in ontario they dropped rent controls for buildings built after doug ford was elected in 2018. the result:
https://nationalpost...al-housing-woes
Until recently, a building like the Livmore, a new 43-storey, 595-unit housing tower in downtown Toronto, would have been a rarity in the city. Not just because of its unique mix of amenities — which includes a dog spa, an outdoor dog park and a two-storey sky lounge — but because it’s a purpose-built rental, not a condo like many of its Bay Street neighbours.
Structures such as the Livmore were once common in Toronto. Between the mid-1960s and 1970s, developers built 140,000 rental apartment units, a number that started to dwindle when Ontario’s introduced modern rent controls in 1975. Those controls protected the budgets of existing tenants, but limited the return on investment for developers’. By the 2000s, little more than a thousand units were coming onto the market every year — or less than 10 per cent of the number of condo units completed over the same period.
Today, though, a confluence of factors is changing the city’s housing mix. Condos are still king (there were more than 56,600 units in development as of September 2019), but there are more rentals currently under construction than at any time since at least 1990 – 7,800 as of September, with another 50,000 or so proposed. The city’s rapidly rising rents – the average one-bedroom currently goes for $2,300 a month, the highest in the country – and historically low vacancy rates (about one per cent) are enticing investors, as are new provincial and national initiatives such as relaxed rent controls, deferred development fees and cheap federal loans.
the cheap loans are also useful:
in 2017 the federal Liberal government introduced a $2.5-billion, CMHC-backed program offering low-interest, long-term loans to rental developers. Currently, rates are between 1.5 and 3 per cent, with loans locked in for 10 years. So far, the program has helped fund some 12,000 new rental units across the country.
Those include 761 units in a massive three-tower development in Toronto’s West Don Lands by Tricon Capital Group and Dream Unlimited Corp., which received $357 million in federal financing. The program has been so popular that the government is increasing the fund to $14 billion by 2028.
Edited by Victoria Watcher, 09 December 2019 - 02:45 PM.