Ooh, Doug Ford will be cross! Home-builders, in the Toronto area in particular, say that a perfect storm of factors means that they are pausing, or even cancelling, new construction projects. This comes at the very same time as the Ford administration is trying to ramp up house-building in the province. He's gonna be pissed.
Developers say that increased costs of pretty much everything, from lumber, concrete and steel to labour, and a depressed housing market due to higher interest rates, an affordability crisis, and general uncertainty, mean that it has become almost impossible for them to make money. Therefore, many developers, who are already sitting on prime land ready for building, are putting plans on hold, and even sitting back on projects already started, in the hopes that things will turn around for them.
Now, I can't see interest rates going back down any time soon, and the inflation genie is not going back in the bottle (do they expect prices to actually go down?) So, we can probably expect that ugly undeveloped land to just sit there, and many of those blocks under construction could go very quiet for an unspecified period of time, cluttering up sidewalks and streets, and making the city look like some slum in a developing country.
Ooh, Doug! Of course, he could intervene and give developers a bunch of money. Oh, wait, he already tried that, didn't he?
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