The Cure for Canada's Housing Crisis? Boost Immigration!
(media.communities.win)
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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.