Here are a few Ontario / Toronto housing supply charts taken from this recent blog post by Mike Moffat (an assistant professor at Ivey Business School):

So what do these tell us?

Well, 2015 was a banner year for the supply of new apartments/condominiums in the City of Toronto. And supply, in general, has been ticking upward for apartments across the province.

But if you're in the market for a new single-detached, semi-detached, or row house, supply is on the decline in the Toronto CMA. You're likely going to have to go further out for that.

This, of course, makes sense. The Toronto CMA has been built out. Most of the new growth is now going to need to take place through intensification, which usually means apartments and condominiums.

Though obvious, I think all of this is an important reminder. Because the more difficult and the more expensive we make it to build in our already built-up areas, the more we are encouraging sprawl in "Ontario outside of Toronto CMA."

At the same time, we are also making it more financially challenging for families to remain in the city. We can talk all we want about 3-bedroom suites and ways to make them more accommodating to children, but that doesn't mean much if people can't afford them.

This Twitter thread by UC Davis Law Professor, Chris Elmendorf, is a good reminder that there can be a meaningful difference between actual completed homes and zoned land that might one day becoming new housing.

The point he makes is as follows: The state of California's housing needs allocation for the city of San Francisco is approximately 80,000 new homes over the next decade. In the past, cities could demonstrate that they were able to meet these targets through, as I understand it, some fairly loose assumptions. But more recently, amendments have made it such that the probability of new homes actually getting built needs to be considered.

San Francisco has been doing this and, according to Chris, the conclusion was that the city should upzone portions of the city -- primarily on the west side -- to allow for some 22,000 new homes. Sounds cool. But as part of this process, the city also hired an outside consultant to run indicative pro formas and assess overall development feasibility. This is what they found:

I haven't seen any of the actual numbers, but what this chart is saying is that nobody is going to develop on the west side of the city no matter what entitlements you put in place (tier 3 and tier 4 market areas). The only new development that is likely to take place is high-rise development over 24 storeys in the highest value submarkets (tier 1 and tier 2 market areas).

Based on this, the 22,000 new homes figure is probably closer to 0 new homes.

So 2021 was a pretty good year for condominiums here in the Greater Toronto Area. According to the latest data (Q4-2021) from Urbanation, this is what happened last year:

• 30,844 new condominium sales. This is a 69% increase compared to 2020, which saw 18,282 new unit sales.

• Fourth quarter alone saw 8,361 unit sales, which is the best quarter on record according to Urbanation.

• Unsold inventory dropped 26% year-over-year because sales exceeded the number of new project launches by over 4,000 units.

• Average price for an unsold condominium unit in Q4-2021 reached $1,322 psf, which is an 18% increase compared to the year before.

• Resale condominiums also did exceptionally well with 29,880 unit sales -- a 49% annual increase.

• All in all, some 60,000 condominium units were purchased last year in the GTA. Of course, some were ready to be lived in and some were future homes.