Toronto’s Housing Crisis: A Massive Scam That We’re Paying For
By Victor Jiang
April 2025
The housing market in Toronto is a disgrace. Not just the prices that cause the rest of Canada to look affordable to America in comparison. It's that the city's housing market is, in reality, a broken system that is skewed against regular citizens—middle-class families, young professionals, and all others who cannot afford to drop a mini fortune on a shoebox condo or a half-cooked townhouse.
To break it down: Toronto real estate prices have become absurd. The average price for a detached home is $1.7 million across the city, and the rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Toronto’s core is pushing $2,300 a month—all for a box with a bed, a bathroom, and some questionable drywall. All this while the city’s population is booming. There are people from all over the world flocking to the world’s melting pot to live, work, and raise their family. They need homes, and the situation of the status quo is not helping.
Deducing the actors behind the situation is a matter of figuring out who has money at hand to obtain: wealthy developers and investors. To them the game makes sense. The key to stuffing their own pockets is building shiny, overpriced condos that sell off at high prices. They build homes as investments; luxury condos sit empty for months, sometimes years, because they are not even meant for regular people. Rather, they were built for the global elite who want a second or third property passively collecting value. Toronto’s melting pot is being ladled of its contents by foreign investors with additional cash flow, while the rest of the population’s needs are left with scraps.
That’s not all. Zoning laws and bureaucratic red tape from the city itself make it robustly difficult to build the homes we need. It often takes years for developers to gain the approval to even start a project on a small plot of land; this further pushes them to utilize their scarce development resources to maximum potential, ex. expensive condos.
Meanwhile, renters are being squeezed out of their own city. The rental market in Toronto is genuinely sad. One-bedroom apartments in the downtown core are barely affordable for an individual, nevermind a couple or a family. Even outside the downtown core, rents are rising at flaring paces, and people are left scrambling to find a place to live.
What are we supposed to do? Solving Toronto’s housing crisis requires more than just a quick band-aid solution. The system needs a serious overhaul, with significant administrative cooperation… and money.
First off, developers need to be held accountable. If one is going to build something in this city, they ought to stop catering only to the wealthy few who are just here to inflate property values. Instead, much more subsidization of contracts for the building of affordable housing that actually serves the people who need it most is required.
Second, zoning laws need to be curtailed. It should not take years to obtain a building permit to create affordable housing. We are wasting time—people’s dreams and livelihoods. If we want to increase the supply of homes and make housing more accessible, we need to start by clearing the red tape that is shutting down progress.
Third, further taxation of foreign investment in real estate shoots two birds at once. 10% in January 2025 is a step, but not enough to scare the accounts of wealthy international tycoons. Toronto is not a place for global capital to park its money. We ought to implement policies that target those who buy up property just to leave it empty. At the same time, we could use those taxes to fund affordable housing for the local population, creating a positive cycle.
Toronto’s housing market isn’t just a crisis. It is a massive scam. Developers, investors, and the city’s bureaucracy are all complicit in a system that prioritizes profit over our working class population and our renters.
To remedy this requires bold action that creates the right incentives and capacities for affordable housing over luxury condos and global investments. Afterall, it is time to stop pretending that the system is functioning and start building a city that actually works for everyone. The people of Toronto depend on it.