CONTAGION IN THE MARKETS? COVID-19 AND HOUSING IN THE GREATER TORONTO AREA 355 BUILT ENVIRONMENT VOL 47 NO 3 was still raging as we wrote this think piece. Much of it is articulated in ongoing discussions about personal household de- mand for more and less central living space during times of remote work, and perennial concerns about the relationship between density and contagion (frequently raised early in the pandemic but now largely de- bunked) (Barr and Tassier, 2020; Keil, 2020b). In each urban context, this meant that the types of changes likely to take place would be engaging with and reflective of ongoing trends. In some cases, as in the demise of Sidewalk Labs’ Quayside Project in Toronto, the economic crisis brought on by the pan- demic was ostensibly seen as an impedi- ment to pursuing grand housing develop- ments plans (Keil, 2020a). In this article, we present some pre- Covid-19 has changed the demand for hous- ing in significant but not universally predict- able ways. As part of general speculation on what would become of cities and urban life through and after the pandemic, pro- fessionals and scholars early on began to contemplate what the effects on housing could be (Safi, 2020). To some observers ‘the Covid-19 pandemic is not as much changing real estate as accelerating existing trends’ as in the case of dying malls being turned into residential real estate (Sisson, 2020). To others, the pandemic meant that cities entered ‘a period of massive social experi- mentation’ in which the housing markets would experience turmoil as would other dimensions of urban life and economies (Florida et al., 2020). The debate on how resi- dential housing markets would be affected Contagion in the Markets? Covid-19 and Housing in the Greater Toronto Area MURAT ÜÇOĞLU, ROGER KEIL and SEYFI TOMAR The Covid-19 pandemic has had crucial impacts on housing markets as working from home has become a new normal for certain economic groups. In this paper, we analyse the specific role the pandemic played in worsening the ongoing housing affordability crisis in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). The GTA has, in fact, been experiencing a housing crisis since the early 2000s. In this paper, we argue that this continuing affordability crisis stems from the economic growth model that was embraced in the late 1990s, and we discuss why the existing market-oriented housing model has failed. The economic growth model of the Toronto region depends on the convergence of the financialization of housing and massive suburbanization. Because of this, the new wave of suburbanization that has accelerated with the outbreak of Covid-19 is not a new phenomenon for the GTA. In the final analysis, we also illustrate that the ongoing Covid-related-suburbanization in the GTA has deepened the housing crisis as the region continues to be less and less affordable. Contact: Murat Üçoğlu  muratucoglu@gmail.com