Some folks on here have been repeating this garbage as well
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.
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
That doesn’t explain why prices have held stable outside of agricultural areas. Why would foreigners care that someone happens to produce food next door?
The answer is far more obvious: Dairy and poultry producers are using their government-granted money printers to buy up all the land around urban centres at inflated prices, which has largely forced urban dwellers to compete for what land is already established as being urban, or to go toe to toe with the farmer to try and buy vacant land (which means only the rich can try).
Historically, farmers were poor and couldn’t afford to buy land for more than pennies. Urban areas thereby were able to buy up cheap farmland to sprawl into in order to keep costs affordable, but that has become exceptionally more expensive amid the farmland boom. With the US backing away from farm subsidies since 2007, with a greater focus on market farm stability, farm profitability in Canada has gone up, most notably in the two farm sectors which were given special government assistance to help with those olden days – which have turned into money printers in this new landscape.
You can even map home prices to the desirability of the farmland. Of course, not all farmland is equal. The more attractive the farmland surrounding a given urban area is, the higher the prices homes will be in that urban area.
I think this is a symptom and not the problem itself.
The issue is that residential zoning only allows for single family homes to be built. No mixed use, no apartments/condos. Just a house for one family with a front and back yard. I mean, who even uses their front yard? I used to live in a house like that and I’ve never seen anybody actually use their front yard aside from mowing it. It’s a chore to keep people busy designed during the cold war to prevent people from noticing any commie propaganda or thinking that the establishment as it is might not be the best thing for them. A surprisingly useful HAI video You can build an entire house in the space of a front lawn.
If the zoning restriction didn’t exist, you could build two or three townhouses on a single plot of land, or even an apartment building by combining two plots. We would litterally have more than a million new homes if we simply replaced all the single family houses with low-rise apartments. Make that a mix of mid and high-rises and we can house the entire Canadian population in Toronto or Vancouver.
Despite how dense Toronto seems, there are huge tracks of land that are completely underutilized, and I’m not talking about parks. Leaside Business Park alone is a good hectare and there is almost nothing but one-story buildings, most of which have empty yards not doing anything. This isn’t the only place Toronto (and near the middle of the city at that) has.
Despite how dense Toronto seems
In what way does Toronto seem dense? It is laughably sparse. It struggles to fill 4,000 people per square kilometre. If we look at an actual city, there are over one million people per square kilometre. Even the wannabe cities of the world have 40,000 people per square kilometre. Toronto is a wannabe farmer’s field. Which is no doubt why its people are always calling for the TTC to deploy more tractors.
Which, all of that, is to say that you’re right, but prior to 2007 it didn’t matter because you could just keep sprawling for basically no cost. Until the people of Toronto get past wishing they were farmers, which is unlikely to happen… ever, they will be at the mercy of those who are actually (dairy, poultry) farmers with a government granting them free money. Good luck.
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.
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.
