Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
Which is compounded by the number of people per household getting lower and lower over recent decades (3.5 in 1971 vs 2.5 in 2021).
It takes a lot more housing units (including the smaller apartments and condos opendoor referenced) to house a million Canadians today than it did 50 years ago.
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But by and large, those housing units exist. There were 290 houses per 1,000 people in Canada in 1971 with an average household size of 3.5. At today's average household size of 2.5, we'd need 422 houses per 1,000 to maintain the exact same ratio. As of the last census (which coincided with the peak in real housing prices), we had 411 houses per 1,000, so it's basically unchanged.
Yeah there is a very small deficit relative to 1971, but that same deficit existed in the early '00s when we had some of the lowest priced housing in modern history. It's a combination of financial demand (i.e. investors accepting terrible cap rates on the hope of price appreciation) and the lack of space for detached housing in cities that is driving unaffordability, not the number of households relative to housing stock.