The Rise of Investor Ownership and the Housing Crisis with Jeremy Withers
05/28/24 • 37 min
The housing crisis is apparent for most ordinary Canadians, especially for those paying rents and mortgages that feel increasingly out of reach. Recent data shows that among wealthy countries, Canada's housing cost increases have seen the fastest decoupling from income growth, and with that accelerated price inflation, according to Jeremy Withers, a new class of housing investors has grown.
According to the data, more and more new housing is being purchased without the intention of being the home that they buyer lives in. This trend has increased over time, all across Canada, and investors have become a very big proportion of home owners. It isn't just new condos that investors are buying—single-family homes are increasingly owned by families that don't live in them.
To understand more about what's behind these trends, Clement Nocos spoke with Jeremy Withers, a housing policy researcher and PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto’s Department of Geography & Planning
Withers' article Addressing the Rise of Investor Ownership of Housing, Part 1: Assessing the Scale and Impacts across Canada was published in the inaugural issue Perspectives Journal, where he analyzes these stark realities and trends for home ownership in Canada.
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The 2024 Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize is awarded to economist Dr. Isabella Weber for critical research on economic shocks and inflation that equip Canadian progressives with alternatives that push back against anti-democratic policy choices and help to empower workers.
Each year’s prize recipient also delivers the Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture. We invite you to join us on Thursday, May 30 for the 2024 Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture at Toronto Metropolitan University, at the Sears Atrium (3rd Floor, George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre), starting at 7pm EDT, followed by a reception with light refreshments.
Professor Isabella Weber is an economist and a leading voice against corporate profiteering, identifying economic shocks as the cover that the rich and powerful use to raise prices and put the working-class through an affordability crisis.
Her analysis has come to accurately illustrate the forces behind today’s price inflation, and why governments have not effectively addressed the affordability crisis.
Weber has advised policy makers in the United States and Germany on questions of price stabilization, and is now a regular feature in the business papers. For her work on “Sellers’ Inflation,” she has been profiled in the New Yorker, Jacobin Magazine, and recognized as one of TIME100 Next by US Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Tickets to the 2024 Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture are now available: 2024-ellen-meiksins-wood-lecture.eventbrite.ca
The housing crisis is apparent for most ordinary Canadians, especially for those paying rents and mortgages that feel increasingly out of reach. Recent data shows that among wealthy countries, Canada's housing cost increases have seen the fastest decoupling from income growth, and with that accelerated price inflation, according to Jeremy Withers, a new class of housing investors has grown.
According to the data, more and more new housing is being purchased without the intention of being the home that they buyer lives in. This trend has increased over time, all across Canada, and investors have become a very big proportion of home owners. It isn't just new condos that investors are buying—single-family homes are increasingly owned by families that don't live in them.
To understand more about what's behind these trends, Clement Nocos spoke with Jeremy Withers, a housing policy researcher and PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto’s Department of Geography & Planning
Withers' article Addressing the Rise of Investor Ownership of Housing, Part 1: Assessing the Scale and Impacts across Canada was published in the inaugural issue Perspectives Journal, where he analyzes these stark realities and trends for home ownership in Canada.
-
The 2024 Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize is awarded to economist Dr. Isabella Weber for critical research on economic shocks and inflation that equip Canadian progressives with alternatives that push back against anti-democratic policy choices and help to empower workers.
Each year’s prize recipient also delivers the Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture. We invite you to join us on Thursday, May 30 for the 2024 Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture at Toronto Metropolitan University, at the Sears Atrium (3rd Floor, George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre), starting at 7pm EDT, followed by a reception with light refreshments.
Professor Isabella Weber is an economist and a leading voice against corporate profiteering, identifying economic shocks as the cover that the rich and powerful use to raise prices and put the working-class through an affordability crisis.
Her analysis has come to accurately illustrate the forces behind today’s price inflation, and why governments have not effectively addressed the affordability crisis.
Weber has advised policy makers in the United States and Germany on questions of price stabilization, and is now a regular feature in the business papers. For her work on “Sellers’ Inflation,” she has been profiled in the New Yorker, Jacobin Magazine, and recognized as one of TIME100 Next by US Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Tickets to the 2024 Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture are now available: 2024-ellen-meiksins-wood-lecture.eventbrite.ca
Previous Episode
Is Canada Falling Behind on Green Industrial Policy? with Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood
To help make Canada into a “good society,” Ed Broadbent was a major proponent of “industrial strategy” throughout the 1970s and 80s as leader of Canada’s NDP, to use this policy vision for social democratic change and challenge the dominance of market mechanisms, ultimately to the working-class the tools to build a just and equal economic democracy.
Today, comprehensive policy plans in the United States, Europe and China have taken the form of industrial strategy to guide their economic transformation and development in the face of economic and climate crises. Canada, on the other hand, seems to have lagged behind on this front, despite Ed Broadbent’s urging to develop industrial strategy from decades ago. While Canada’s political discourse becomes embroiled in revisiting industrial-scale carbon pricing, the USA has unleashed the Inflation Reduction Act, and China has become a world-leading producer of electrified products such as electric vehicles and photovoltaic cells.
Why is Canada lagging behind the rest of the world when it comes to industrial policy, and how can industrial strategy help Canada take serious climate action?
Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood, senior researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives focusing on international trade and climate change policy in Canada, sat down with the Perspectives Journal Podcast at the 2024 Progress Summit in April to discuss Canada’s industrial policy vision.
Subscribe to Shift Storm: Transforming Work in a Changing Climate—a newsletter on work and climate change by the CCPA’s Hadrian Mertins-Kirkwood. In this newsletter, he breaks down all the latest research and news related to green jobs, a just transition and industrial policy from Canada and around the world.
-
The 2024 Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize is awarded to economist Dr. Isabella Weber for critical research on economic shocks and inflation that equip Canadian progressives with alternatives that push back against anti-democratic policy choices and help to empower workers.
Each year’s prize recipient also delivers the Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture. We invite you to join us on Thursday, May 30 for the 2024 Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture at Toronto Metropolitan University, at the Sears Atrium (3rd Floor, George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre), starting at 7pm EDT, followed by a reception with light refreshments.
Professor Isabella Weber is an economist and a leading voice against corporate profiteering, identifying economic shocks as the cover that the rich and powerful use to raise prices and put the working-class through an affordability crisis.
Her analysis has come to accurately illustrate the forces behind today’s price inflation, and why governments have not effectively addressed the affordability crisis
Weber has advised policy makers in the United States and Germany on questions of price stabilization, and is now a regular feature in the business papers. For her work on “Sellers’ Inflation,” she has been profiled in the New Yorker, Jacobin Magazine, and recognized as one of TIME100 Next by US Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Tickets to the 2024 Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture are now available: 2024-ellen-meiksins-wood-lecture.eventbrite.ca
Next Episode
Profits, Inflation and Survival in an Age of Emergencies with Isabella Weber
The 2024 Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture was held on Thursday, May 30th in partnership with Toronto Metropolitan University’s Faculty of Arts. A special thanks to TMU Interim Dean of Arts Amy Peng for hosting this Broadbent Institute event.
Ellen Meiksins Wood was one of the left’s foremost theorists on democracy and history, and often promoted the idea that democracy always has to be fought for and secured from below, never benevolently conferred from above. The Institute founded the annual Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize & Lecture to honour Professor Wood’s legacy as an internationally renowned scholar and to bring her work to new generations of Canadians.
The Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize is given annually to an academic, labour activist or writer and recognizes outstanding contributions in political theory, social or economic history, human rights, or sociology.
Each year’s recipient also delivers the Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture.
The 2024 Ellen Meiksins Wood Lecture was delivered by economist Professor Isabella Weber. She is awarded the 2024 Ellen Meiksins Wood Prize in recognition of outstanding contributions to political economy research that helps to defend the working-class in a time of economic crisis.
Her lecture, entitled Profits, Inflation and Survival in an Age of Emergencies: Why We Need a New Paradigm , demonstrates how prices on essentials have risen, while corporate profits have grown, due to economic shocks induced by pandemics, climate change, and other global events. The lecture helps to equip progressive movements with the information and analysis needed to push back against austerity, and helps to demonstrate why public policies such as public investment, wage gains, and price controls complement a policy toolkit to help ordinary Canadians out of today's affordability crisis.
You can also read the lecture and watch the full lecture with Q&A at perspectivesjournal.ca
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