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Primal force
Not all challenges are created equal. Some problems cost more, are harder to remedy and leave lasting damage when ignored. A small, unattended water leak inside a wall, over time, can destroy a building that has stood a hundred years or more. Some matters demand an immediate and robust response.
By any measure, Shire Hall has had a productive first six months in 2021. Big files. Little ones. And some behemoths—like the Official Plan rewrite, which had languished inside municipal hallways for a decade— have finally been wrestled across the finish line. It is an extraordinary record.
And yet.
Seventy-four new home building permits were issued so far in 2021. That pace suggests perhaps 150 new homes will be built this year in Prince Edward County. A few more houses than last year but still lagging 2017, 2018 and 2019.
Meanwhile, 81 properties traded hands in the County in June—a 22 per cent increase over the same month last year. More homes traded in June than were built in the first six months. The average price of a home sold here was more than $700,000 in June. That’s up a whopping 133 per cent since 2013 when the average house could be purchased for under $300,000. One hundred-and thirty-three per cent increase in the value of the average home.
Such market forces change communities. Particularly so when we lack the collective agility and policy nimbleness to respond quickly and effectively. It threatens the foundations of this community.
Understandably, folks look at rising house prices across Canada and conclude it is a national problem. And that’s partly true. Home prices are rising at a staggering clip across the country. But Prince Edward County is a category of its own.
In 2013, the average price for a house sold in Canada was $389,119, according to Canadian Real Estate Association. By June of this year, the average had increased to $670,000—a 48 per cent increase in a little under a decade. Even the red-hot Toronto market pales in comparison to the County in terms of the pace of rising house prices. Since 2013 the average home price in the city has increased by 108 per cent.
A nation wrings its hands over affordability and the future of cities where young people and first-time homebuyers are shut out of the opportunity to own a home. Few folks worry about Prince Edward County’s skyrocketing house prices. But we should.
We are more exposed. And less resilient. And the pressures are greater.
We are an older population, and we are growing older faster than most other jurisdictions in the world. Worse, the number of children in Prince Edward County is expected to decline over the next 25 years, according to Statistics Canada projections. Indeed, the County comes up for special mention for most anaemic population growth forecast in the province at just under nine per cent population growth over the next decade and a half.
These trends, unless reversed soon, will have dire implications for our schools, health care services and affordability in this community. Ultimately, they will impair the local economy by choking the supply of workers, investment and creativity. These factors tend to feed on each other until the transformation to a gilded haven for the wealthy is complete.
How to respond? Build more homes. Faster. Get out of the way of homebuilders. This is true in Canada—but utterly imperative in Prince Edward County. For more than 15 years, this community has dithered and stalled as market forces blew into the County and twisted the housing market into something few recognize any longer.
For 15 years, demand for homes has vastly outstripped the supply. It has resulted in folks bidding up the few homes that come on the market. Every year the County slips out of reach for a greater number of folks. Lifelong residents are displaced by newcomers. Cultural pressures get magnified.
Add to this mix a generation who have overextended themselves to pay for these escalating house prices—who have never known real estate price to fall—who have never known inflation. A few upticks in interest rates and their mortgages will become unmanageable.
When it all collapses in on itself, we will tell ourselves it was the bank’s fault or a failure of the market. Somebody else did this to us. So, let it be stated clearly before then: the failure, at least in part, was that our central planning authorities’ inability to process new homebuilding files at a pace anywhere near the demands of the market. The problem was us. There are consequences to ignoring overpowering market forces.
For a decade or more, Shire Hall assured homebuilders it was committed to doing better—to streamlining the process to get more homes started. But there is little to show for all this talk.
We continue to issue new home building permits at a snail’s pace. Another summer is slipping away, and while a few basements are being dug—mostly in Picton— hundreds of potential new homes are languishing in the procedural swamp.
Do not read this to suggest that community safeguards, scrutiny and control ought to be scrapped in favour of the wild west. Picking up the pace does not mean setting aside standards and long-term community interests.
But let us understand clearly and explicitly that— even if inflation doesn’t return as a hurricane of wealth destruction—our inability to meet the demands of market forces will continue to contort and change Prince Edward County until we wake up one day to find we’ve become clones of one another—a homogenous collection of Audi-driving seniors with vague memories of King and Bay and the persistent sense that gravity used to be more reliable.
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