Canadian Housing Observer 2010

In late-October, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation released the Canadian Housing Observer 2010.  I’ve finally given it a thorough read and am struck by some of the statistics.

The MLS average price of a home in Canada has almost doubled in the past decade.  In 2000, the figure was just under $164,000.  By 2009, it was just over $320,000.  Perhaps not surprisingly, during this same period, residential mortage credit by lending institutions in Canada more than doubled, from just under $432 billion to just over $936 billion. (Numbers such as these led David MacDonald to argue in an August 2010 CCPA paper that Canada is experiencing a housing bubble; I’ve blogged about that here.)

In 2006, just under 13 percent of Canadian households were considered to be in “core housing need” (which usually means that they are paying more than 30 percent of gross monthly income on housing).  But the figure for Nunavut was just over 37 percent, by far the highest of any province or territory.  And just over 20 percent of Aboriginal households across Canada are in core housing need.

Finally, there are just over 49,000 units of band housing in Canada.  More than 47 percent of those units are in need of major repairs (while only 7.5 percent of all housing units across Canada are in need of major repairs).  Moroever, almost 15 percent of band housing units built in the past decade are already in need of major repairs, while the corresponding figure for all housing units built in Canada over the past decade is roughly one percent.