The media is blaming immigrants for the housing crisis. They're wrong
The media is blaming immigrants for the housing crisis. They're wrong
Instead of halting immigration, we should regulate the investors and developers driving and profiting from sky-high housing prices
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.
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.
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.
It’s always Wall Street. There is literally no other answer. It was them last time and I’d wager a shitload of money they did it again.
Ordinary people buy one house to live in. Corporations by dozens or hundreds of homes at a time and then charge rent. It's easy to see who's buying up most of the housing supply.
Zillow and I already bought puts 😅
Iiterally blackrock
Who would have thought investment groups backing SFR aggregators could have ever lead to this?? They all buy more homes than they can manage. Let them age neglected for months to a year at a time until they can come in and replace the floors with lvp, the cabs with builders grade trash and splash agreeable grey over all the walls and then value the home 100k higher. They don't sell, cause they want to own it all forcing you to have to rent from them
Who is blaming immigrants? Seriously, I haven't seen that take.
You could put part of the blame on immigration targets/the system though. It's not "RaCiSt" to know that if you don't have enough housing as it is, that adding more people who needs homes won't help the issue (unless they are all here to build homes?).
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I need to explain to adults how addition and subtraction works.
I see that take every week on this instance. Used to be everyday on Reddit, but still.
I mean they aren't wrong (assuming the link is working)? Immigration should be slowed down drastically not sped up to record levels so we can at the very minimum ensure these people have an actual place to live? Hell I would argue THAT is the pro-immigration take. It's not fair to these people to move there without an actual place to live. There's plenty of recent immigrants on YouTube voicing their frustration of being sold a false promise when coming here. Seriously, just look at the average rents vs incomes. I have no idea how these people are getting by at all.
Visit any of the local community subs on Reddit. Lots and lots of people blaming immigrants for housing issues.
From Wikipedia:
The Breach is an online, Canadian news outlet launched on 10 March 2021 to provide reader- and viewer-supported reporting, analysis, and videos on issues such as racism, economic inequality, colonialism, and climate change. Its contributors include the Indigenous writer, lawyer, and professor Pamela Palmater, journalists El Jones and Linda McQuaig, legal scholar Azeezah Kanji, and documentary filmmaker Avi Lewis.[1]
So it's basically their thing. Like any other news media, they're just trying to attract clicks by saying people are blaming immigrants for the housing crisis. The reality is that we need immigration to keep our economy afloat. However, like you said, the immigration system is not working in our favor because it set the limits too high and everyone and their grandmother are moving to the only couple of large urban centers where every other immigrant decided to live: Toronto and Vancouver.
It's not the immigrants' fault. It's the immigration system and the government who can't manage their shit well.
If you go on Canada Reddit it’s every other comment on housing
I imagine Facebook and Twitter are the same
I'm getting the sense that people are mixing up blaming the individuals coming here for a better life, vs blaming the systems that brought them here knowing full well we simply don't have a place for them until we actually get around to building it...
I'm all for immigration. So let's fucking build some places for these people to live, and then bring them over. Why is this so hard for people to understand?
These damn immigrants, they're going to ruin the entire planet.
Immigrants are at least partly to blame for the pressures. I mean, it's impossible they're NOT impacting the cost of housing. If you add 400,000 people to a country and do not add 400,000 units of new housing that year, you're in a deficit. It's Grade 1 math.
But what is genuinely to blame is a cogent political strategy to house Canadians. We can't just leave it to the private sector to maximize profits. We can't expect homeowners to make secondary suites. We can't do nothing.
Cutting immigration is a sure-fire way to prevent over-demand for a scarce resource. It may sound right-wing but that's the way it goes.
Cutting immigration is a sure-fire way to prevent over-demand for a scarce resource.
Sure! At the cost of no longer having skilled immigrants advancing Canadaian industry and economy. We'd also go into a population decline which, while great for housing, would cause lots of problems with job shortages and government benefits paying out way more than they collect.
Immigration is far too much of a benefit to Canada to stop it instead of just building more places to live. We are one of the largest land masses on the entire planet. I think we can fit a few more houses in.
There's no point in making houses out in the middle of nowhere. Not only does it cost a massive amount of money to build the infrastructure just to support it, but who the hell wants to live several hours away from where anything exists? No stores, no jobs, no schools less than 3 hours away? No thank you.
That said, all they have to do is change the zoning laws to convert residential into mixed use housing plus actually build high density housing. We don't need skyscrapers everywhere. That's only happening because it takes 3 years to get anything bigger than a single family home approved. Remove the approval process and we can get tons of low and mid rises that would be extremely cheap and quick to build.
At the cost of no longer having skilled immigrants advancing Canadaian industry and economy.
Meanwhile skilled Canadians are moving to the US en masse.
Well, if you bring in 400k immigrants and build 400k housing units You're probably not that much in a deficit since a lot of those immigrants will be families living together.
But as I understand it last year we brought in 1,000,000 immigrants and only built 250k housing units so every one of those immigrants would need to be a family of four just to fill those, let alone any increase in natural reproduction within Canada, so we very likely did have quite a deficit.
The nothing-doing will continue until policy improves.
In recent years Canada has experienced absurdly rapid growth in total population by any standard. It doesn't matter that much of it is from immigration, that's beside the point. Even without any immigrants the population would've been growing still. It's already grown to levels that stretch our natural resources per capita much thinner than they used to be. I remember even in my youth, in the 1980s, my father pointing at the vast new suburbs surrounding his hometown and lamenting how much of the best farmland had already been paved over. Growth like this cannot continue, it's got to stop at some point. Slowing it down a little would be nice, if we have that power. It wouldn't magically fix all our problems with housing and everything else, but it sure wouldn't hurt. It would at least buy us time to learn how to do development in less environmentally destructive ways.
On the other hand, borders suck and I'd prefer to live in a world without any. It's a dilemma keenly felt and little understood even in Canada where it's endlessly discussed.
The issue isn't growth. The issue is that we're deliberately choosing to grow in inefficient ways.
We wouldn't have ever had to pave over any of that greenspace if we simply gave up single family homes and build decent apartments and condos in their place. Especially if they're mixed use so businesses can occupy the first floor. An entire hectare of farmland converted to housing could be saved by a single low-rise apartment that takes up the space of a single city block. Make that a high-rise and you saved a dozen hacares. That's an entire farm, and not a minor family one, but a decent corporate one.
In addition, you're saving on electricity, water, and tons of other resources by not having to build infrastructure that goes out kilometers on end, and instead just extend it a dozen meters for a single large building. Heating and cooling gets easier and cheaper as it's far more efficient to heat/cool one building than it is to do the same to hundreds that are all separated and spewing hot air at each other.
Most of the modern problems are caused by choosing to be wasteful. We waste half of our produce because it's not pretty enough to be sold in grocery shelves. 80% of crops goes to feeding livestock. We bulldoze entire neighbourhoods just so we can make a six lane highway go through the middle of a city. Amazon owns a private garbage pit it just throws stuff into because they make more shit than they sell. And I'm talking about tens of millions of dollars worth of products a year.
We're insanely wasteful, and that's the real reason why things are so shit. It's not because there's too many people. It's because those in power would rather keep the status quo than actually make a positive difference. And any change they do make always has to be the quick and easy one, not something that actually fixes the problem.
I thought of your comment when I saw this story: Every developer has opted to pay Montreal instead of building affordable housing, under new bylaw
A radical redesign of our urban landscape along the lines of what you suggest would be a good start, but even that is not going to happen quickly or any time soon in most of the country. There are any number of things we could do, any number of things we definitely should do, and many of the ones you list are certainly among them even if they are not in themselves sufficient. But it's not happening, not just now. Canada remains stubbornly set on an unsustainable path. We are oil dependent to a horrifying degree. Without petroleum exports our balance of trade would be a disaster. It's looking quite bad even while the country still is a major oil exporter. Agriculture is about to take a hit from climate change. Things will continue getting worse before they get better even if our politicians do suddenly come to their senses and start getting serious about redesigning the way our cities and economy function.
Meanwhile we will continue to have the worst of both worlds: Rapid population growth driven by net migration, as well as tightly-controlled borders to keep out the officially undesirable people.
Let me ask a question.
Did the Natives ever agree to immigration? I'm going to take a guess and say they did not. More immigration means less native land and that's not ok, it's just a slowly continuing genocide that never ended
Your comment made a funny U Turn for me kkk
The federal and provincial governments have largely been the ones stealing the land, with anglo and Franco settlers aiding in certain instances.
Absolutely nothing to do with Immigration!
It's not necessarily a "garbage" argument. When 100% of your population growth is immigrants, it does not feel right. My point is that when your local population does not feel like they can create families in their community, replacing that with immigrants is probably not a good way to patch the problem. I mean, our environment is so shit that less and less people feel comfortable creating families.
Another question I never had a response to is the difference between a population that its growth is majority immigrants versus locals. How different the city will evolve in either case ? Immigrants are usually coming from an economic, capitalist need. What does this say on our communities ? Our places are so crappy that you can't even have your own children ? What's the point of a community ?
I would avoid using terms like "replacing" when it comes to humans. You may not mean it, but people may read what you wrote as supporting the "Le Grand Remplacement"
My family mostly came over prior to the 1800's, and they changed their last name to appear less Scottish when they did so. I believe that we should continue to welcome new immigrants to Canada.
How different the city will evolve in either case ?
Well, I lived in one prairie town of less than 20k people on the prairies that basically only encouraged temporary farm labour as opposed to immigration. It's dying a slow death and losing population. The town looks shabby, and when you leave high school, you leave town. There isn't a reason to stay unless you got someone pregnant, or you work at one of the 2 factories.
I now live in another prairie town that actively reaches out to new Canadians, having a welcome centre, and includes non-religious holiday celebrations. It's growing, it's vibrant, it's safe, and it's clean. People with different experiences come up with different solutions to problems, so as long as everyone is reasonable, it leads to better outcomes.
What does this say on our communities ?
It means that (white) Canadians don't have a long history of being as exploited and that Canada is a nation with general political stability, allowing for the development of a more robust economy.
Our places are so crappy that you can’t even have your own children ?
I see people with kids here every day. Some people, including myself, have chosen to not have kids. It's considered common knowledge that the richer a nation is, the lower the birth rate. I see less accidental children now than I did 20 years ago, which may be linked to the availability of birth control options.
What’s the point of a community ?
Humans are social creatures. Communities give a place of belonging, as well a group of people who generally help each other.
I don't really get why you're asking this question.It's cool that you have great anecdotes about how great it is for you. I am an immigrant myself so I'm absolutely not against immigration, far from it. I'm not saying ImMiGrAnTs ArE rUiNiNg OuT NaTiOn. I'm saying that our communities are not for community anymore but more an organisation that is for profit.
I know that it's common knowledge that the richer you get, the less children you want but why is that the case? I feel like there's something wrong when your cities is less and less welcoming of families that you have to patch it with immigrants. It's not about having immigrants or not. It's how the cities are organizing themseves and that somehow prevents people from having families. Or maybe everyone just chooses to not have children which I would love to see a paper about it.
The "media" or propaganda machine as they are otherwise known have an agenda.
Thanks for contributing nothing intelligent