I’m half joking, half serious: has anyone looked at a job site lately? Who’s doing a lot of the physically demanding work? If anything, it’s immigrants who are helping solve the housing crisis. The old boy’s network, which makes the laws and controls the money, is where the problems actually come from.
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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Housing has skyrocketed due to governments allowing essentially unrestricted purchases by foreign entities and investment groups for the use of investment properties. Not even accounting for money laundering issues, we are watching the rich gobble up all the assets and forcing individuals into situations where they have to rent
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I mean it shouldn't be that hard to understand. Housing prices skyrocketed when interest rates dropped during the pandemic. Add the effects of inflation, increases municipal evaluations leading to higher taxes, and you get more costs passed on to renters. This started before all the news of "HuGe SuRgE ImMiGrAnTs".
That being said there is still plenty of truth to the argument that if we do indeed want to welcome more people here, we better make sure there are affordable places to live. So the article addresses that better regulations are needed to ensure an adequate supply of affordable housing. BUT, if people already in Canada are really struggling to get affordable housing, and the number of people who need affordable housing is increasing, you can see why this might be a problem.
struggling to get affordable housing, and the number of people who need affordable housing is increasing
The human brain is bad at noticing the fact that one of those numbers is really huge and the other comparatively very small, and tends to equate the two or put them at the same order of magnitude.
It's like the distance to the moon vs mars. Given we need foreign workers to shore up the shortfall we're expecting to see, as our own population declines below what's needed to support an ageing and increasingly long-lived population, all calculations need to take into account that expected increase. At least until we tax the rich like we used to.
Given we need foreign workers to shore up the shortfall we’re expecting to see
No we don't. You're buying the capitalist dogma that says infinite growth at any cost. Canada could shrink to 8 million people, like Austria. There would be no problem with that whatsoever.
The issue is that shrinking the population over a short period of time (and I mean more than 10% a generation) means that you have a lack of young people to take care of older people. And that's ignoring all the capitalism issues that come with all this.
Not every young person is willing to spend the majority of their free time taking care of their parents. Hell, most people aren't willing to do that more than once or twice a week, yet once you get past 70, a lot people need constant care. That's the original point of elderly homes. Of course, those homes are just plain shit and closer to cruel and unusual torture than actually a form of care (especially here in Ontario). And that's not to mention that occupancy is so tight that there's a wait list on them.
Then there's the fact that if our population drops too quickly, we'll have massive holes in essential services as well. There's already a massive hole in all blue-collar work as it stands as people would rather go into the service industry than skilled labour. And while pay is an issue, this is a problem in the States as well, where pay is far better. It's to the point that they've legalized child labour in several places just to make up for the shortfall.
Population decline is an easy way to destroy society, even ignoring capitalist needs.
But it's paradoxical. You need population increase to support increasing costs, yet increasing population creates a strain on the finite resources of the planet.
I acknowledge you said this ignoring the capitalism issues, but if you didn't ignore it then it wouldn't really be an issue. We have the wealth to handle this if we had the political courage to force an equitable society.
Believe it or not, Canada was once a population much lower than 40 million people and we managed just fine. The idea that populations cannot contract is a harmful concept because it forces acceptance of the paradox that we can infinitely grow in a finite world. And this always relies on the use of technology to overcome this. So, instead of reducing the population to the point where automobiles wouldn't need to be electric, we increase the population and try and find green solutions.
I feel that it's more complex than just the interest rates... That only explains part of the demand.
Then there's the supply. New housing construction in the US bottomed out after the 2008 recession and has never returned to where it needed to be since. At least here in the PNW we have a major shortage of housing (both affordable housing, and just new home/unit construction in general) that has been more than a decade in the making and is not trivial to overcome. It would likely take a huge investment in new/affordable housing construction incentives to get us anywhere close to where we need to be.
On top of that, immigrants are not a problem, but institutional investors (both foreign and domestic) are. There are many American homes being bought by people and firms merely as investments, which means they wind up expensive and empty. I've seen this happen in Vancouver BC, Seattle and Portland, and I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if it's happening elsewhere. We really need laws and tax benefits that help put regular people in homes that they will actually live in. Homes are one of the few kinds of assets that have really appreciated in value over the last couple of years, and because of that regular people who simply want a place to live or raise a family are being priced out of the market by rent-seekers or investors would would be perfectly happy to leave a house empty.
Housing prices skyrocketed here in Ontario when people escaped the big cities, and rushed to buy houses in smaller cities and towns. This caused a huge supply problem, as there weren’t enough houses for sale to meet demand, so bidding wars erupted.
It was a period of utter lunacy and mania for both buyers and sellers. I think we reached almost 100% price increase over pre Covid.
Once everyone had bought that wanted to buy, the market slowed down and houses went for under asking or sat on the market unsold. I don’t think anyone cared about the interest rate.
It has always been a zoning issue. Japan solved its housing crisis by putting the federal government in charge of zoning.
If apple pie is American. Real estate investment is Canadian. I mean mom and pop Canadians. It's an elephant in the room. Immigrants who are wealthy enough to invest such way are merely doing as Canadians do.
It's literally the most traditional Vancouver business. When the city was incorporated and built around the region today known as Gastown, as early as 1870 everyone was encouraged to go in debt to buy two pieces of land, then next year sell the second to finish paying for the first one. BC's economy has been sustained by sky high returns on real state for more than 100 years at this point.
The US had their real estate investing moment in the 2000s.
We're behind only because we, the most educated nation on earth, are much, much, much more likely to attend a post-secondary school, and, as you recall, we went on a dorm building frenzy in the late 90s/early 2000s to accommodate the influx of millennials who make up the echo baby boom. That buffered us for a while.
But the buffer was only so good for so long. Eventually post-secondary schooling comes to an end and people set out to find a place to call their own. As such, we eventually caught up with the US in not having enough homes to handle the millennial baby boom, and as such there was more competition for homes, price went up in response, and soon it started to look like a good place to park money for mom and pop.
Are we though? From what I can find we are only about 20% more likely than Americans, and I'm reasonably sure trade schools (like a mechanics Red Seal) counts as post secondary, which the US doesn't have Journeymens programs like we do.
I apportion the blame 5% to the Martin Liberals ending rental construction subsidies, 5% to the Trudeau and Harper governments for ignoring the writing on the wall pre-pandemic, 5% to the BC Liberals/United party for deliberately celebrating their province's housing market as a casino, 5% to the Ontario PC government for exploiting the problem to hand out goodies to donors instead of solutions, another 5% to the Federals again for their lackluster post-pandemic response, and 99% to the various Municipalities across Canada that actually caused and continue to cause this massive problem and if every planner and councilman was fired tomorrow and we shifted to Kowloon Walled City anarchy it would be a net positive for Canada.
Edit: yes I know the math doesn't add up there but it's real-estate that's a given.
We've had a housing crisis for a decade or more. But yes, it's the immigrant's fault. Not the greedy developers who are only making half as many houses as they could.
Well.. well... well.. MP Daniel Blakie clearly explains the Canada housing problem. They will blame anything but their policy for the rich.
These damn immigrants, they're going to ruin the entire planet.
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