Toronto’s Housing Crisis

By: Michael Baldassarra Seneca News

Toronto Skyline Via GettyImages

Toronto,Ontario, a dynamic metropolis with beautiful skyscrapers that 2.7 million people call home. It is also one of the most expensive places in the world to live. A city filled with condos, that comes with one down side, the housing market. Toronto has been going through a so-called crisis going back to 2010. It is becoming harder and harder everyday to live and prices don’t seem to be going down anytime soon. The Average house price in Toronto cost about 2 million dollars and average rent is through the roof. With house prices across the city getting higher and higher by the year, buying a house downtown won’t do you justice over a condo and living downtown is becoming ever so difficult. Many people would love to live downtown in the heart of the city but a minimum wage job just won’t cut it nowadays and is causing a lot of people to move further and further away from the city.
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Condo Crisis

Buying a condo in Toronto used to be most financial smart thing to do for people that are planning the move but truth is, buying a condo could cost you the same as a house nowadays. Toronto’s condo prices alone are rising more and more by the year. The demographic that this affects the most are university and college students. With downtown being home to TMU and U of T, it is becoming super difficult for students to live downtown. Many students that don’t live in the city are forced to travel down, either by subway or car. That can means longer days or stress of a closure, if you take public transit, and that can have a serious effect on somebody’s mental health.

Cost Of Everyday Life
In Toronto the average rent price is about $1800 a month (Toronto.listing.ca) but at the end of the day most people have a social life that can affect that price and raise up your monthly total. For people that want to live downtown you need to have a good paying job because if we assume the average person goes to a gym, or needs wifi, or goes out once a week for dinner, those things need to be considered for people wanting to live downtown. So let’s calculate some of those numbers. If you spend $100 a month on your phone bill, you have to take that into thought before buying. Even things like the gym can cost you an extra $60 a month or something essential like groceries and maybe something as simple as transportation can up your total. If we made an assumption that most people spend $600 to $1000 a month on themselves and we add that with the rent average, that racks in a total of $2000 a month and in 52 weeks in a year that is about $104,000 a year. The problem with that is the average salary in Toronto before taxes is $52,000 making living downtown not affordable to the average person. There is a lot of job opportunities in the city and people could potentially have an easier way to get to work if the condo prices were lower than what they are. When the average salary is $52,000, it is impossible that the majority of the people that work in the city also live downtown.

Population Trends

When you look at the graph above, one thing sticks out and that is Toronto and its population. Toronto has a much bigger population than all the cities in Ontario but the truth is that population number is declining by the years and that is because people are moving away to have a more affordable lifestyle. Places like Barrie or Innisfil have seen huge population bumps (Barrietoday.com) and when I was talking to one realtor that works at Aspen ridge homes, she told me about how population trends are moving up towards Northern Ontario.

“As a realtor for Aspen ridge, we are building more and more up north because that’s where people are migrating to”

Toronto has a big population and there isn’t that much space to accommodate the population causing housing prices to skyrocket. It is very hard to find a property in Toronto and even harder to buy it. The process to buy a property can be a very stressful and tough and in Toronto, with limited properties going up to sales, you can be bidding against 10-15 people causing most properties to be sold over asking. It is a good time if you are a realtor in Toronto because of this, and with them making more money that can make finding a home in Toronto very hard. The repercussions of this way causes people to move up north. You could buy a larger property for the same price as a 1 room bedroom in Toronto. For a new family, that’s the best financial option.

Onatrio and British Columbia are 2 of the most expensive places to live in Canada. From the graph above the prices across Canada are drastic from area to area. For example, New Brunswick has an average house price of only $183,000 and me being someone that lived in Toronto his whole life, that is insane to me. Ontario has an average home rate of about $500,000 (Livingincanada.ca) and those numbers are drastically different. Even Quebec, Toronto and Montreal share a lot of comparisons when people that don't live in Canada talk about Canada and Quebec has an average home rate of $300,000. Quebec might be the most European- like province in all of Canada and many people that live there love it and call it the best city in the world. That graph alone shows that population is the main reason for prices to be the way they are in Ontario.

This housing crisis in Toronto is not changing anytime soon and time will tell where people will end up in the next 15 years.

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