to affordability concerns.”

Imagine that. Three-quarters of the kiddos vanished. Vape and weed shops turned into adult diaper outlets. The clubs and music halls silenced. Tat parlours gone. Downtown Toronto looking like Chernobyl, all decayed and empty, with feral Boomers wandering around, wondering how to fix their phones.

The agents and brokers blame taxes and fees for adding 30% to the cost of a new house. They claim in the GTA that $380,000 of the purchase price (of about $1.2 million) is scooped off by bureaucracy. “We should not treat housing like a high-end luxury good to be taxed, instead a home should be treated like a human right,” the cartel says.

Of course, the new-house charges go to creating new-hood infrastructure, like roads, schools, parks and firehalls. The builders collect it from the buyers, then pay the city to build stuff. Imagine the squawking that would happen if people were asked to move into an area without pavement, streetlights or working sewers.

Anyway, “housing” is not a human right, as much as the realtors would like it to be. Shelter is. Real estate is not.

The reality is taxes and fees won’t be coming down the way the industry is begging. In Toronto the municipality is hiking property taxes to try and stem a $1 billion revenue shortfall. The province is in the red this year by almost $7 billion. The feds are wallowing in a $62-billion shortfall. Universities are in crisis, staring at unimaginable gaps between revenues and overhead. And you know all about healthcare. Over two and a half million people in this one province (16% of the population) don’t have a doctor.

Personally, it’s worse. Families owe more than $2.2 trillion in mortgage debt, which is currently growing at twice the rate of inflation. So many of us have made so many bad choices. Politicians have responded to pressure like the realtors are exerting by enabling Canadians further. Consider all the real estate-bullish factors detailed here earlier this week. Thirty-year amortizations (new). CMHC insurance of homes worth up to $1.5 million (new). Down payments on high-ratio, high-end properties lower by 60% (new). Then there’s the FHSA with is historic tax breaks, the enhanced RRSP Home Buyer’s Plan, the forced trashing by Ottawa of traditional zoning regs, and eight billion in tax money flushed into the ‘accelerator’ plan to get more homes built licketly-split.

Add to that provincial incentives, low-cost builder loans, waived GST and local free-down-payment plans and the pile of incentives for renters to become owners grows higher and higher.

Now, while there are over 21,000 unsold new units available in the GTA alone, and with resale inventory stacking up in most markets across frosty Canada, the politicians keep at it. Houses are not being built because buyers are not buying. Fees and taxes aren’t coming down because public coffers are threadbare already. Investors are bailing out of condos as rents fall, prices stagnate and mortgage rates stay high. Ownership costs are swelling thanks to property tax increases, obscene insurance premiums, utility cost hikes and moronic inventions like the underutilized house tax.

Against this background of self-flagellation in Canada we have the existential external threat posed by Tariff Man. Our steel and aluminum biz will soon be whacked. A fat tax on everything looms over next month. And the best our 13 provincial and territorial leaders could do in Washington yesterday was gain a meeting with two junior Trump White House staffers. When it ended one of them posted that no agreement was reached on Canada being the 51st state. “Take Trump at his word,” our guys were told.

Oh, and US inflation came in hot just as Trump was about to announce reciprocal tariffs on the world, likely to be inflationary and ensuring the Fed will not cut rates again.

In short, there’ll be no spring housing romp this year. Fughedabouidit. And will the cities empty?

Nah. Of course not.

Where will they go?

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Source: https://www.greaterfool.ca/2025/02/13/the-exodus-4/