Toronto

Carney's Canada Will Devolve into Feudalism

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Canada may have severed its feudal ties less violently, but like America, it experienced far less sustained aristocratic domination than either of its two mother countries, France and Great Britain. But now, particularly with the rise of the ultimate establishmentarian, Mark Carney, as prime minister, Canada’s feudal future seems increasingly assured.

Carney’s election places power in the hands of the “ultimate Davos man,” a habitue and beneficiary of the elite financial and real estate. He is a reliable advocate for the kinds of strenuous climate, tax and regulatory policies undermining Canada’s middle class.

Canadians like to boast that their country is more egalitarian — in terms of distribution of wealth — than the United States. And to be sure, America’s more ruthless capitalism tends to create both a great many winners and a lot of losers, with the middle classes struggling in between. Yet, despite the aspirations of Trumpian fascism, it has been Canada, and notably the Liberals, who allow the clerisy — the modern-day Church — and the bureaucracy, to limit free speech, a classic fascist tactic.

But the essence of feudalism lies in the marginalization of the middle and working classes. Here, Canada is failing; its per capita income relative to the United States has been slipping for years, and is now at the lowest level on record. Nor is it living up to its oft-repeated egalitarian image. Rather, today, Canada is well on its way to feudalism, having its highest income inequality ever recorded, with the top 20 per cent of households holding more than two-thirds of all wealth, while the bottom 40 per cent holds only 2.8 per cent. At the bottom, notes the left-leaning Policy Options magazine, up to one-in-four Canadians suffer from “a poverty level standard of living.”

Canada not only lacks corporate headquarters, but it is also hardly an entrepreneurial hotbed like the United States. Canadian small businesses, notes one recent analysis, are less productive than those in the U.S., one reason why few, particularly in manufacturing, become large. A paper by the Business Council of Alberta identifies trade, financing, institutional, regulatory, or taxation constraints. Overall poor productivity, particularly among high end workers, also contributes to Canada’s mediocre performance.

Not surprisingly, job creation outside government employment has been meagre. Overall, as the bureaucracy has thrived under the Liberals, the people, in general have not. In 2002, Canada’s GDP per capita was about 80 per cent of the U.S.’s, but has dropped by 2022, to 72 per cent of that of its neighbour to the south.

But perhaps nothing so reflects Canada’s feudal dilemma than housing. Despite being a country with enormous reserves of land, even in British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec, Canadian climate and regulatory policies, coupled with high levels of immigration, have made building new homes extraordinarily expensive by putting more pressure on an already inadequate supply. Although immigration levels may now be reducing, a surge of migrants, including those fleeing the Trump immigration policies, is already overwhelming border cities like Niagara Falls.

In this shift towards oligarchy, homeownership and investment profits play a major role. This is particularly true in terms of housing, where the Liberal party has long championed “urban containment,” a policy that seeks to limit suburban and exurban development while promoting dense urban growth. The result, notes a new study by demographer Wendell Cox, has been housing prices that, in terms of the relationship between median home prices and household income, are increasingly out of reach for the average Canadian.

Immigration, key to Canada’s population surge, has contributed to this shortage. While the country’s working population swelled by a record 3.7 per cent at the start of this year, housing starts remained essentially flat. At one housing start for every 4.9 people entering the working-age population, “there is no precedent for a housing supply deficit of this magnitude,” notes National Bank of Canada economist Stéfane Marion. The biggest losers have been people under 40, for whom the homeownership rate has dropped to around 50 per cent, almost 10 per cent less than a decade before. It also helps to have wealthy parents who own a home; children of homeowners are twice as likely to acquire a home themselves.

If you wish to live in Canada’s two great international cities, and are not of aristocratic stock, it’s getting tough to get shelter. Four of the six major markets in Canada have a median multiple — a ratio of the median house price by the median gross (before tax) annual household income — of 5.4, considerably higher than the U.S.’s 4.8. Vancouver now ranks fourth among all anglophone markets at 11.8, behind Hong Kong, Sydney, and San Jose. Toronto, at 8.4, stands as the second-least affordable market in Canada and ranks 84th out of 95 markets in international affordability, with a severely unaffordable median multiple of 8.4. As late as about 1990, national price-to-income ratios were “affordable,” at 3.0 or less in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

This pattern severely restricts homeownership, which has been declining since 2021. Not surprisingly, rates are lower in both Vancouver and Toronto than in much of the country. Clearly densification, the preferred growth option of the elites, does not help a housing shortage or reduce prices as Patrick Condon of the University of British Columbia has shown. Indeed, now Vancouver is now producing less-than-half the housing units needed to meet demand, one reason for the high prices even in a weak economy. Condon, an eloquent advocate of densification, cites the “indisputable” evidence that “upzoning” increases the value of land (by increasing the development value).

Concentrations of property and wealth are likely to worsen under the renewed Liberal regime. Planners and climate activists, as in California, a place which almost rivals Toronto and Vancouver in their progressive domination, will likely get even stronger with “net zero” devotee Carney in charge. Similarly, industries that tend to create high-wage jobs, notably in oil and gas, will find themselves constrained, leaving the big money to financial institutions and those firms who rely on protectionism to shield themselves from both Chinese and American competition.

It may comfort the current ruling elites in Canada to bloviate over Trumpian idiocy, but none of this will slow the country’s growing shift to feudalism. Blaming Trump may deflect the suffering public from identifying the real culprits, the property and financial elites, and their political operatives like Carney, whose preferred policies threaten to stymie the progress of most Canadians.

This piece first appeared at National Post.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: National Post.

Jews Are Discovering That Canada's Multicultural Utopia Isn't Safe

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 19:28:58 -0500

In the many summers my family spent in Quebec, at the farm owned by my wife’s uncle Morris and his wife Louise, I could see Canada in its best light. Morris, who grew up in the old Jewish ghetto of Le Plateau-Mont-Royal in Montreal, always expressed gratitude to Canada, a country that birthed his own success and provided security his Polish forebears never enjoyed. “Canada,” he would say, almost tearfully, “is a very good country.”

Morris died not too long ago, but I am glad he is not experiencing what is happening now. Of course, Montreal Jews experienced prejudice before: beatings on the streets by local toughs, boycotts of Jewish businesses and quotas at McGill. For much of the first half of the last century, the country’s politics were in large part dominated by the antisemitic three-time prime minister MacKenzie King, one of the most hostile western leaders to Jewish immigration before the Holocaust.

Today sadly all too much now reprises the 1930s, with governments standing by as rioters deface Jewish institutions across the country. Some of this comes from political extremists, but a key driver has been poorly vetted immigrants from countries with very different traditions. In what is the fourth-largest Jewish country (after Israel, the United States and France), 82 per cent of Canadian Jews feel less safe today than before the October 7 pogrom.

The Jews of Canada have been abandoned by the very forces — the Liberal party, the big cities and the universities — which once nurtured them. The Liberals’ tilt away from Israel parallels rising antisemitism within Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s partners in the NDP. The new drift was epitomized by Trudeau’s pledge to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he dared show up on the country’s tarmac. Such an action, he claimed, would show “just who we are as Canadians.”

There’s another word better suited for this: betrayal. We see some of this in the U.S. Democratic party but, for the most part, President Joe Biden and congressional leaders have restrained the anti-Zionist left. Oddly many American Jews expect president-elect Donald Trump to be far tougher on Islamic terrorists, expel foreign students breaking the law and protect besieged Jewish communities. Most Jews may dislike Trump for his crudity and nativistic leanings, but they supported him more than any GOP candidate since 2012, with huge margins among the Orthodox.

Canada’s Jews have also been shifting towards the Conservatives. Former prime minister Stephen Harper has long been well-regarded, and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, likely the next prime minister, has been outspoken in his support of both Israel and the security of Canadian Jews. As in the U.S., it’s the left that torments the Jews, not the right.

Canada’s Jews need new allies because they are losing the demographic battle, and inevitably some electoral influence. The Muslim share of the population has more than doubled since 2000 to roughly five per cent in 2021. Meanwhile the Jewish population of roughly 326,000 accounted for under one per cent in 2016. As Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly admitted, citing her own district’s demographics, numbers matter.

Quebec has long sought to lure French-speaking North Africans to make up for a diminishing workforce. Nationally, Canada’s broken immigration system does little to screen migrants, which has led observers to conclude the country is a haven for terrorists, war criminals and other undesirables. Jews in Canada, notes analyst David Mendelson, a Montreal native, are finding out how things can unfold in the multicultural utopia of an increasingly post-Christian Canada.

Read the rest of this piece at National Post.

Photo: Can Pac Swire via Flickr under CC 2.0 License

Demographia International Housing Affordability – 2024 Edition Released

Wendell Cox — Sun, 02 Jun 2024 20:28:58 -0400

Demographia International Housing Affordability assesses housing affordability in 94 major markets across eight nations (Australia, Canada, China, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore, United Kingdom and the, United States). The 2024 edition focuses on data from the third quarter of 2023.

Key Points

Ratings: The report uses a median price-to-income ratio (“median multiple”) to determine affordability.

Affordability Categories: Housing markets are rated from “affordable” to “impossibly unaffordable” based on their median multiple (Table (ES-1).

Geography: Housing markets are labor markets (which are also metropolitan areas or functional urban areas), largely defined by the “commuting shed.” Housing affordability comparisons can be made, (1) between housing markets (such as a comparison between Adelaide and Melbourne) or (2) over time within the same housing market (such as between years in Adelaide).

Variations within Nations: The report emphasizes that affordability often varies significantly between markets within the same country. National averages aren’t always representative.

Housing affordability in 2023 is summarized by nation in Table ES-2.

International Housing Affordability in 2023: In the US, the most affordable market was Pittsburgh (PA), with a median multiple of 3.1, followed closely by Rochester (NY) and St. Louis (MO-IL) at 3.4, with Cleveland (OH) at 3.5. Rounding out the most affordable ten markets also includes one Canadian market, Edmonton, plus Buffalo (NY), Detroit (MI), Oklahoma City (OK) at 3.6, Cincinnati (OH-KY-IN) and Louisville (KY-IN) at 3.7. Singapore at 3.8 was also moderately unaffordable, along with, in the UK, Blackpool and Lancashire, and Glasgow at 3.9.

The Housing Affordability Crisis: Causes and a Path Forward

Middle-income households face rapidly escalating housing costs, which is the primary cause of the present cost-of-living crisis. For decades, home prices generally rose at about the same rate as income, and homeownership became more widespread. But affordability is disappearing in high-income nations as housing costs now far outpace income growth. The crisis stems principally from land use policies that artificially restrict housing supply, driving up land prices and making homeownership unattainable for many.

Urban containment policies (greenbelts urban growth boundaries, densification) are designed to limit sprawl and increase density. While well-intentioned, these policies severely constrict the land available for housing. In constrained markets, higher land values translate to dramatically higher house prices.

Economic Dynamics

Land values naturally increase closer to urban centers. Urban containment policies are associated with abrupt value spikes at established boundaries. Research confirms this, finding land prices inside urban containment boundaries can be 8-20 times higher than outside.

New Zealand's Reforms: A Model

New Zealand provides a hopeful path forward. Recognizing the crisis is rooted in high land values, new policies are proposed to open up sufficient land to accommodate demand.

A Focus on People, Not Places

The housing crisis demands prioritizing the well-being of people over abstract planning ideals. The planning orthodoxy, while aimed at improving cities, has worsened affordability. This undermines the economic opportunity essential for thriving middle- and lower-income households.

Elaboration and sources are in the full report. Click here to read and download the full report.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Lead image: Demographia International Housing Affordability — 2024 Edition cover photo from New Matilda used under CC 2.0 License.

Trudeau, Biden Paying Political Price as the West Turns Against Immigration

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 21 May 2024 20:28:58 -0400

U.S. President Joe Biden, in one of his regularly inept utterances, recently castigated Japan and other East Asian countries for being “xenophobic,” compared to the relatively immigrant-friendly United States. The president surely made no friends, but actually spoke something of the truth, or perhaps more of a half-truth.

As Biden suggests, western immigration receiving countries like the U.S., Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom have long benefited from mass migration. Canada, for example, ranks eighth among receiving countries, but has a considerably higher percentage of foreign born citizens than its much more populous neighbour.

With the lowest fertility rate in history, without immigration, Canada would now be facing the kind of population decline now looming in much of East Asia, notably China. Statistics Canada has recently indicated that immigration accounts for up to 97.7 per cent of Canada’s population growth.

This shift relies on the pool of migrants predominately from developing countries that is projected to average 2.2 million a year globally through 2050. To some, as the Brookings Institute suggests, the West’s “last hope” to forestall demographic and economic decline lies in mass migration from African countries.

Certainly, population decline is not good for economies. Japan’s long economic slowdown has occurred with a labour force that has been declining since the 1990s and will be fully a third smaller by 2035. In China, where hospital delivery rooms are closing in many hospitals, the working-age population (those between 15 and 64 years old) peaked in 2011 and is projected to drop 23 per cent by 2050 when almost half of China’s population will be over 60, a percentage far greater than in the U.S. or much of Europe.

Driven by ultra-low fertility rates, the labour situation is particularly acute in Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. Outside China, these countries no longer out-perform the United States, although they still grow faster, for the most part, than both Canada and the United Kingdom.

For western countries, including Canada, a shrinking workforce creates an unsustainable future for the younger generations. For the OECD as a whole, the dependence ratio of older people (i.e., the ratio of those aged 65 to those aged 20-64) will rise from the current figure of 22 per cent, to 46 per cent in 2050. The United States already faces a massive public pension crisis, which is expected to get much worse by 2035.

Yet, if mass immigration creates opportunities, often overlooked are the broader, and more complex, economic, social, and political ramifications. Contrary to President Biden’s assertions — backed by reliable party organs like the Washington Post — more immigration does not automatically make a country more economically productive, but could simply expand the economy to meet the need of a growing population.

Read the rest of this piece at National Post.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Taylor Atkinson via Flickr in Public Domain.

Toronto Falls Into Pit of Urban Decline that's Plagued U.S. Cities

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 20:28:58 -0400

For years, American urbanists and city planners have looked at Canadian cities with envy, as they had managed to avoid the searing decline of their American counterparts. And Toronto was where the late Jane Jacobs chose to make her home, largely due to her enthusiasm for urban neighbourhoods.

But more recently, the Greater Toronto Area has been showing signs of the urban ills that are commonly associated with city life south of the border. Carjackings, for example, have boomed; one recent victim was Maple Leafs star Mitch Marner.

Last year, CTV reported that downtown infrastructure has been deteriorating, as have cleanliness and order, which were once the city’s strong suits. Thomas Caldwell, chairman of Caldwell Investment Management Ltd. and former governor of the Toronto Stock Exchange, took out an ad in the Globe and Mail last fall describing Toronto as a “declining city.” Even with the pandemic gone, Toronto restaurants have reported declining customers for in-person dining.

Toronto’s downtown malaise, which is mirrored in other Canadian cities, reflects in part the accelerating decline of what Jean Gottman once called the “transactional city” — a place defined largely by high rise offices. In the United States, office occupancy has been declining since the turn of the century.

This crisis has been made worse by planning policies, which are common throughout Canada’s largest cities, that limit suburban growth, the normal way cities have long expanded. Seeking to squelch the development of new single family homes, planners have targeted the aspirations of Canada’s young families. This has had two unintended effects: making housing in and near the city more expensive; and, ironically, chasing people even further away to the far fringes of the region and beyond.

According to Demographia’s 2023 survey of 94 major housing markets around the world, Toronto was the 10th least affordable. The region’s price-to-income ratio (“median multiple”) has increased from 5.2 in 2010, to 9.5 today, making Toronto more expensive than virtually any American city outside California and Hawaii.

For its part, Vancouver had the third-worst median multiple according to Demographia’s survey, trailing only Hong Kong and Sydney. Vancouver’s price-to-income ratio has increased from 5.3 in 2005 to 12 in 2023. Imagine this: Vancouver is pricier than London, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago.

Read the rest of this piece at National Post.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Toronto Views, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Comparing Canadian and U.S. Metropolitan Areas

Wendell Cox — Sun, 27 Aug 2023 20:28:58 -0400

Canada and the United States are among a minority of national governments that formally designate metropolitan areas. Metropolitan areas are labor and housing markets which include a core urban area (built up or developed area) as well as rural territory from which workers commute in large numbers to jobs in the urban area. The concept is illustrated in Figure 1, which uses Paris as an example. Other countries, such as Japan, Brazil, and France also formally designate metropolitan areas.

Metropolitan Areas: More Rural than Urban

Usually the land area of metropolitan areas is overwhelmingly rural, with only a small portion being in the core urban area. According to data from the 2021 census, 87% of the land area in Canada’s metropolitan areas was rural, with only 13% being urban development. Similarly, the data from the 2010 Census indicated that 81% of the land in US major metropolitan areas was rural, with only 19% being urban development. The Paris metropolitan area was 83% rural and 17% urban in the early 2010s.

This article compares Canadian and US major metropolitan areas (1,000,000 plus population) analyzing the last five years of available data (2017 to 2022). In 2022, 190 million people lived in the major metropolitan areas of the United States, while 18.5 million lived in Canada’s metropolitan areas (“census metropolitan areas”). Thus, about 10 times as many people live in major US metropolitan areas as in Canada. Moreover, there are 56 major metropolitan areas in the United States and six in Canada, a similar 10 to 1 ratio.

The Largest Metropolitan Areas

The largest metropolitan area in Canada or the United States is New York, with a population of 19.6 million in 2022. Los Angeles is second, at 12.8 million. Chicago is third at 9.4 million and has been losing population in recent years, raising questions about whether the metropolitan area will ever achieve megacity status (10 million). Dallas-Fort Worth ranks 5th, at 7.9 million, with nearby Houston at 7.3 million. Toronto is the only Canadian metropolitan area ranking in the top 10, with a population of 6.7 million (Figure 2).

Measured in population, Toronto is more significant in relation to Canada than New York is to the United States. The Toronto metropolitan area has 17.3 percent of Canada’s population. The New York metropolitan area has 5.8% of the US population, two-thirds less of the national population share than Toronto (Figure 3).

Population Gains and Losses

Dallas-Fort Worth is the fastest growing major metropolitan area in the two nations, adding 606,000 new residents in the last five years. Toronto was the second fastest growing metropolitan area, adding 468,000 residents. The Dallas-Fort Worth annualized growth rate was 1.60% from 2017 to 2022, slightly above the Toronto rate of 1.46%. Over the last year (2021-2022), Dallas-Fort Worth retained the lead, adding 170,000 residents compared to Toronto’s 138,000 and retaining its slim lead in percentage population gain of 2.19% to 2.11%.

Houston was close behind Toronto, at 441,000. Atlanta, Austin, New York, and Phoenix gained more than 250,000. Vancouver was the second Canadian metropolitan area in the top ten, ranking ninth, with an increase of 226,000 (Figure 4).

Four Canadian metropolitan areas ranked among the top ten in percentage growth. Austin had largest percentage population increase from 2017 to 2022 at an annual rate of 2.77%. Jacksonville and Raleigh followed Austin. Calgary was the highest ranking Canadian metropolitan area, ranked fourth, with a annual population growth rate of 1.98%. Orlando gained 1.87%. Edmonton ranked sixth with a 1.76% rate, followed by Nashville, at 1.75%. Vancouver ranked eighth at 1.67%, Dallas-Fort Worth, at 1.60% and Ottawa-Gatineau ranked 10th at 1.59% (Figure 5). Toronto, Canada’s largest metropolitan area, ranked 12th in percentage population growth, at 1.46% annually.

California accounted for four of the five largest population losses. Los Angeles lost 394,000 people between 2017 and 2022. This is a stunning result for metropolitan area that had grown quickly for decades. San Francisco lost the second largest population loss (132,000), while Chicago lost 72,000. San Jose and San Diego had the fourth and fifth largest population losses. No Canadian metropolitan areas were among the those with the smallest gains (Figure 6).

California similarly dominated the lowest percentage population changes. Los Angeles had an annual population loss rate of 0.60%. San Francisco’s loss rate was 0.57% and the San Jose loss rate was 0.57%, New Orleans lost 0.40% annually. San Diego lost 0.26%. No Canadian metropolitan areas were in the bottom 10 in percentage change (Figure 7).

Prospects

According to Statistics Canada, Canada was the fastest growing G-7 nation in 2022, and had a 2.7% annual growth rate in calendar 2023. This was the first year that Canada added more than one million residents in its history (1,050,000). Meanwhile, population growth was significantly muted in the United States in calendar year 2023, adding 1.571 million residents, with a growth rate of only 0.5%. One factor was Canada’s increased immigration targets.

But both countries are experiencing a significant movement of people out of the larger metropolitan areas to smaller areas and even rural areas. In the United States (Figure 8), domestic migration has shifted strongly away from the largest metropolitan areas (with some notable exceptions, such as Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, and Phoenix). In Canada, the census metropolitan areas (over 100,000 population) lost a net 252,000 internal migrants from 2017 to 2022. while the census agglomerations (populations from 10,000 to 100,000) gained 125,000. The big surprise was that the largest gain was in the under 10,000 category, where the gain was 127,000 (Figure 9). Both national trends are in contrast to nearly opposite trends before the middle of the last decade.

Photo: Peace Arch, Blain, Washington and Surrey, British Columbia. By U.S. Embassy and Consulate, via Flickr, in public domain.

Richard Bilkszto Won't Be the Last Victim of the Diversity-Industrial Complex

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 17 Aug 2023 12:14:29 -0400

The suicide of former Toronto school principle Richard Bilkszto, 60, was one that many of his associates believe was prompted, at least in part, by vicious attacks from an “anti-racism” instructor. After he differed on her assessment of pervasive structural racism, she held up his comments as an example of “white supremacy.” In the progressive-dominated education bureaucracy, this stands as among the worst of sins.

Bilkszto ran into the buzz saw of an ever expanding “diversity-industrial complex” that, though it harasses some, also provides high wage employment to a generation of college graduates. These same people reacted vehemently against the recent United States Supreme Court ruling against racial quotas, which all too often allowed minority students to qualify for the most elite colleges, even if they had inferior grades and test scores. Some schools’ large diversity departments are already looking at how to get around the law; while corporations, ever vigilant to please the chattering classes, look for ways to continue quotas and race preferences, despite the court’s decision.

The new racialist movement rests its case on a particular take on history. The argument is that since white Europeans exploited non-whites on a global scale, their descendants must pay for past wrongs. The fact that non-white empires — the Chinese, Japanese, Egyptian, Aztec, African — were at least equally as brutal seems to have little purchase. Also down the memory hole lies the benefits the West has bequeathed in terms of technology, medical advances and the introduction of democratic legal systems.

The New York Times’ 1619 Project epitomizes this distorted view of history. The report insists that the American Revolution was conducted largely to preserve a slave economy that was its alleged economic core. The study largely dismisses such things as the role of mostly slave-free New England as the instigator of the rebellion, along with the role of the abolitionist movement and the Civil War, the most devastating war in history to end slavery, largely fought by white northerners. Many seem to have forgotten Marx’s insight that the South would lose because the slave economy was no match for the North’s industrial and agricultural prowess.

The 1619 thesis has been widely rejected by historians both left and right, but still won a Pulitzer and its primary author, Nikole Hannah-Jones, has become an iconic figure on college campuses, earning over US$500,000 (C$672,000) in speaking fees over the past few years. More importantly, this sloppy historical effort has what in show business they call “legs,” with an estimated 4,500 classrooms teaching it as a factual text of the country’s origins.

Canada, as the Bilkzto case reveals, is stepping into a similar morass. To be sure, any decent version of Canadian history addresses the ill-treatment of First Nations people. But what may well be sometimes exaggerated accounts should not supplant a basically proud history — one, critically, that’s largely free of the horrors of slavery.

Read the rest of this piece at National Post.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo credit: @SOSTDSB via X

Remote and Hybrid Work Continues Appeal in the US and Canada

Wendell Cox — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 20:28:58 -0400

Despite the continuing pressure from employers for employees to work on-site, working from home continues at a strong pace. Just released data from WFH Research indicates that 41.3% of US workers worked at home at least part of the time between March and June 2023. Among these, 29.3% had “hybrid” work schedules, consisting of working at home part time. Another 12.0% worked full-time from home. This left 59.7% of workers on-site five days per week (Figure 1).

WFH also reports that 28% of full workdays were remote or hybrid during the first six months of 2023. This figure has barely changed from 30% or slightly below since the first quarter of 2022 six times the pre-pandemic level of 4.7 percent.

Reduced Downtown Activity

The nation’s downtown areas (central business districts or CBDs) had work forces — essentially people working on computers — particularly susceptible to being performed from home. They were also made up of people who previously took transit and suffered the longest commutes. The seven largest downtowns are in seven municipalities (cities, in contrast with metropolitan areas) that account for 60% of all the transit work trip destinations in the United States (New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Boston, Washington and Seattle). These cities have only seven percent of the nation’s jobs, according to American Community Survey data yet have nearly 10 times as large a share of transit work trip destinations than their share of employment.

Economic activity in these downtowns has fallen substantially and not returned to its former level, according to research at the School of Cities at the University of Toronto. Among the cities with the seven largest CBD’s New York which is the largest CBD in the US, has done the best, now 22% below its pre-pandemic level (based on mobile phone activity) as reported in April 2023. The weakest recovery has been in downtown San Francisco, the fourth largest CBD, now 69% below its 2019 level. Downtown San Francisco has experienced a steep decline in retail activity as well (see Photograph above).

Chicago, home of the second largest CBD in the United States, was down 57%. Philadelphia was down 49%, Seattle and Boston were each down 48%, and Washington was down 35% (Figure 2).

Among the CBDs outside the top seven, three had activity reductions compared to 2019 greater than 50%. These included Portland, with a loss of 59%, Minneapolis, with a loss of 56% and Atlanta, with a loss of 52%.

The average overall loss was 47% in the 15 downtown areas.

Demand for Working from Home Exceeds Supply

WFH research also reported that employees have a greater appetite for working at home than their employers. The differences with respect to one- and two-day schedules are relatively minor. However, more than 50% of employees would like to be able to work at home for three or four days, compared to the present situation. Forty percent of employees would like to be permitted to work at home five days per week, compared to the present situation (Figure 3).

CBD Activity Losses in Canadian Metropolitan Areas

The School of Cities research also provides data on larger CBDs in Canada. The three largest CBDs had the largest drop-in activity between 2019 and 2023. Toronto was down 54%, Montreal 52% and Vancouver 57%. The fourth largest downtown was in Calgary, for which data is not reported. Ottawa had the fifth lowest, at a 52% decline and tied with Winnipeg (Figure 4). The most favorable recovery was in Halifax, the one Maritime metropolitan area included in the data. The Maritimes have experienced a spurt of net domestic migration in recent years, which may have contributed to the better performance of Halifax (see: “Canadians on the Move to Smaller Communities”). The average recovery in the eight Canadian metropolitan areas was an activity loss of 49%. Statistics Canada reported that the decline in working from home from the peak of the pandemic was less in Canada than in the United States.

Remote and Hybrid Working Seems Here to Stay

The indications are that remote and hybrid working from home are here to stay. University of Toronto urban planning professor Richard Florida told Marketplace that “Remote work is just the latest technology that stretches the boundaries of metropolitan areas.” In other words, urbanization and labor markets are dispersing well beyond the metropolitan focus that has been dominant since -World War II, driven by the preferences of both present and future.

Photo:Shopping center location of the Nordstrom downtown San Francisco store, set to close by the end of August 2023, by author.

Ontario Land Use Policies Make Housing Unaffordable

Wendell Cox — Mon, 06 Mar 2023 20:28:58 -0500

A poll by highly respected IPSOS, released by BILD-GTA, shows a strong awareness of the Greater Toronto Area’s severely unaffordable housing.

In the 15 years from 2004 to the last pre-pandemic year of 2019, the median detached house price rose more than 160 per cent (inflation-adjusted), about 5.5 times the rise in the consumer price index. Obviously, something is wrong.

In the middle 2000s, the provincial government established the GTA greenbelt, where development is banned. House prices soon began a stratospheric rise, more than doubling relative to incomes by the last pandemic year (2019).

This isn’t surprising as virtually all markets with similarly severe affordability in our eight-nation Demographia International Housing Affordability report have adopted similar bans (such as Vancouver, San Francisco, Auckland, Sydney and London). These bans are associated with substantial land cost increases, often 10 or more times at their inner boundaries. As a result, substantially higher house prices can be expected where urban expansion (pejoratively called “urban sprawl”) is banned.

Meanwhile, the GTA appears to be exporting its new suburbs the province has banned. Toronto census metropolitan area (CMA) lost a net 260,000 intraprovincial migrants between 2016-17 and 2021-22. That many people live in the municipalities of Kitchener or Saskatoon. According to Statistics Canada, the CMAs within 250 km (such as Guelph, Peterborough or Belleville) gained a net 140,000 intraprovincial migrants.

Toronto need not bemoan “sprawl.” Toronto has the highest urban density (the population centre, which is the continuously built up urban area) in Canada, higher than U.S. leader Los Angeles and one-half higher than New York. It is also more than double urban planning icon Portland, Ore., and more than five times that of the least dense large United States urban areas.

The consequences of the ban are severe. Young people can generally not afford the very homes they grew up in, but they were affordable to their parents. Many lower-income households have insufficient incomes to afford the higher prices and add their names to social housing waiting lists. For example, waits in the city of Toronto are over 10 years for one and two bedroom units. For most younger households, a lower standard of living is likely; for some with lower incomes, it’s a transition into poverty.

Read the rest of this piece at Troy media. Reprinted by permission of Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

Photo: dispersed employment in suburban Toronto, by author.

Cities Have to Expand for House Prices to Fall

Wendell Cox — Wed, 21 Dec 2022 20:28:58 -0500

The Ford government’s plan to expand the land supply available for housing has evoked the usual dog whistles about “urban sprawl” by interests apparently unaware of the strong connections between an organically expanding city, housing affordability and upward mobility.

The reality is that the Toronto population centre — its built-up urban area — is already the densest in either Canada or the United States, at 3,100 people per square kilometre. It is about 15 per cent denser than Vancouver or Montreal and about the same density as the built-up urban areas of the European Union. Most people will be surprised to learn, however, that Toronto’s population centre covers only one-third of the Toronto CMA (or Census Metropolitan Area), most of which is in fact rural.

Everyone agrees the Toronto CMA is experiencing a severe housing crisis. Expanding the supply of land available for housing is crucial to ending the crisis. Restricted land supply has made it far more difficult for middle-income households to buy the housing they prefer. Many households have been forced to seek subsidized housing, for which waiting time in Ontario can be over ten years and reach as high as 37 years in the city of Toronto. It’s clear the crisis in housing affordability crisis has reduced standards of living and increased poverty.

The problem has been worsening since the middle 2000s, when the government of Dalton McGuinty enacted the “Places to Grow” program, with its greenbelt banning housing construction just outside the edge of existing development. This made the land market for housing much less competitive even as strong demand for housing continued. Not surprisingly, housing affordability began to deteriorate in the Toronto CMA. In 2004, the median-priced house was about four times the pre-tax median household income (a ratio called the “median multiple”). By 2021, the median price had risen to over 10 times median income.

There is no mystery here. International research shows that policies of urban containment, such as greenbelts and growth boundaries, are associated with large price increases. The eight-nation Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey that I have been publishing for 18 years showed, in the last pre-pandemic year (2019), that all markets with severely unaffordable housing had urban containment policies.

The cost of actually building a house does not vary that much across Canada. The Altus Group’s surveys show Toronto construction costs to be about one-third higher than Winnipeg’s. Yet houses in Toronto cost more than 250 per cent more than those in Winnipeg, with much of the difference being due to land and land-related costs. As the numbers suggest, Winnipeg does not engage in market-distorting urban containment.

Read the rest of this piece at Financial Post.

Wendell Cox is a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Winnipeg) and author of Demographia International Housing Affordability Index. He is also a contributing editor of newgeography.com."

Photo: Simon Carr via Wikimedia CC 2.0 License.