Tag Archives: urban neighbourhoods
Home values have doubled since 2000, report says
Geoff Nixon, CTVNews.ca
A new report suggests that the average home value has more than doubled in most of Canada’s big cities since the millennium.
Re/Max says it examined the value of homes in 16 major markets across Canada, calculating the changes that occurred from 2000 to 2010.
The real estate organization found that an average home in these markets was worth $339,030 as of last year, more than double the average price of $163,951 in 2000.
Re/Max says that Canadians have spent an estimated $450 billion on renovations over the decade, while more than $340 billion in residential building permits were issued.
This heavy-duty investment has helped build value in individual properties while an increasing number of people looking for housing has helped spur demand.
“They key to Canada’s housing evolution has been an increase in population,” says Michael Polzler, the executive vice president of Re/Max Ontario-Atlantic Canada Inc.
With further sharp population growth expected in the years ahead, Polzler says that portends “continued investment and continued growth in Canadian housing values.”
The hundreds of billions poured into rejuvenating homes and properties across the country have also created new trends in urban neighbourhoods, Re/Max says in its report.
In cities where space is scarce, residents are increasingly seeing small properties snapped up and turned into new structures, whether personal residences, townhomes or high-rise apartment buildings.
Condominiums have also become more popular and more varied in terms of what they can offer. Re/Max says buyers can now choose from mixed-use residential, live-work studios, lofts, townhomes and condo bungalows in major markets.
The 16 markets that Re/Max studied were: Greater Vancouver; Victoria; Kelowna, B.C.; Edmonton; Calgary; Regina; Saskatoon; Winnipeg; Ottawa; Greater Toronto; Hamilton-Burlington; Kitchener-Waterloo in Ontario; London, Ont.; Saint John, N.B.; Halifax-Dartmouth and St. John’s.
No markets from Quebec or the Territories were included in the Re/Max analysis.
———————————————————————————————————————
Contact the Jeffrey Team for more information – 416-388-1960
Laurin & Natalie Jeffrey are Toronto Realtors with Century 21 Regal Realty.
They did not write these articles, they just reproduce them here for people
who are interested in Toronto real estate. They do not work for any builders.
———————————————————————————————————————
Incoming search terms
Related posts:
- Home prices almost doubled in past decade Reuters TORONTO — Real estate markets across Canada posted solid...
- City beats suburbs in real estate values John Morrissy, Canwest News Service Better a city mouse or a country...
- Average home price dropped $10K in July The Canadian Real Estate Association said the national average price...
- January 2011 — Monthly Report Data from the Canadian Real Estate Association show generally balanced...
- GTA REALTORS Report August Resale Market Figures Greater Toronto REALTORS reported 7,542 sales through the TorontoMLS system...
The urban upset
Adam McDowell, National Post
Richard Florida sighs, deflated by submarine sandwiches.
A photograph of two Subway sandwiches lies on the table of Mr. Florida’s office at the Martin Prosperity Institute of the University of Toronto as he sits for an interview. He stares at the memo about cheese placement from Subway Australia’s head office to franchisees. What vexes the most celebrated urban planner of the moment is the fact that the memo replaces one black-letter directive (overlap the cheese) with another (tessellate the cheese — you can look it up).
Having spent years advocating making service jobs more challenging and rewarding, Mr. Florida would prefer to see “Sandwich Artists” encouraged to do the geometry for themselves. “This is exactly what drove General Motors into the ground,” he says, shaking his head. “Treating employees as cogs in the machine.” The problem with being a guru is no matter how persuasive or prescient your recipe may appear, the real world has a habit of fixing a whole other sandwich. For example, Mr. Florida’s adopted home of Toronto has not been behaving the way he would like in the postrecession era.
Toronto has figured prominently in Mr. Florida’s sermons since 2007, when U of T poached the urban theorist, originally from New Jersey, from Washington’s George Mason University. He says he has told Americans, “If you’re really interested in seeing a liveable, sustainable city, you’ve got to come to Toronto.”
An entire chapter of his most recent book, The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity, is dedicated to the greatness of Toronto. In particular, the number of young families living downtown impresses the transplanted American.
As the post-recession era unfolds, however, Toronto threatens to become one tough sandwich for the urban economics guru to swallow. Mr. Florida’s adopted backyard is exhibiting a few trends that would seem at first to make the “spatial fix” he predicts in The Great Reset more unlikely to happen.
As is his prerogative as an academic, Mr. Florida wears the hat of the prophet or the evangelist, depending on the circumstance.
In the book and in our interview, he likens imagining the orld a few decades from now to trying to predict the post-war suburban boom on the day of FDR’s inauguration. That being said, self-fulfilling prophecies often pan out, and The Great Reset urges business and political leaders to help realize a new, post-industrial “spatial fix.”
“One thing is certain,” he says in Chapter One. “[An] emerging way of life, which some already refer to as an impending ‘new normal,’ will be less oriented around cars, houses and suburbs.”
Back to some of those difficulties fitting Toronto into this theory:
1. People still want to own their houses
“Mobility and flexibility are key principles of the modern economy. Home ownership limits both,” Mr. Florida writes in a chapter of The Great Reset about a coming “shift toward renting.” A labour force attached to its houses is less competitive than an unfettered one, he argues.
He explains that a robust rental market has contributed to the success of cities from San Francisco to Washington and New York. “When 40% to 45% of your housing stock is rental, it enables you to adjust much better to economic changes,” Mr. Florida says.
Meanwhile, figures released by the Toronto Real Estate Board this year have shown the city’s housing market back to the usual: in other words, record-breaking frenzy. The May report, issued last week, revealed the average cost of a house in Greater Toronto has reached $446,593, or 13% higher than a year earlier.
The market is so strong, Toronto Real Estate Board president Tom Lebour says even people who expect to move from the city in a year or two often buy rather than rent, in order to build up some equity. Mr. Florida says advice about home ownership only applies to certain people and cities, and is mostly directed at the United States, which got more carried away during the boom of the 2000s than Canada.
“Folks who have a job that they know is stable, and they’re going to stay in the city for a long time, they should probably buy a house,” he says.
2. People still want to live in the suburbs
According to data released this week by Statistics Canada, 14% of residents in the child-rearing age range of 25 to 44 decamped from the core municipalities of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver between 2001 and 2006 and headed for the decidedly less Floridian suburbs.
Some 95,700 Torontonians swapped their 416 area codes to become suburban 905ers, compared with 27,500 who moved in the opposite direction.
While Mr. Florida may be associated with championing dense urban environments, his postrecession message has acknowledged that the suburbs are not going to be vacated.
“There’s no shortage of dyed-in-the-wool urbanists out there predicting the death of the suburbs and a return to denser, urban neighbourhoods,” he writes. “It’s a lovely, romantic notion, but it’s wrong.”
Homeowners and businesses with roots and investments in suburban locales are not about to make a reverse flight back to cities. Mr. Florida says one key to the Reset is “the rebuilding of older suburbs,” and he lauds “attempts that officials and planners and politicians are making to have more transit-oriented development, to rebuild our walkable communities, to retrofit our communities.”
Mr. Florida says projects like this are taking place in Mississauga, Markham and Ajax.
3. Suburban transit riders are still waiting for expanded public transit
In the remade suburbs of the future, Mr. Florida says “those who prefer to take public transportation or walk or ride their bikes to work will also be able to.”
In reality, Ontario’s governing Liberals curtailed Toronto’s plans to branch light rail transit into its inner suburbs in their March budget. The regional transit body was asked to find $4-billion in savings over five years, which forced shortening of the routes and lengthening of the construction timelines.
Last year, Mr. Florida and his colleague Roger Martin delivered a report to the Ontario government insisting it invest in the province’s workforce and infrastructure, stopping bailouts for failing industries. Mr. Florida declined to bite the hand of Premier Dalton McGuinty when asked to comment on the Transit City decision.
“I’m not an expert on transit. Look, I think we need a transit system that is seamless, that can get people from point A to B to C to point Z without having to go nuts — and certainly a transit system that connects us to our airports. We definitely need high-speed rail in this region,” he says.
The most fearsome challenge facing Toronto, according to Mr. Florida, is a familiar one to drivers. “The traffic in this city is terrifying.”
————————————————————————————————————–
Contact the Jeffrey Team for more information - 416-388-1960
————————————————————————————————————–
Related posts:
- Condos to remain an attractive option for many home buyers TD Canada Trust Canada’s condo markets have delivered a strong performance...
- Real estate deep freeze now hot thaw Sales in May and early June have outdone May and...
- Toronto Real Estate Forecast 2010 MLS® sales in the GTA will hit a record high...
- Real Estate Market Update On a micro level, the news pertaining to the Central...
- Dissecting the Condo Bubble Instead of running out and selling your condo before it's...
They need to keep people like you out of the hood
Now that house prices are on the rise again, residents in well-to-do neighbourhoods are breathing a sigh of relief: Their wealth clubs are secure
Sarah Hampson – Globe and Mail
They will never admit it, because it’s bad manners, not part of the civility to which they aspire.
But they may think it.
Now that house prices are apparently on the rise again, residents in gentrified and well-to-do neighbourhoods are likely to be breathing a sigh of relief: Their wealth clubs are secure.
It’s not just that property ownership is most people’s major investment, the value of which they would rather see rise than decline. A neighbourhood can become a sort of PLU club – as in People Like Us, those of the same range in income, taste in cars, designer dogs, hairdos, and tolerance for overpriced foods. And when prices tank, as they do in a recession, those who previously couldn’t afford to buy in can. The community, gated by a price barrier, is accessible to a wider range of people – potential riff-raff, to adopt the snooty word the self-described elite use among themselves.
I know this because, years ago, at the height of the recession in the early nineties, my then-husband and I moved with our three children into a large house on what is known in real-estate language as a “good street” in an upscale neighbourhood in Toronto. The house was in need of serious renovation, none of which we could afford right away.
It had sat on the market for months – too much of a challenge for most people, despite its reduced price. By the time we looked at it, the price had dropped to the basement. Accustomed to buying fixer-upper houses, we found it impossible to resist. It was a steal. And even though we had lived in the same neighbourhood, but on its periphery, in a small house on a much less desirable street (a busy train track was nearby), there was a definite sense from some of our neighbours, most of whom had lived in their big houses for years, that we had crashed the street club.
All I can say is thank goodness we were white, had postsecondary educations and nice kids, and didn’t put a gnome on our front lawn.
Oh, don’t get mad at me for pointing out our less-than-noble urban psychology. If it’s any comfort, such thinking is common and postmodern. “Research shows that residential segregation by socio-economic status (education, income and wealth) has increased over the past 25 years in Canada,” observes Brent Berry, a social scientist at University of Toronto.
In fact, as gentrification of neighbourhoods continues to be the hot urban pursuit of aspiring homeowners everywhere, academics have begun to look at the phenomenon with great interest.
“The surprise is that gentrification has mutated since the sixties and seventies,” explains Loretta Lees, professor of human geography at King’s College, London, and co-author of Gentrification , a book that looks at case studies of urban neighbourhoods in various cities around the world. “The pioneering generation was pro-diversity and anti-suburban. They didn’t like the sterility of suburbia. … But over time, the culture of gentrification and that ideology of pro-diversity and pro-multiculturalism changed.”
Gentrified neighbourhoods become “wealth clubs,” Prof. Lees says. “They are buying into a certain social and cultural capital. It’s about contacts at work, about working in a particular business, mixing at the same restaurants, sending your kids to the same school. There’s a sense that people are looking for people like themselves.”
They are exclusionary by nature and promote “social tectonics rather than social mixing,” Prof. Lees explains. Different socio-economic groups “rub past each other. There is no real social interaction.” An attitude of not in my backyard (or NIMBYism) emerges, she says, “as they attempt to push these groups out.”
The power of address is not hard to see – or feel. It’s why a question about where one lives in a city is among the first to be asked by others – sometimes even before the standard query, “What do you do for a living?” An address becomes a key signifier, a shorthand others use to place someone politically, socially or even intellectually.
And it’s also why, once in to the wealth club, there are certain expectations, an unspoken code that distinguishes those who belong from those who don’t. If you truly belong, then you conform, which is ironic, given how the wealthy often consider themselves worldly and open to new ideas. But the wealth club is focused inward not outward, generally. It can be painfully parochial. As a woman I know once said of people in Muskoka, the upscale cottage area north of Toronto, “You can tell what people are talking about by looking at them across a room. You don’t have to hear them to know they are discussing where their children go to school and what they doing for Christmas holiday next year.”
Prof. Berry sees it all in the context of typically modern human behaviour. “Because they are higher status than most of the population, segregation is viewed as desirable because it is a means through which to maintain relative advantage,” he explains.
Sigh. So much for all that progressive talk about how inclusive we all are. It’s only so much rhetoric. Social scientists worry about the self-segregation in urban neighbourhoods, “because of the problems that stem from both concentrated advantage and concentrated disadvantage,” Prof. Berry says.
But try telling people who have bought their expensive house in “good” neighbourhoods that their aspiration to live there is a problem.
They probably feel they have arrived, even if that means that the new address comes with the “privilege” of contracting out the lawn-mowing duties. In a wealth club, it is déclassé to be seen in one’s T-shirt and shorts mowing your own grass. Horrors!
————————————————————————————————————
Contact the Jeffrey Team for more information - 416-388-1960
————————————————————————————————————
Related posts:
- Toronto real estate booming again Buyers have returned with a vengeance, but experts predict the...
- Tone down the real estate speeches Tales of an overheated housing market show why Bank of...
- Where the smart money is heading As the market adjusts to new realities, here are the...
- Some pockets still warm as real estate market cools Prices jump in Trinity Bellwoods, Leslieville and Old Mill, fall...
- GTA house prices aren’t in collapse "Real estate is a great investment, and it's not a...
