it's still a trickle, but i'm starting to see a lot of for sale signs in the neighbourhood, suggesting the pandemic is starting to turn over into serious financial ruin for more and more people. while i don't have any desire to harm these people, their reliance on property as a wealth sink is a factor in driving up rent, and there is currently a bubble in the price of rent in windsor, which would not be anywhere close to average market rent under fair market conditions. if more people and more people are forced to sell at low prices due to the pandemic, that should burst the rent bubble and bring property values and subsequent rents back down to the level they were at a few years ago.

windsor can be a diploma mill college town for foreign students that couldn't get in anywhere else or it can be a retirement villa for people trying to escape the city without really escaping the city but it does not have enough housing supply to be both of these things, and attempts to be both of these things will just undo both of them as rising rents and property costs simultaneously repel retirees from toronto (who want to come here because it's cheap on a fixed income) and students (where high rents will undo some of the pull effects of the reality that foreign students coming into canada can enjoy some of the lowest entrance requirements in the world at the local university, which hardly appears to attract any local students at all due to it's atrocious reputation.).

i was hoping that it would be a collapsing industrial centre, ripe for revolutionary anarchism, but what once seemed like a promising epicentre has been taken over by the capitalist interests of students & seniors, and the banks funding their loans. it's disappointing, but it's what it is.

regardless, from a renter's perspective, a collapse in property values would be a godsend, right now, after so many years of unchecked increases in property values driving rent costs up to unsustainable levels, creating a bubble that needs to burst. in canada, the cmhc won't let bad assets tank the market like we saw happen in the united states in 2008; our system is structurally sound, and the regulatory safeguards to prevent the free market from running out of control and generating that kind of catastrophe are properly in place. but, all of that control at the ownership level will neither prevent a bubble in rent from developing, nor from it exploding in front of everybody.

so, if you start seeing piles of for sale signs go up, you should interpret that as a good news - it means property values are coming down as people flee the market, that supply is coming up and that decreases in market rent are imminent.