7 ms·

Great, and it has all the housing to support it! Right? ... Right?!

Karsteski 3y ago
I suspect all the people voting for restrict housing are going to be surprised when young/poor people eventually revolt :)
- jacquesm 3y ago
  They won't revolt. It's a sad reality but Canada is an endless web of special interests.
  - grecy 3y ago
    They won't need to revolt, they'll just stop participating in the rigged game which will bring the game to it's knees.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      I highly doubt it. I've had a lot of exposure to Canada's up and coming generation and unless it interferes with their internet connection I really don't think they will do much of anything. Participation is for immigrants, who have nothing to lose and everything to gain and they too won't be acting against the vested interests. This is a very frustrating aspect of Canada and it took me a long time to get to terms with it, such potential and so little to show for it. It's quite frustrating.
    - red-iron-pine 3y ago
      How? You can't stop eating, and Canada is too cold to homestead in large numbers. Homeless shelter options are not good. They can't get on a bus to the US for more than 6 months at a stretch, and gun ownership is heavily curtailed. Until Ottawa makes some systemic changes -- and that sure as hell ain't gonna happen -- you're gonna participate, or freeze. They will then import a bunch of Temporary Foreign Workers to replace you.
      - grecy 3y ago
        Myself, and a ton of engineering-types that I know quit our full time jobs and quit trying to "get ahead", and now just live on ~$20k a year doing what we want with our time. No need to aspire to buy a new car or house or pay huge taxes. Also, plenty of homesteading all the way up into Yukon (I lived there for four years). It's not hard to grow the majority of the food you need and hunt the rest.
        jacquesm 3y ago
        'Myself and A ton of engineering-types' is a rounding error on the size of society. The number of people that can afford to do this is super small, and those that do typically can do so because they are fairly carefree (healthy, few if any dependents). $20k / year will not support a family and growing food and hunting isn't how the vast bulk of society stays alive.
        grecy 3y ago
        What I'm saying is that I believe more people will choose to do what we are doing, because the alternative (playing the rigged game) makes less sense every year. If it requires going to work for more than your entire life to pay for a house, people will stop buying houses, etc.
        jacquesm 3y ago
        People in general have far less choice in this than is probably desirable. They tend to have normal lives, with normal friends and normal jobs and as a result they lose their ability to make such choices. The game is utterly rigged but there isn't a whole lot you can do about it if you are trying to make ends meet with a family. In my family I'm the lucky one, I can pretty much live in any way that I want. But the rule is that the job cycle pretty much dictates how much freedom you've got. The financial stakes are balanced in such a way that you're likely in the tredmill for life unless you get very lucky. The big problem is that there are so many little races to the bottom that if you're not very careful you will end up participating in one or more of these effectively reducing the negotiation power of others and time shifted with yourself. Unionization is one way to solve some aspects of this (though not all and some unions have their own issues that then become dominant). Alternatively you can go it alone but that kind of risk taking isn't for everybody either. I don't think homesteading or opting out is going to be a big driver, it would be nice if it were but I just don't see it happening. What you will see is an increase in mental issues, homelessness, personal bankruptcies and more like that. Those are the indicators that things are really not going well. But many people don't care about these things until it hits them personally.
  - noughtme 3y ago
    Also, a lot of restrictions on development are coming from affordable housing groups, who don’t want any development unless it’s affordable, or (if condos) includes some affordable units.
- xienze 3y ago
  It’s not so much about “restricting housing supply” as it is a fundamental problem with growth through immigration. When a new citizen is born, there’s roughly 20 years before that person needs individual housing to be made available for them. Plenty of time to build new housing. When a new citizen is imported, they need housing _today_. And Canada is importing massive numbers of people relative to the country’s population.
  - TX81Z 3y ago
    Good thing it doesn’t take 20 years to build a house or apartment building.
    - JimtheCoder 3y ago
      Have you ever tried to build a house or apartment building in Canada?
    - xienze 3y ago
      That's... not the key point to take away there. The point is, if the rate of new citizens (who need new housing, i.e. aren't living with a family member who already has existing housing) is greater than your rate of speed with which you can throw up new housing, you're gonna be in trouble. This is Canada right now. Their population is increasing at like 1-2% per year due to immigration. That's insane. People forget that construction projects aren't like AWS, you can't just spin them up and down in and instant and "poof", 500K houses, ready in a week. There's a significant amount of spin up time for this sort of stuff, nevermind the money required.
      - KptMarchewa 3y ago
        Have you looked at how, for example US population has grown in the late 19th century? The rates have been extraordinarily greater than today.
        xienze 3y ago
        The US would also take breaks where they greatly reduced immigration levels in order to let things "settle" a bit, instead of running it full throttle with no end in sight. AND of course, birth rates were significantly higher, which is what drove a lot of growth. Which can be accommodated much easier from a housing stock perspective, as mentioned earlier. The situation today isn't exactly the same.
- 0zemp2c 3y ago
  [dead]
seretogis 3y ago
If only. The average Canadian house price is over $700,000 [1], and over $1.2 million in Vancouver, $1.1 million in Toronto. Rentals are also extremely expensive in metro areas, with 1 BR apartments over $2,700 in Vancouver and $2,500 in Toronto. [2] [1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/crea-housing-data-1.6843592 https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/crea-housing-data-1.6843592 [2] https://rentals.ca/national-rent-report https://rentals.ca/national-rent-report
- Gunnerhead 3y ago
  And what sucks is that these two cities are where a big portion of the tech jobs are, especially Toronto. And with companies pushing for back to office, you don't have much option besides living in these expensive cities. There is a tech industry in Ottawa & Waterloo, but the former is getting very expensive too and is sprawling suburb while the latter is also getting expensive, while losing a lot of tech campuses to Toronto.
  - pkulak 3y ago
    At least Vancouver is expanding the Sky Train. You can get pretty far away from downtown at this point and still be one train away. But I haven't looked into housing costs, so maybe that just makes everything anywhere near a stop just as expensive.
    - soperj 3y ago
      Everywhere you go in Metro Vancouver is ridiculous.
    - 3pt14159 3y ago
      Well, there is the Go train for the GTA and some areas are still pretty cheap like Hamilton which is a little over $650k for a two bedroom. But I agree with the overall point that housing is too expensive in Canada.
ThisIsNotNew 3y ago
What stops house building given Canada is so big? In the UK, its all green "farmland" (mostly sheep) that prevents land being used for housing. Anyway UK population will overtake Germany in the next decade or two if immigration to UK continues like it has past 12 months and Germany doesn't open for mass immigration.
- notatoad 3y ago
  same as the main thing that stops housing everywhere: the people who already own homes want the value of their own investments to continue rising uncontrollably, and building more houses has the potential to threaten that. the stated reasons are usually that building more housing outside of existing urban areas is bad for the environment, and building more housing within existing urban areas is bad for the "neighbourhood character". but the reality is just that a housing shortage is good for a lot of people's bank accounts.
  - imbiased 3y ago
    It’s actually possible it’s all those reasons, with some contributing more than others
  - soupbowl 3y ago
    Strange comment, in my area nobody is against more housing, if you don't plan to MOVE out of the city, your house keeps doubling in price and your taxes go up, you make no money. If you want to buy up into a larger house because you had a kid? The gap between a 2 bed 1 bath house and a 3 bed, 2 bath is too much to justify. Locals that have been here 20-30 years are selling and moving into remote areas because the only way to use your home equity is to abandon the area. More houses are not built here because our infrastructure has been poorly planned for 40 years. We are also surrounded tightly by mountains and water, every new build is condos to jam in as many people as possible.
- michaelmior 3y ago
  Most people want to live in or close to bigger cities. Canada is big, but ~85% of the population lives within 100 miles of the border. Once you get far enough north, which is not that far, there's much more limited infrastructure (and everything else).
m3kw9 3y ago
Immigration policy greatly affects this and its lax af
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  Immigration isn't helping, but allowing large companies, esp. large foreign companies, to buy up all of the housing is part of the problem.
ChuckNorris89 3y ago
If only that how housing prices would have worked, take the number of homes in the country, divide by the number of citizens and if that results are greater than 1 then everyone should have no problem affording to own their home. But that's not how it works in our current reality. In the real world housing is a speculative asset, so every free home doesn't go to the homeless person who needs it, but to the financial institution who has bigger piles of money that that person, like BlackRock, who will added to their ever increasing portfolio and you will continue to be homeless because their piles of money will be bigger than yours and they can make more money renting that house to you. Aint that great? /s
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
seydor 3y ago
But prices will go up and to the right
- mitthrowaway2 3y ago
  I always wonder when I hear this expression... Do prices ever go to the left?
  - seydor 3y ago
    that would not be right
tenpies 3y ago
I'll put it to you this way: The Liberal Minister of Housing, who is responsible for making housing affordable (and has failed at virtually every portfolio he's ever been given), has been buying more rentals.[1] One in three Liberal Ministers owns rentals. These are the politicians bringing in more people into a housing crisis. They are not here to serve the public. Like Trudeau, they are here to get rich, and housing is the way to do it in Canada. The US investor may want to "trade like Pelosi", but the Canadian investor should want to "buy housing like a Liberal". It's literally a government-backed investment and they will do anything it takes to keep it from going down. --- [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/TorontoRealEstate/comments/13az7qt/federal_housing_minister_buys_another_investment/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TorontoRealEstate/comments/13az7qt/...
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
  You seem to be thinking this is a one-sided issue and are ignoring the forest for the Liberal trees. Poilievre and his wife are both involved in owning rental properties. It's a class issue.
soupbowl 3y ago
In my area, housing is in a terrible state. My house almost doubled in price every 5 years. I down graded into a town house that 10 years ago was $130,000 new, they are selling for $500,000 now. I was talking to someone that works for the city and they told me my current townhouse were originally 'low income housing'. No wonder we have such an explosion of homeless people. We've had conservative and liberal governments here, our government has failed us, doesn't matter which direction you want to point and blame for our current unsustainable housing.
- ricardobayes 3y ago
  How come Canada doesn't build more houses? As I see that's the only way to keep prices from rising. Here in Spain, which is a comparable country in terms of population, real estate is big business, especially on the coast. In some areas, there are still unsold housing stock from the 2008 turmoil, yet they keep building like crazy. Fortunately there's plenty of land available. Maybe it helps that we don't have mega-cities, but the whole country is pretty decentralized. You can have the same quality of life in Sevilla, Bilbao or Valencia, like Madrid or Barcelona. Prices didn't rise all that much, prices are just now coming back to early-2000s levels. You can easily buy a well-built brick 3 bedroom house for under 200k.
  - xemoka 3y ago
    Similar reasons to elsewhere with these problems: lots of NIMBY, lots of people who think (at least here on Vancouver Island) that we should just close up shop and not have anyone new move here, lots of building requirements that increase pricing (not necessarily a bad thing, but compounds the issue), lots of people who don't want to devalue their homes (because most Canadians have seen it as their "retirement plan" for their entire adult lives), poor zoning practices amplified by voter apathy and a misunderstanding of population realities (i.e. Vancouver, where single-family residential dominated for decades, instead of increased density). It's a cacophony of poor planning and people who are stuck in the past—or at least what they imagine the past to be.

I suspect all the people voting for restrict housing are going to be surprised when young/poor people eventually revolt :)

jacquesm 3y ago
They won't revolt. It's a sad reality but Canada is an endless web of special interests.
- grecy 3y ago
  They won't need to revolt, they'll just stop participating in the rigged game which will bring the game to it's knees.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    I highly doubt it. I've had a lot of exposure to Canada's up and coming generation and unless it interferes with their internet connection I really don't think they will do much of anything. Participation is for immigrants, who have nothing to lose and everything to gain and they too won't be acting against the vested interests. This is a very frustrating aspect of Canada and it took me a long time to get to terms with it, such potential and so little to show for it. It's quite frustrating.
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    How? You can't stop eating, and Canada is too cold to homestead in large numbers. Homeless shelter options are not good. They can't get on a bus to the US for more than 6 months at a stretch, and gun ownership is heavily curtailed. Until Ottawa makes some systemic changes -- and that sure as hell ain't gonna happen -- you're gonna participate, or freeze. They will then import a bunch of Temporary Foreign Workers to replace you.
    - grecy 3y ago
      Myself, and a ton of engineering-types that I know quit our full time jobs and quit trying to "get ahead", and now just live on ~$20k a year doing what we want with our time. No need to aspire to buy a new car or house or pay huge taxes. Also, plenty of homesteading all the way up into Yukon (I lived there for four years). It's not hard to grow the majority of the food you need and hunt the rest.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        'Myself and A ton of engineering-types' is a rounding error on the size of society. The number of people that can afford to do this is super small, and those that do typically can do so because they are fairly carefree (healthy, few if any dependents). $20k / year will not support a family and growing food and hunting isn't how the vast bulk of society stays alive.
        grecy 3y ago
        What I'm saying is that I believe more people will choose to do what we are doing, because the alternative (playing the rigged game) makes less sense every year. If it requires going to work for more than your entire life to pay for a house, people will stop buying houses, etc.
        jacquesm 3y ago
        People in general have far less choice in this than is probably desirable. They tend to have normal lives, with normal friends and normal jobs and as a result they lose their ability to make such choices. The game is utterly rigged but there isn't a whole lot you can do about it if you are trying to make ends meet with a family. In my family I'm the lucky one, I can pretty much live in any way that I want. But the rule is that the job cycle pretty much dictates how much freedom you've got. The financial stakes are balanced in such a way that you're likely in the tredmill for life unless you get very lucky. The big problem is that there are so many little races to the bottom that if you're not very careful you will end up participating in one or more of these effectively reducing the negotiation power of others and time shifted with yourself. Unionization is one way to solve some aspects of this (though not all and some unions have their own issues that then become dominant). Alternatively you can go it alone but that kind of risk taking isn't for everybody either. I don't think homesteading or opting out is going to be a big driver, it would be nice if it were but I just don't see it happening. What you will see is an increase in mental issues, homelessness, personal bankruptcies and more like that. Those are the indicators that things are really not going well. But many people don't care about these things until it hits them personally.
- noughtme 3y ago
  Also, a lot of restrictions on development are coming from affordable housing groups, who don’t want any development unless it’s affordable, or (if condos) includes some affordable units.
xienze 3y ago
It’s not so much about “restricting housing supply” as it is a fundamental problem with growth through immigration. When a new citizen is born, there’s roughly 20 years before that person needs individual housing to be made available for them. Plenty of time to build new housing. When a new citizen is imported, they need housing _today_. And Canada is importing massive numbers of people relative to the country’s population.
- TX81Z 3y ago
  Good thing it doesn’t take 20 years to build a house or apartment building.
  - JimtheCoder 3y ago
    Have you ever tried to build a house or apartment building in Canada?
  - xienze 3y ago
    That's... not the key point to take away there. The point is, if the rate of new citizens (who need new housing, i.e. aren't living with a family member who already has existing housing) is greater than your rate of speed with which you can throw up new housing, you're gonna be in trouble. This is Canada right now. Their population is increasing at like 1-2% per year due to immigration. That's insane. People forget that construction projects aren't like AWS, you can't just spin them up and down in and instant and "poof", 500K houses, ready in a week. There's a significant amount of spin up time for this sort of stuff, nevermind the money required.
    - KptMarchewa 3y ago
      Have you looked at how, for example US population has grown in the late 19th century? The rates have been extraordinarily greater than today.
      - xienze 3y ago
        The US would also take breaks where they greatly reduced immigration levels in order to let things "settle" a bit, instead of running it full throttle with no end in sight. AND of course, birth rates were significantly higher, which is what drove a lot of growth. Which can be accommodated much easier from a housing stock perspective, as mentioned earlier. The situation today isn't exactly the same.
0zemp2c 3y ago
[dead]

seretogis 3y ago

If only. The average Canadian house price is over $700,000 [1], and over $1.2 million in Vancouver, $1.1 million in Toronto. Rentals are also extremely expensive in metro areas, with 1 BR apartments over $2,700 in Vancouver and $2,500 in Toronto. [2] [1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/crea-housing-data-1.6843592 https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/crea-housing-data-1.6843592 [2] https://rentals.ca/national-rent-report https://rentals.ca/national-rent-report

Gunnerhead 3y ago
And what sucks is that these two cities are where a big portion of the tech jobs are, especially Toronto. And with companies pushing for back to office, you don't have much option besides living in these expensive cities. There is a tech industry in Ottawa & Waterloo, but the former is getting very expensive too and is sprawling suburb while the latter is also getting expensive, while losing a lot of tech campuses to Toronto.
- pkulak 3y ago
  At least Vancouver is expanding the Sky Train. You can get pretty far away from downtown at this point and still be one train away. But I haven't looked into housing costs, so maybe that just makes everything anywhere near a stop just as expensive.
  - soperj 3y ago
    Everywhere you go in Metro Vancouver is ridiculous.
  - 3pt14159 3y ago
    Well, there is the Go train for the GTA and some areas are still pretty cheap like Hamilton which is a little over $650k for a two bedroom. But I agree with the overall point that housing is too expensive in Canada.

ThisIsNotNew 3y ago

What stops house building given Canada is so big? In the UK, its all green "farmland" (mostly sheep) that prevents land being used for housing. Anyway UK population will overtake Germany in the next decade or two if immigration to UK continues like it has past 12 months and Germany doesn't open for mass immigration.

notatoad 3y ago
same as the main thing that stops housing everywhere: the people who already own homes want the value of their own investments to continue rising uncontrollably, and building more houses has the potential to threaten that. the stated reasons are usually that building more housing outside of existing urban areas is bad for the environment, and building more housing within existing urban areas is bad for the "neighbourhood character". but the reality is just that a housing shortage is good for a lot of people's bank accounts.
- imbiased 3y ago
  It’s actually possible it’s all those reasons, with some contributing more than others
- soupbowl 3y ago
  Strange comment, in my area nobody is against more housing, if you don't plan to MOVE out of the city, your house keeps doubling in price and your taxes go up, you make no money. If you want to buy up into a larger house because you had a kid? The gap between a 2 bed 1 bath house and a 3 bed, 2 bath is too much to justify. Locals that have been here 20-30 years are selling and moving into remote areas because the only way to use your home equity is to abandon the area. More houses are not built here because our infrastructure has been poorly planned for 40 years. We are also surrounded tightly by mountains and water, every new build is condos to jam in as many people as possible.
michaelmior 3y ago
Most people want to live in or close to bigger cities. Canada is big, but ~85% of the population lives within 100 miles of the border. Once you get far enough north, which is not that far, there's much more limited infrastructure (and everything else).

m3kw9 3y ago

Immigration policy greatly affects this and its lax af

red-iron-pine 3y ago
Immigration isn't helping, but allowing large companies, esp. large foreign companies, to buy up all of the housing is part of the problem.

ChuckNorris89 3y ago

If only that how housing prices would have worked, take the number of homes in the country, divide by the number of citizens and if that results are greater than 1 then everyone should have no problem affording to own their home. But that's not how it works in our current reality. In the real world housing is a speculative asset, so every free home doesn't go to the homeless person who needs it, but to the financial institution who has bigger piles of money that that person, like BlackRock, who will added to their ever increasing portfolio and you will continue to be homeless because their piles of money will be bigger than yours and they can make more money renting that house to you. Aint that great? /s

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

seydor 3y ago

But prices will go up and to the right

mitthrowaway2 3y ago
I always wonder when I hear this expression... Do prices ever go to the left?
- seydor 3y ago
  that would not be right

tenpies 3y ago

I'll put it to you this way: The Liberal Minister of Housing, who is responsible for making housing affordable (and has failed at virtually every portfolio he's ever been given), has been buying more rentals.[1] One in three Liberal Ministers owns rentals. These are the politicians bringing in more people into a housing crisis. They are not here to serve the public. Like Trudeau, they are here to get rich, and housing is the way to do it in Canada. The US investor may want to "trade like Pelosi", but the Canadian investor should want to "buy housing like a Liberal". It's literally a government-backed investment and they will do anything it takes to keep it from going down. --- [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/TorontoRealEstate/comments/13az7qt/federal_housing_minister_buys_another_investment/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TorontoRealEstate/comments/13az7qt/...

SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
You seem to be thinking this is a one-sided issue and are ignoring the forest for the Liberal trees. Poilievre and his wife are both involved in owning rental properties. It's a class issue.

soupbowl 3y ago

In my area, housing is in a terrible state. My house almost doubled in price every 5 years. I down graded into a town house that 10 years ago was $130,000 new, they are selling for $500,000 now. I was talking to someone that works for the city and they told me my current townhouse were originally 'low income housing'. No wonder we have such an explosion of homeless people. We've had conservative and liberal governments here, our government has failed us, doesn't matter which direction you want to point and blame for our current unsustainable housing.

ricardobayes 3y ago
How come Canada doesn't build more houses? As I see that's the only way to keep prices from rising. Here in Spain, which is a comparable country in terms of population, real estate is big business, especially on the coast. In some areas, there are still unsold housing stock from the 2008 turmoil, yet they keep building like crazy. Fortunately there's plenty of land available. Maybe it helps that we don't have mega-cities, but the whole country is pretty decentralized. You can have the same quality of life in Sevilla, Bilbao or Valencia, like Madrid or Barcelona. Prices didn't rise all that much, prices are just now coming back to early-2000s levels. You can easily buy a well-built brick 3 bedroom house for under 200k.
- xemoka 3y ago
  Similar reasons to elsewhere with these problems: lots of NIMBY, lots of people who think (at least here on Vancouver Island) that we should just close up shop and not have anyone new move here, lots of building requirements that increase pricing (not necessarily a bad thing, but compounds the issue), lots of people who don't want to devalue their homes (because most Canadians have seen it as their "retirement plan" for their entire adult lives), poor zoning practices amplified by voter apathy and a misunderstanding of population realities (i.e. Vancouver, where single-family residential dominated for decades, instead of increased density). It's a cacophony of poor planning and people who are stuck in the past—or at least what they imagine the past to be.