More government action needed to help make housing more affordable in Canada, economists say

Vancouver has built a ton of housing and yet prices have not dropped. The way things are, they won’t drop, unless government changes course and creates policy designed to slowly turn the ship around, according to economists.

There is a common narrative that if Vancouver, for example, were to greatly increase its supply of new housing, prices would come down. The problem, goes the theory, is that Vancouver is just not building enough. But that’s not quite the story, say economists Paul Beaudry and Jeremy Kronick, who just released a paper titled Making Housing More Affordable in Canada: The Need for More Large Cities, for the C.D. Howe Institute.