this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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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.
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.
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.
You got a source for that 1,000,000? Pretty sure it was quite literally the first number you put in the comment.
Your correct, I mistook the total growth of the country instead.. It was 440k immigrants contributing to the total growth of 1,000,000 people in Canada for 2022.
And it averages out to approximately 200k - 250k housing units per year.
The nothing-doing will continue until policy improves.