The vast majority of new purpose-built rental housing in Canada relies on CMHC-insured loans to make them financially feasible. In 2024, CMHC estimated that their construction financing programs backed an estimated 88% of new rental starts across the country.

But anyone in the industry will tell you that the terms in which these loans are made available to developers are constantly changing. And I think it's pretty clear that many of the changes being made are intended to push, maybe force, developers into building some percentage of affordable homes as part of their projects.

At the political narrative level, this makes sense: Canada needs more affordable housing. But it's important to remember that homes pegged to below-market rents are not financially feasible to build on their own. So, unless equivalent subsidies are being somehow provided, the remaining market-rate homes will be forced to shoulder the additional costs.

We talk about this a lot on the blog (see inclusionary zoning posts), and I don't see it as an equitable solution. But there's also the problem of it further choking off new housing supply. And my sense is that that's exactly what is happening. It's only getting harder to underwrite new rental housing — certainly in cities like Toronto.

This will have the opposite effect on overall affordability. It also increases the probability that my supply predictions will prove roughly correct. I can't see a world where new rental supply is able to step up and fill the gap being left by new condominiums, a large portion of which was serving as new rental housing.

Toronto is on a path toward a severe housing shortage, and it's very hard for the private sector to do much about it in the current market environment. When that will change remains to be seen.

The Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area is expected to see 6,821 new rental homes completed this year. This is a "multi-decade high", according to Urbanation's latest rental report. Indeed, you need to go back to the 1970s to get rental supply figures of this magnitude.

A big part of this has to do with the fact that we are now taxing rental housing less. Toward the end of last year, the federal government removed their portion of the HST on new rental housing and, then in November, the province of Ontario followed with theirs.

This was "a big first step" for the industry, according to leading apartment developers like Fitzrovia.

But there's another reason that many developers are now looking to purpose-built rentals:

I came across the above floor plan over the weekend. I reshared it on Twitter and there was then a pretty good discussion about what people like and don't like. I mean, who doesn't like looking at floor plans?

The suite is 790 square feet with 2 bedrooms and 1 bathroom. It rents, at least according to Bobby's original tweet, at $2,600 per month. That's $3.29 per square foot. I'm guessing that the apartment is in Philadelphia solely based on Bobby's location.

The divisive thing in this floor plan is the two inset bedrooms. Some people don't like these. But designing a good floor plan is like working through a puzzle. You have all these constraints (some of which are just personal preference) and you have to find ways to work around them.

When you're working with a deep urban floor plate, you pretty much have no choice but to design floor plans with inset bedrooms. Otherwise, the suites get too big and they stop making economic sense. I have talked about this a few times before on the blog.

So what you do is "bury" the bedroom(s) and keep the main living space as open as possible. In this case, the living/dining dimensions are about 17' wide x 10' deep. So a pretty good size, and certainly a very good width.