Toronto’s rent crisis: Minimum wage would have to hit $40 an hour for workers to be able to afford to live here, report finds
Toronto’s rent crisis: Minimum wage would have to hit $40 an hour for workers to be able to afford to live here, report finds
Economic think tank report says the minimum wage needs to be $33.60 an hour for a worker to afford a one-bedroom apartment in Toronto — $40 an hour for a two-bedroom apartment
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/1678577
Obviously there is the housing crisis, but housing prices are crazy in most huge metros like this. The best way to combat this IMO is to make it easier to get into the city from outside so people can live further away without worse commutes. And the only way to accomplish this is to drastically improve the public transit in and out of the city.
I recently moved out of Markham, from my old place to union station it would be 1.5hr bus ride, a 1hr car ride with traffic, and a 20min car ride without traffic. Lowering that bus ride would directly lower the with traffic number too.
Its not just big metros that are having rental market crisis. My hometown has a monthly 9% increase in the cost of apartment rentals and has for months now. And we're far from a metro of any kind. Apartments that went for 600/month in 2021 are going for 1500 or more a month now. And a lot of currently available units are even worse off than that.
People are already commuting regularly from Kitchener, where housing also isn't cheap. Agree that we need faster and better public transit, but Ontario as a whole is in a cost of living crisis that I don't think better public transit is going to solve.
I feel like even if they had just prioritized the rail line growth in the early 2000s we'd be fine. Barrie is just starting to get their second line so there can be two way trains all day. All of the other Toronto suburbs need to have dedicated rail service accompanied by densification near those stations.
Barrie is also starting to get really expensive with regards to housing.
Explains why the mayor with an affordable housing plan got elected!
I see the Citadel has found a way to encourage the poor to leave
In my opinion, the problem is that for the past 50 years, we spent all our time to build beautiful subburbs and parking lots. The city has not expanded as much as it should have been and now, we reap the consequences of unsustainable cities.
Subburbs exists because the city generate a lot of wealth and yet, for some reason, we keep building big box store, big parking lots and single family houses.
I don't think the solution is to build more or raise the minimum wage. The solution is to make the city denser and probably bulldoze the fuck out of the subburbs to actually make cities that have a high value per acres.
Economic think tank doesn't realize that a two-bedroom apartment would probably be shared between two people.
The solution, as it always is, is to increase density everywhere. Increased density supports more transit, which decreases traffic and allows for faster commutes.