Housing costs

[dtkvictim]

As for how to reduce rent costs..that is a challenge, and I don't have any easy answers, beyond the fact that parking minimums and other anti-development policies that prevent infill development and prioritize sprawl make the situation worse.

But it does come back to income inequality, if wages had grown at a similar rate to housing...there wouldn't be an issue...

Unless more housing is built, housing will be expensive no matter what happens to wages. In the long term there are only two fundamental ways to make housing in an area more affordable: increase the supply (build more), or decrease the demand (people move away). Measures like using tax money to build affordable housing just move the expense around a bit.

You can decrease the demand without having people moving away, but simply by slowing the rate of growth to match supply (or better yet, let supply catch up). This is a federal problem though, since Canada's growth is almost entirely immigration. But since our economy is based on never-ending growth, and GDP growth is essentially in lockstep with immigration, I don't expect we'll see lower immigration rates any time soon.

You are partially right about your first statement, but what about when local wages have become completely detached from the cost of housing? If you look at the government reported incomes for any somewhat large city in Canada, and compare it to the cost of housing... it just doesn't make sense. I am more than double the median individual income, and my spouse is above the median as well, yet all we can look at in the housing market is the bottom ~15%. I don't think there is enough local individual wealth to make up for this difference from wages.