The Cure for Canada's Housing Crisis? Boost Immigration!
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Read the article, it's an op-ed by a venture capital firm and an immigration promotion NGO.
It's poorly written, throws random numbers around and suggest that immigrants built most housing in the first place, so why shouldn't they do so now?
They essentially want to solve the labor shortages in nursing and construction through immigration. And they want to house them in modern day versions of 'government-operated immigration halls'. They don't explicitly say the reason why they want to house them in communal halls. The reason is, of course, because construction workers and nurses can simply not afford the exorbitant housing costs in Canuckstan and that's why they need Dubai/Qatar/UAE style low-cost housing.
But in reality construction/nursing is just a smokescreen and they don't offer any explanation why they should allow the other hundreds of thousands of immigrants into the country, while there is a housing shortage.
I do financing for residential development in Canada. The solution to the housing crisis is simple. Let developers build. Most municipalities actually don't want to develop because most Canadian cities don't want more people. The reason is because more people means more utilities like sewage, waste, water, etc.... that existing residents don't want to pay for. Canada needs to literally ban immigration and deport the trash humans. Then housing stops being an issue.
Immigration is literally the root problem of the housing crisis.
I mean, you don't even have to deport them.
Just stop immigration for 5 years; total lockdown for a clearly fixed period.
We have (barely) enough housing for the people currently here and we can build more in five years, creating surplus and bringing the prices down. Done.
After that, simply set the maximum immigration rate to the difference between births and deaths and we'll never need to worry about housing ever again.
No Canadian politician will ever intentionally do anything that causes house prices to go down, unfortunately.
They have to go down eventually; the Canadian real estate market is a massive bubble right now.
The question is: will politicians try to pop it now, let the air out as slowly as possible, or just keep on pumping it up until it takes out our entire economy?
This is, once against, exactly the same in Australia and NZ…
Almost like it’s a coordinated effort… 🤔
But don't developers like this scenario? They build fewer houses but the houses are worth so much more than they ought to be. That seems perfect for making money.
I haven't met a developer that likes controlled sprawl instead of just build however you want. Even if technically maybe what you're saying is true to maximize your profit, most developers just hate the government and want them out of their way. Not all developers are evil villains plotting to maximize their profit by screwing over the public. If the developers could build how they wanted without government oversight and ended up with a smaller return on capital but higher volumes, I think they'd be quite happy.
This is true, and they're all Eastern European. The only others are Jamaican drywallers/painters because they have to work by themselves and can hotbox the houses they're working on.
The problem I'm seeing is that everyone can figure out that inflation is 25% and wages aren't matching it. So they're all waiting for companies to get desperate for workers and raise their rates. The problem, of course, is that the government is literally importing low skill workers who'll work for pennies and this keeps prices low.
In about 10 years, everything built by these people will collapse.
If they want all their Chinese to build things for them quickly like they do in China, then Canada is going to have to revise it's labor and building policies. You can't be slowed down by safety practices and engineering standards.
How does importing more third world solve the lack of housing caused by NIMBY zoning laws?
If adding one criminal to a city removes two normal people, either by white flight or by murder, then you've reduced the demand for housing.
That's unironically probably their real reasoning. They won't say it, but a sudden influx of vibrancy is a proven method to obliterate demand, which reduces an entire city to a ghetto where they can store Democrat voters for next to nothing because property values are close to zero.
Remember, the ideal society for a leftist is billions of non-whites living in ten square foot concrete closets where they'll get high and watch CNN until the yearly period when the doors open for 24 hours so they can go vote blue no matter who.
"Vote blue no matter who" would be an interesting strategy in Canada, considering the colours are reversed there. Of course it wouldn't matter much in the end, but still.
Well, "vote red unless you're dead" doesn't work because leftists continue to vote from the grave.
It has little to do with NIMBYism and everything to do with government interference.
First, Southern Ontario has literally millions of acres of undeveloped land that both companies and individuals are chomping at the bit to develop. The problem is, they can't; it's all zoned as Environmentally Protected. This means that you can't build on or harvest resources from the land you own. Further, even though Canada has a progressive Carbon Tax, there's no mechanism by which a land owner could monetize the living trees on their property (like a Carbon Credit) because Canada doesn't count the reduction in CO2 from trees until they're harvested, which you can't do on EP land. So the land sits there, both undeveloped and useless towards our so-called environmental committments.
Second, municipalities have been fully aware that they were running out of space for decades. They're confined by the municipal boundaries which were set some time in the last millenium. Instead of planning for this, or leaving any land untouched, they've built sprawl. Subdivisions provide the worse combination of high-maintenance and low usable space, but each lot nets the city tens of thousands of dollars in lot fees alone, before anything is even built. Instead of building 4-8-plexes with large parks and walkable amenities, they build 1/4 acre houses with tiny parks (because the yards are too small to use for anything other than a BBQ) which need cars because the low density doesn't support small, distributed retail but large centralized super-stores.
I would honestly by fine with immigration if the new people were expected to move out to the woods and build new cities, like my ancestors did, but they're literally just taking up all the low-price housing options.
I'll never understand evil, they kill the citizens and then import more, humans are not commodities!!!
To communists? Yes, we are. Mere numbers that can be scapegoated for every failure of their vanity projects, and replaced on-demand.
I’ve been in situations where I’ve complained about immigration only to be met with anger from someone I didn’t know was left-wing. It’s really interesting how they get personally offended, like you’re somehow immoral for not supporting massive replacement-level immigration policies. It’s like they’ve placed immigration in the same sacred, untouchable category as vaccines in their new religion. They insist that it raises the GDP and affords everyone a “larger slice of a larger pie”… completely forgetting the “income inequality” argument the left used to make.
It's all so tiresome.
Boosters are always the solution.
- MAID in Canada
A better cure would be to quickly purge undesirable entities such as regressive leftists.
Laughs in 650,000 new immigrants per year, in Aus
This is almost the exact same arguments they use over here, to justify “replacement level” immigration rates from developing countries (specifically India, Nepal, China and South Sudan)…
This ain’t just Canada. Unfortunately…
Easiest way to solve the housing crisis in most western countries is to send all the immigrants home, but bankers and investment capital firms won't be very happy about that.
Fuck off and die, liberal media.