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Housing

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Writing

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Toronto's 2026 federal housing partnership: which of the 18 projects were already announced or under way, and why announced homes cannot be added upMost of the 5,605 homes Ottawa and Toronto announced in August 2026 were in projects the city had already announced or where site work had begun. Each government counts a building at the stage it pays for, so announced totals keep growing while Toronto's construction starts fall.Article18 Oct35 quotes · 3 sources · 15 min Canadian recessions and the mortgage channel: rate decisions, CMHC, and five decades of housing-led downturnsEvery major Canadian downturn since 1980 carries a monetary-policy fingerprint, and housing is how the decision reaches people. The clearest case is 1990, where the campaign overshot its own target and Toronto prices did not pass their 1989 peak until 2002.Article10 Oct61 quotes · 1 source · 10 min Canada's short-term rental rules: supply, prices, and the mid-term rental tier that never formedShort-term rentals add flexible supply, and competition lowers prices. Canadian cities banned them anyway — and cut off a tier between a hotel and a lease just as it was forming.Article10 Oct24 quotes · 2 sources · 5 min Canada's short-term rental bans and rents: what returned to the long-term market, and what actually moved pricesCanadian cities restricted short-term rentals to bring homes back to renters. Few came back, rents fell for other reasons, and the bans squeezed a new kind of housing that sits between a hotel and a lease.Article10 Oct41 quotes · 2 sources · 7 min

Open problems

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Would a legal tier between a hotel and a lease lower rents?There is no public Hamilton-specific data on the MTR share of its 1,250 units, but the broader Canadian pattern would suggest the market was structurally changing — not just returning to its 2019 form.Open problem10 Oct

Research

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Are Federal Housing-Supply Programs Getting More Homes Built in the Greater Toronto Area?The federal supply programs launched since 2023 have not stopped the Greater Toronto Area's homebuilding from falling to multi-decade lows. Toronto CMA housing starts fell 31% in 2025, from 37,718 to 26,087 [3], and were down another 14% i…Research18 Oct38k characters Did Banning Airbnb Actually Fix Canadian Housing? An Evidence-Based Audit of the STR Restriction ExperimentCanadian housing affordability rests on a chain of causal assumptions — that STRs significantly reduce long-term housing supply, that banning them returns those units to the long-term rental (LTR) market, and that this added supply lowers rents.Research brief22 Jul24k characters Hamilton's Short-Term Rental Crackdown and the "Demand-Side Disruption" QuestionHamilton, Ontario adopted one of Canada's stricter short-term rental (STR) regimes in January 2023, with full enforcement starting January 1, 2024.Research brief22 Jul24k characters

Questions it raises

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Did Canadian STR restrictions actually lower rents?Did Banning Airbnb Actually Fix Canadian Housing? An Evidence-Based Audit of the STR Restriction ExperimentQuestion Is there a legitimate economic case that STRs help?Did Banning Airbnb Actually Fix Canadian Housing? An Evidence-Based Audit of the STR Restriction ExperimentQuestion What do banned operators actually do?Did Banning Airbnb Actually Fix Canadian Housing? An Evidence-Based Audit of the STR Restriction ExperimentQuestion Was the "ban Airbnb to fix housing" policy evidence-based or political?Did Banning Airbnb Actually Fix Canadian Housing? An Evidence-Based Audit of the STR Restriction ExperimentQuestion Who is in this flexible-demand cohort?Hamilton's Short-Term Rental Crackdown and the "Demand-Side Disruption" QuestionQuestion Could MTRs be a legitimate parallel housing tier?Hamilton's Short-Term Rental Crackdown and the "Demand-Side Disruption" QuestionQuestion