Okay. I'm just going to hold it up. Hopefully it works.
I know that Scotiabank appeared before this committee and talked about dwelling units per capita. It's such an easy, “meat and potatoes” starting point for this problem. The number of people who need somewhere to live and the places we have available for them—not necessarily available in the marketplace but just existing—is the logical starting point.
If you look at chart 2 of the slide deck I've shown, the distribution of Canada's population by age is very uneven. Fifty years ago, the median age in this country was 25, so half of the population were not likely to be homeowners or to have a place of their own, but as time has gone on....
When you look at 2021, you can see we are very much a middle-aged population. You have your boomers, your Gen-Xers and your millennials, who are all in or past their thirties, but not elderly. This creates a huge under-the-surface demand for what could be called “headship rate” I suppose, or having a place of your own, wherever that is on the housing continuum.
If you look at what we've been building over 50 years, as well—this is CMHC data, which hopefully you can see if you're following along at home—the yellow is apartment units. That's the majority of what we're building these days. There have been fewer single, low-density homes built in the last 20 years, which is fine, but for anyone following along in the slide show, in the middle of that chart, appropriately, are your townhomes and semi-detached homes—what's called “medium density” or “the missing middle”. That term was coined 10 years ago, and it's still as missing as it's ever been. We can't go around calling everything “units” and saying we're building enough units, when you have an increasingly middle-aged society and you're building more and more tiny condos.
What happens is that, with the data we track for the existing home market, the inventory all gets absorbed. To some extent, some subset of that inventory is available every year, and when you're getting five or 10 offers on some of these places, the demand is much stronger than the sales we're able to count. What happens is that the overall supply of listings.... If you were to go on realtor.ca today and look for a home for sale, there would be fewer pins on that map than there have ever been. That is the major supply issue we have, and it keeps falling.
That's out of a record housing—