11 ms·

Canada is a big country. But immigration goes where the jobs are, and those are concentrated in 3-5 large cities which are hitting the limits of sprawl (conges

by michael1999 5y ago

Canada is a big country. But immigration goes where the jobs are, and those are concentrated in 3-5 large cities which are hitting the limits of sprawl (congested highway commute time) and geography (water and mountains). Densification is unpopular with existing municipal voters, and bankrupting CPP would be unpopular with federal voters.

edgyquant 5y ago
Can they not move to nearby cities and commute?
- techsupporter 5y ago
  No, that's what the person you replied to mean when they wrote: > hitting the limits of sprawl (congested highway commute time) There's only so far you can bus, train, drive, bike, walk, seaplane, helicopter, hyperloop, or transporter in to go to work. Canadian cities are, just like cities in the US, hitting this limit rather aggressively. In cities where sprawl isn't physically prohibitive, like Calgary or Toronto, the upper bound of "this shit ain't worth it" for time and money is a limiting factor. I know someone who commutes from Kitchener to Toronto on GO, so they don't even have to put up with driving, and they're debating moving back home to Winnipeg for a 40% salary cut just to not have to put up with it any more. Remote work might help with this but even there, you have people who are moving "a little further out" but not leaving the region because they want to stay nearby for other reasons (or because they're not entirely convinced that full remote is actually on the table long term).
  - ericmay 5y ago
    > I know someone who commutes from Kitchener to Toronto on GO, so they don't even have to put up with driving, and they're debating moving back home to Winnipeg for a 40% salary cut just to not have to put up with it any more. Isn't this a good thing in some ways or maybe many/all ways? Now wealth is less concentrated in one or a few locations. Every dollar not spent commuting is a dollar spent at a local coffee shop, or money that goes into the tax base of the other city.
    - paconbork 5y ago
      In theory, yes it would be nice to have the wealth more spread out, but jobs aren't concentrated in Toronto just for lack of creativity. The agglomeration of talent causes firms to be more productive, earn more money, and pay employees more. If a company moves to Winnipeg, the lose some access to the most productive employees and their employees have fewer companies to move to where they'll be more productive themselves. So while you'd be spending a larger percentage of your money locally, you'd also be spending less money in absolute terms.
      - ericmay 5y ago
        Yea but paying employees more means they can afford to buy more expensive houses. It all fits together. While I think there's a lot that Canada (and other democracies) can do to help reduce housing prices, it's almost like a truism that if you have a great city with a lot of high paying jobs, getting closer to the city and getting access to that city will be expensive. I mean, if we were to take what you were saying to heart, why doesn't all of Canada move to one city? Clearly there are some bounds. > So while you'd be spending a larger percentage of your money locally, you'd also be spending less money in absolute terms. True, but in absolute terms it's cheaper to live where you're spending the money as well, which pays for a house, etc.
      - chaostheory 5y ago
        If corporate culture embraced remote work, this wouldn’t be an issue
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    Then shouldn’t the government be incentivizing businesses (and thus people) populate other cities?
  - cameronh90 5y ago
    > There's only so far you can bus, train, drive, bike, walk, seaplane, helicopter, hyperloop, or transporter in to go to work. Canadian cities are, just like cities in the US, hitting this limit rather aggressively. Canada's largest urban area is 5.6 million people. London, Paris and Seoul are around double that, NYC is 19 million and Tokyo is 37 million. Why are Canadian cities hitting this limit at such a comparatively low population compared to other cities in the world? Why are all the major cities in the western world seemingly hitting this limit at the same time, even though they all have different populations? It seems to me that we've just become less aggressive at building the infrastructure necessary to support population growth.
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
      > Why are all the major cities in the western world seemingly hitting this limit at the same time, even though they all have different populations? I can’t speak for Canada, but in America the answer is always cars. Car based transit is wildly land inefficient, and the main reason why all car based cities hit their limit at the same time. In particular there are two huge shortcomings with cars in urban design: 1. Parking eats up a huge amount of space. Either you let that drive density way down (which means commutes get longer) or you build underground parking at exorbitant prices driving up rents. Even in the latter case the roads around housing ends up becoming an issue, limiting density far below what you’d expect in say, Paris on Chicago. 2. Car transit to a shared destination is almost comically inefficient, which is really noticeable when people try and commute via car to job centers. This wouldn’t be as bad if we restricted cars to what they’re good at, such as driving away from the city, but most American cities have the unique psychosis of demanding that transit into the city center be via car. This does not scale, and is why places with wildly different zoning laws can have equally hellish commutes. The issue is not that we can’t build, we’re really good at adding more highway lanes, it’s more that we are monomaniacally focused on building the wrong things.
      - exfascist 5y ago
        So I hate driving and actually moved to DC for work and also partly for the transit. Here's what I found: 1) Taking the metro many places (for example, from my apartment in an urban "luxury" apartment building a couple blocks from the initial station to my boat near the waterfront in downtown DC) doubled the time it took to get there. It was actually faster to drive there even during rush hour where you'll sit motionless on the 395 bridge. Yes I can redeem a lot of that time with my above average personal mobile computing set up but a: most people have a pretty mediocre personal mobile computing setup and b: now I can't use that time for anything other than programming projects. 2) I couldn't get rid of the car entirely because I still needed it to move bulky things that I really can't take on transit. It's bad enough not having a truck but losing the car entirely would create some serious logistical problems on a regular basis. So while I saved some money I couldn't save as much as I wanted. 3) Most wealthy people (many of my friends) start families^ and people who can afford it buy detached housing for that. You're not going to be taking transit to these places. It might not ever be economical. Like it or not transit will probably always lower property values in the US too. For whatever reason the more violent people here tend to take it and anywhere it goes becomes more violent so building it into suburbs like these is always going to be unpopular. 4) Bringing me to the fact that I've been accosted multiple times on transit by people who were high, drunk, or just belligerent. I have an extremely high tolerance for this sort of thing (I've wandered around some of the more violent cities early in the morning just to see what the fuss is about) but I can absolutely see why most people here would give up after that happening once at a maximum. I'm a huge fan of transit but pretending it isn't a large sacrifice to give up a car is just going to get people to ignore you, because it is and for most people it isn't worth it. (^ and for those that don't start families, many have lots of intense DIY projects that don't fit in apartment buildings and actually need either detached housing or industrial space with similar density.)
- Majromax 5y ago
  That's generally happened. House prices have notably increased not just in major cities, but also in smaller municipalities within commuting distances of Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa, and Montreal. Truly "cheap" housing is historically limited to rural areas far outside the traditional commuting area of the big cities, but the covid shock has put even that in question through remote work. Even though a small number of people in absolute terms are moving to rural areas (with sufficient Internet infrastructure, etc), that still can represent a large relative demand increase. Some of this will probably shake out over the next few years as construction catches up where it can, but that's cold comfort to younger families on the market today.
  - armagon 5y ago
    Goodness, I live in a rural area, and the house prices are only insane, instead of egregiously insane. I don't know how I'd afford a home for a young family if I was just starting out today.
    - voisin 5y ago
      I concur with this. The story of insane housing prices being limited to TO and Vancouver is a 2016 story. Since the pandemic, it has hit ever podunk town in the country. Look at rural Nova Scotia and New Brunswick for evidence. Same price increases on a percentage basis as in significantly more populated areas. It’s interest rates!
      - monkeywork 5y ago
        NS/NB/PEI rates went nuts due to lack of building and people from Ontario buying places unseen and well above asking (and from their point of view why not - sell your house in Ontario and you could buy 5 of them in NS at inflated prices and still be mortgage free). Go and look how many of these homes are on AirBNB and summer short term rentals every year and then sit empty the rest of the time.
- qball 5y ago
  Well, they thought of that; it's just as expensive out there too. If you want a house and a job in this country, you have to go to Alberta, Saskatchewan, or Manitoba. BC has no land and is either mountain or agricultural land reserve (the second-largest city in the province has massive fields in the middle of it; average single family home price $1M). ON and QC are similarly boxed in for land (the Canadian Shield is very difficult to build on, and if you don't know French the only part of Quebec you can really go to is the Montreal area), and the Maritime provinces have land but no work. The important thing to remember is that, unlike the US, the vast majority of Canadian land is much more difficult to inhabit- 90% of the population lives within 100 miles of the border, because that's where the good land ends.
  - chaostheory 5y ago
    Would this change due to climate change? I’ve been looking at the climate trends in major cities and there are some drastic temperature changes in the coming decades.
    - qball 5y ago
      No, and this (https://d3d0lqu00lnqvz.cloudfront.net/media/media/9d427dba-cd89-4cfb-9b96-05499c77197e.jpg https://d3d0lqu00lnqvz.cloudfront.net/media/media/9d427dba-c...) is the reason why. The area in the red is one continuous granite slab called the Canadian Shield. The US has no comparable geography. There's almost zero topsoil, and building any community there involves a lot of very expensive blasting. It's bad land for the opposite reason that the Australian continent is largely uninhabitable: there's tons of water, but no soil. (The only real upside to it is that it's very conducive to hydroelectric energy; the vast majority of Canadian energy production can be, and has always been, zero-emissions- we call electric companies "the hydro", and combined with the nuclear reactors in Ontario, 85% of national electrical power generation is zero-emissions.) Superimpose a population density map on the Eastern provinces, and you'll notice that generally speaking, the settled area of the provinces ends where the shield begins. That isn't a coincidence. Sure, climate change should make a bit of the [non-red-shaded] land more economically useful, but that's about it, and mining/farming communities generally aren't large enough to provide a base for a new city especially because it's landlocked- so you're not going to see any new cities spring up there any time soon.
52-6F-62 5y ago
Densification is absolutely not unpopular with municipal voters! My current city, Hamilton, is currently fighting with the Ontario government over this matter. The mayor is a regular feature on the local news and speaks to that often. Their major push is for more density and resources for urban development. The provincial government has pushed for developing in Ontario's green belt and watershed instead. They've faced massive backlash over that to the point where they had to capitulate in some cases. The current provincial government is the one pushing for downtown to be filled with parking lots and low-density housing developed outward. They're also responsible for nixing various transit and green power initiatives in favour of highway expansion. It's infuriating.
- wk_end 5y ago
  Everywhere is different. Hamilton may be in favour of densification - I wouldn’t know - but even in Toronto, where I’m from, there’s endless pushback against densifying the single family homes that dominate much of the city. Right now I live in Victoria, and although many people and groups (including the mayor and the province) are pro-development, there’s a loud contingent of busybodies here who oppose literally any change or construction project whatsoever.
  - johndubchak 5y ago
    That doesn't only exist in Victoria and that busy-body group isn't only about building and housing. They are active against many things. I live in California and they complain about people walking down the street, water restrictions, lifting water restrictions, cleaning your driveway with water, not being able to use water, it goes on and on. It does touch on building, but it's mostly about, "NOT IN MY BACKYARD!"
    - chaostheory 5y ago
      There’s a certain street in SF across from a shopping mall where there are fatal accidents involving pedestrians every year. Consequently, the city planned on building a crosswalk. Well, the NIMBYS blocked it because it would ruin their view.
definitelyhuman 5y ago
Waterloo region is building density, despite complaints (1), because there’s no supply. People claim to want all of: affordable housing, no sprawl, no community impact - but that’s not possible. Glad they prioritized units, although a lot are still condos which are not quite ‘affordable’, but the supply will help (1) https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/belmont-village-condo-tower-approval-kitchener-1.6368592 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/belmont-vi...
- brimwats 5y ago
  BC seems to be doing similarly, with the NDP playing hardball and threatening transit and other concessions to holdout municipalities
RocketOne 5y ago
Not so much where the jobs are, but where there is already a community of their own people. We have lots of jobs out west (that fact goes unrecognized by ON and QC) but hardly any immigrants in comparison to cities like Toronto.
- michael1999 5y ago
  You need to be more specific. The “west” means nothing. Calgary is just coming out or a terrible crash and still has dozens of empty buildings. Vancouver and Victoria are growing madly and have the housing pressures to match.

edgyquant 5y ago

Can they not move to nearby cities and commute?

techsupporter 5y ago
No, that's what the person you replied to mean when they wrote: > hitting the limits of sprawl (congested highway commute time) There's only so far you can bus, train, drive, bike, walk, seaplane, helicopter, hyperloop, or transporter in to go to work. Canadian cities are, just like cities in the US, hitting this limit rather aggressively. In cities where sprawl isn't physically prohibitive, like Calgary or Toronto, the upper bound of "this shit ain't worth it" for time and money is a limiting factor. I know someone who commutes from Kitchener to Toronto on GO, so they don't even have to put up with driving, and they're debating moving back home to Winnipeg for a 40% salary cut just to not have to put up with it any more. Remote work might help with this but even there, you have people who are moving "a little further out" but not leaving the region because they want to stay nearby for other reasons (or because they're not entirely convinced that full remote is actually on the table long term).
- ericmay 5y ago
  > I know someone who commutes from Kitchener to Toronto on GO, so they don't even have to put up with driving, and they're debating moving back home to Winnipeg for a 40% salary cut just to not have to put up with it any more. Isn't this a good thing in some ways or maybe many/all ways? Now wealth is less concentrated in one or a few locations. Every dollar not spent commuting is a dollar spent at a local coffee shop, or money that goes into the tax base of the other city.
  - paconbork 5y ago
    In theory, yes it would be nice to have the wealth more spread out, but jobs aren't concentrated in Toronto just for lack of creativity. The agglomeration of talent causes firms to be more productive, earn more money, and pay employees more. If a company moves to Winnipeg, the lose some access to the most productive employees and their employees have fewer companies to move to where they'll be more productive themselves. So while you'd be spending a larger percentage of your money locally, you'd also be spending less money in absolute terms.
    - ericmay 5y ago
      Yea but paying employees more means they can afford to buy more expensive houses. It all fits together. While I think there's a lot that Canada (and other democracies) can do to help reduce housing prices, it's almost like a truism that if you have a great city with a lot of high paying jobs, getting closer to the city and getting access to that city will be expensive. I mean, if we were to take what you were saying to heart, why doesn't all of Canada move to one city? Clearly there are some bounds. > So while you'd be spending a larger percentage of your money locally, you'd also be spending less money in absolute terms. True, but in absolute terms it's cheaper to live where you're spending the money as well, which pays for a house, etc.
    - chaostheory 5y ago
      If corporate culture embraced remote work, this wouldn’t be an issue
- edgyquant 5y ago
  Then shouldn’t the government be incentivizing businesses (and thus people) populate other cities?
- cameronh90 5y ago
  > There's only so far you can bus, train, drive, bike, walk, seaplane, helicopter, hyperloop, or transporter in to go to work. Canadian cities are, just like cities in the US, hitting this limit rather aggressively. Canada's largest urban area is 5.6 million people. London, Paris and Seoul are around double that, NYC is 19 million and Tokyo is 37 million. Why are Canadian cities hitting this limit at such a comparatively low population compared to other cities in the world? Why are all the major cities in the western world seemingly hitting this limit at the same time, even though they all have different populations? It seems to me that we've just become less aggressive at building the infrastructure necessary to support population growth.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    > Why are all the major cities in the western world seemingly hitting this limit at the same time, even though they all have different populations? I can’t speak for Canada, but in America the answer is always cars. Car based transit is wildly land inefficient, and the main reason why all car based cities hit their limit at the same time. In particular there are two huge shortcomings with cars in urban design: 1. Parking eats up a huge amount of space. Either you let that drive density way down (which means commutes get longer) or you build underground parking at exorbitant prices driving up rents. Even in the latter case the roads around housing ends up becoming an issue, limiting density far below what you’d expect in say, Paris on Chicago. 2. Car transit to a shared destination is almost comically inefficient, which is really noticeable when people try and commute via car to job centers. This wouldn’t be as bad if we restricted cars to what they’re good at, such as driving away from the city, but most American cities have the unique psychosis of demanding that transit into the city center be via car. This does not scale, and is why places with wildly different zoning laws can have equally hellish commutes. The issue is not that we can’t build, we’re really good at adding more highway lanes, it’s more that we are monomaniacally focused on building the wrong things.
    - exfascist 5y ago
      So I hate driving and actually moved to DC for work and also partly for the transit. Here's what I found: 1) Taking the metro many places (for example, from my apartment in an urban "luxury" apartment building a couple blocks from the initial station to my boat near the waterfront in downtown DC) doubled the time it took to get there. It was actually faster to drive there even during rush hour where you'll sit motionless on the 395 bridge. Yes I can redeem a lot of that time with my above average personal mobile computing set up but a: most people have a pretty mediocre personal mobile computing setup and b: now I can't use that time for anything other than programming projects. 2) I couldn't get rid of the car entirely because I still needed it to move bulky things that I really can't take on transit. It's bad enough not having a truck but losing the car entirely would create some serious logistical problems on a regular basis. So while I saved some money I couldn't save as much as I wanted. 3) Most wealthy people (many of my friends) start families^ and people who can afford it buy detached housing for that. You're not going to be taking transit to these places. It might not ever be economical. Like it or not transit will probably always lower property values in the US too. For whatever reason the more violent people here tend to take it and anywhere it goes becomes more violent so building it into suburbs like these is always going to be unpopular. 4) Bringing me to the fact that I've been accosted multiple times on transit by people who were high, drunk, or just belligerent. I have an extremely high tolerance for this sort of thing (I've wandered around some of the more violent cities early in the morning just to see what the fuss is about) but I can absolutely see why most people here would give up after that happening once at a maximum. I'm a huge fan of transit but pretending it isn't a large sacrifice to give up a car is just going to get people to ignore you, because it is and for most people it isn't worth it. (^ and for those that don't start families, many have lots of intense DIY projects that don't fit in apartment buildings and actually need either detached housing or industrial space with similar density.)
Majromax 5y ago
That's generally happened. House prices have notably increased not just in major cities, but also in smaller municipalities within commuting distances of Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa, and Montreal. Truly "cheap" housing is historically limited to rural areas far outside the traditional commuting area of the big cities, but the covid shock has put even that in question through remote work. Even though a small number of people in absolute terms are moving to rural areas (with sufficient Internet infrastructure, etc), that still can represent a large relative demand increase. Some of this will probably shake out over the next few years as construction catches up where it can, but that's cold comfort to younger families on the market today.
- armagon 5y ago
  Goodness, I live in a rural area, and the house prices are only insane, instead of egregiously insane. I don't know how I'd afford a home for a young family if I was just starting out today.
  - voisin 5y ago
    I concur with this. The story of insane housing prices being limited to TO and Vancouver is a 2016 story. Since the pandemic, it has hit ever podunk town in the country. Look at rural Nova Scotia and New Brunswick for evidence. Same price increases on a percentage basis as in significantly more populated areas. It’s interest rates!
    - monkeywork 5y ago
      NS/NB/PEI rates went nuts due to lack of building and people from Ontario buying places unseen and well above asking (and from their point of view why not - sell your house in Ontario and you could buy 5 of them in NS at inflated prices and still be mortgage free). Go and look how many of these homes are on AirBNB and summer short term rentals every year and then sit empty the rest of the time.
qball 5y ago
Well, they thought of that; it's just as expensive out there too. If you want a house and a job in this country, you have to go to Alberta, Saskatchewan, or Manitoba. BC has no land and is either mountain or agricultural land reserve (the second-largest city in the province has massive fields in the middle of it; average single family home price $1M). ON and QC are similarly boxed in for land (the Canadian Shield is very difficult to build on, and if you don't know French the only part of Quebec you can really go to is the Montreal area), and the Maritime provinces have land but no work. The important thing to remember is that, unlike the US, the vast majority of Canadian land is much more difficult to inhabit- 90% of the population lives within 100 miles of the border, because that's where the good land ends.
- chaostheory 5y ago
  Would this change due to climate change? I’ve been looking at the climate trends in major cities and there are some drastic temperature changes in the coming decades.
  - qball 5y ago
    No, and this (https://d3d0lqu00lnqvz.cloudfront.net/media/media/9d427dba-cd89-4cfb-9b96-05499c77197e.jpg https://d3d0lqu00lnqvz.cloudfront.net/media/media/9d427dba-c...) is the reason why. The area in the red is one continuous granite slab called the Canadian Shield. The US has no comparable geography. There's almost zero topsoil, and building any community there involves a lot of very expensive blasting. It's bad land for the opposite reason that the Australian continent is largely uninhabitable: there's tons of water, but no soil. (The only real upside to it is that it's very conducive to hydroelectric energy; the vast majority of Canadian energy production can be, and has always been, zero-emissions- we call electric companies "the hydro", and combined with the nuclear reactors in Ontario, 85% of national electrical power generation is zero-emissions.) Superimpose a population density map on the Eastern provinces, and you'll notice that generally speaking, the settled area of the provinces ends where the shield begins. That isn't a coincidence. Sure, climate change should make a bit of the [non-red-shaded] land more economically useful, but that's about it, and mining/farming communities generally aren't large enough to provide a base for a new city especially because it's landlocked- so you're not going to see any new cities spring up there any time soon.

52-6F-62 5y ago

Densification is absolutely not unpopular with municipal voters! My current city, Hamilton, is currently fighting with the Ontario government over this matter. The mayor is a regular feature on the local news and speaks to that often. Their major push is for more density and resources for urban development. The provincial government has pushed for developing in Ontario's green belt and watershed instead. They've faced massive backlash over that to the point where they had to capitulate in some cases. The current provincial government is the one pushing for downtown to be filled with parking lots and low-density housing developed outward. They're also responsible for nixing various transit and green power initiatives in favour of highway expansion. It's infuriating.

wk_end 5y ago
Everywhere is different. Hamilton may be in favour of densification - I wouldn’t know - but even in Toronto, where I’m from, there’s endless pushback against densifying the single family homes that dominate much of the city. Right now I live in Victoria, and although many people and groups (including the mayor and the province) are pro-development, there’s a loud contingent of busybodies here who oppose literally any change or construction project whatsoever.
- johndubchak 5y ago
  That doesn't only exist in Victoria and that busy-body group isn't only about building and housing. They are active against many things. I live in California and they complain about people walking down the street, water restrictions, lifting water restrictions, cleaning your driveway with water, not being able to use water, it goes on and on. It does touch on building, but it's mostly about, "NOT IN MY BACKYARD!"
  - chaostheory 5y ago
    There’s a certain street in SF across from a shopping mall where there are fatal accidents involving pedestrians every year. Consequently, the city planned on building a crosswalk. Well, the NIMBYS blocked it because it would ruin their view.

definitelyhuman 5y ago

Waterloo region is building density, despite complaints (1), because there’s no supply. People claim to want all of: affordable housing, no sprawl, no community impact - but that’s not possible. Glad they prioritized units, although a lot are still condos which are not quite ‘affordable’, but the supply will help (1) https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/belmont-village-condo-tower-approval-kitchener-1.6368592 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/belmont-vi...

brimwats 5y ago
BC seems to be doing similarly, with the NDP playing hardball and threatening transit and other concessions to holdout municipalities

RocketOne 5y ago

Not so much where the jobs are, but where there is already a community of their own people. We have lots of jobs out west (that fact goes unrecognized by ON and QC) but hardly any immigrants in comparison to cities like Toronto.

michael1999 5y ago
You need to be more specific. The “west” means nothing. Calgary is just coming out or a terrible crash and still has dozens of empty buildings. Vancouver and Victoria are growing madly and have the housing pressures to match.