Name me a major western metro area with jobs and a good standard of living that doesn't. I remember people banging the drums 10 years agho "come to Berlin, there's so much empty houses". Yeah, that changed quickly.
This is a good point. There must be one though that other cities can look up to. I would guess Singapore does a good job on these problems. I would be curious to hear of the best examples of large cities that have done a better job on housing.
Housing problems here are related to pricing, and only tangentially to quantity of construction. The issue is how cheap housing loans have been, how deregulated the real estate sales market, and how stupid the last 20 years of governments have been about a) how they regulate the housing market and b) what kind of housing gets built (mostly either sprawly suburban single family mc-homes way out in e.g. Vaughan or Mississauga etc. or tiny condos in Toronto proper which just get turned into speculative investments or airbnbs).
Mortgages here were too cheap for too long. Really, what people "buy" when they buy a home is a mortgage, not a house.
Because the government is importing a massive number of people relative to the country’s population and not building anywhere near enough housing. They ain’t slowing down any time soon so it’s gonna get even worse.