Rent prices in Canada soared last year as supply struggled to keep up with demand, leading to the lowest national vacancy rate on record since the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. began tracking that data in 1988.
The federal housing agency said in a report Wednesday the vacancy rate for purpose-built rental apartments sat at 1.5 per cent during the first two weeks of October 2023, when it conducted its annual survey.
That was down from 1.9 per cent a year earlier, which at the time had been the lowest national vacancy rate in over two decades.
The average rent for a two-bedroom purpose-built apartment, which the CMHC uses as its representative sample, grew eight per cent to $1,359 in 2023. That growth figure was up from the 5.6 per cent average rent increase recorded in 2022 and above the 1990-2022 average of 2.8 per cent.
Which also means it’s a density issue. The solution can’t be a sprawl of more single family homes, either.
I absolutely agree, though I live on the west coast where we’ll have dense city blocks that immediately run off into crown land. I also want to densify urban areas but it’s expensive to buy land when single family homes (even in the boonies) are so expensive to buy.
Oh yeah it’ll take a generation to undo a generation’s worth of bad zoning and urban planning. But it’s the only real long term solution. No high population urban area on the planet sustains itself with a high level of sprawl (without truly outlandish taxes to pay for the necessary infrastructure – looking at you New Jersey).