JOSH GORDON | PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 13, 2020 |
If you follow the housing debates in Toronto and Vancouver, you’ll have undoubtedly heard the claim that the affordability challenges facing both cities are the result of supply problems. Common complaints include a lack of new housing, burdensome regulation and flawed zoning.
This “supply narrative” has been endlessly repeated. There’s only one problem: there’s no good evidence for it.
Consider the following pieces of inconvenient evidence. First, there have been no major changes to the regulatory framework around supply in either city since the early 2010s. Yet benchmark house prices in both cities have risen between 75 per cent (Vancouver) and 115 per cent (Toronto) since 2010. If there has been no significant regulatory change on the supply side, then this suggests that price appreciation reflects changes on the demand side of the equation.