The Globe and Mail reports in its Tuesday, June 2, edition that what builders have to go through today to get a construction permit would be unrecognizable to anyone in 1975. The Globe's guest columnist David Graham writes that 50 years later, with twice the population, we are still putting up the same number of homes. CIBC economists Benjamin Tal and Katherine Judge explained the problem succinctly in a recent report, "Prices are too high to buy and not high enough to build." Every story about Canada's housing crisis is focused on "affordability," and for good reason. Families are squeezed. Young people are locked out. It's painful, but affordability is the symptom of an underlying disease. The disease is feasibility. If it's not feasible for the people who build conventional market housing to make a profit, they stop building. Private developers are the source of 95 per cent of Canadian housing supply. When they stop building, the consequences show up three to five years down the road, with less supply, tighter vacancy rates, higher rents and longer commutes for workers who can't live near their jobs. Canada is now one of the hardest places in the developed world to get a construction permit.