I live in Toronto and can speak to what's happening here. The financialization of housing is to blame. Most new builds are condos, many units are smaller than most people would want to have a family in.

https://thehub.ca/2025/05/17/chart-storm-five-graphs-on-torontos-historic-condo-market-collapse/

Some of the condo units for sale in Toronto are about 550 square feet, are cheaply made, have poor layouts and are listed for over $760,000; small, subpar quality, and expensive.

The quantity of unsold completed units has more than doubled compared to last year, marking the highest level of unsold completed units in Toronto since the first quarter of 1993. Experts at the real estate think tank Urbanation anticipate that the increase in completed and unsold inventory will persist in 2025, with an additional 2,411 unsold units expected to be finished by the close of 2025.

So what's being built is designed to meet investor interests but not community needs.

These units are also listed at incredibly high prices, so that if interest rates drop a bit, units lose the value they are listed at pre-construction, and quickly become negative assets from the perspective of a homeowner versus a long-term investor.

And all this is market-priced housing, not the subsidized housing we desperately need in addition to affordable and adequate market-based housing.

Affordable housing was a non-partisan issue before the financialization of housing in Canada in the 1990s