9 ms·

But where will these new people stay? There is not enough housing being built for people, you are going to see people come here only to leave when they realize

• joshlemer 3y ago
  I've seen first hand refugees come to Canada from Ukraine, realize that this country is in their words "not a country where you can have an easy life" and within 6 months figure out a way to get to the states.
  • peanuty1 3y ago
    I could've been making a great salary in Canada as a new grad but it just didn't make sense to stay when I could make 1.5x more in the US (and in USD!).
    • wesapien 3y ago
      Good on you! I wish I could do the same leave Canada.
  • f6v 3y ago
    > I've seen first hand refugees come to Canada from Ukraine Software developers are used to paying sub-10% income tax there (or no tax at all).
    • joshlemer 3y ago
      Yeah, that was a big shock for them.
      • risyachka 3y ago
        It wasn’t. Software developers are not allowed to leave Ukraine.
        • m00x 3y ago
          I know plenty who have, and there are plenty who were here before. Why wouldn't they be able to leave?
          • f6v 3y ago
            Well you can’t just walk up to border guards and bribe them. You’ve got to have connections, not everyone does.
          • imtemplain 3y ago
            [dead]
          • bjord 3y ago
            Please, correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds to me like this person is assuming all software developers are (military age) men. I'm not aware of other restrictions on people being able to leave Ukraine.
            • rat9988 3y ago
              Military age men are big chunk of ukranian software devs. It's not a small restriction that we can just ignore.
              • MichaelZuo 3y ago
                Quite a lot of folks in Ukraine aren't exactly known for strictly complying with every regulation. There's undoubtedly a huge number of military age men that left regardless, especially among software devs.
  • lordnacho 3y ago
    Is it much different in the states?
    • grugagag 3y ago
      That’s what I’ve been thinking about. Probably there are many people who take the opposite route, states first then Canada. I only know a few cases though.
    • joshlemer 3y ago
      Yes, home prices are drastically lower in most of the states than in Canada. Taxes are also lower, and pay is higher. Just compare home prices in Niagara Falls New York, where you can get what Canadians would consider a great house for literally 100k, and Niagara Falls Ontario where you're looking at 600k-900k. Or compare White Rock BC where a house will run you 3 million, to Blaine Washington where you can get a house for 300k.
• hackly 3y ago
  Billboards have run before (“Can’t afford a home? Have you tried having rich parents?”, etc). A protest was organized but very few showed up. None of this work when the ruling class is benefiting from the lack of housing. You need something more attention grabbing. Something Titan-like that the media will run with for days. Something like what started the Arab spring or similar movements. Not advocating for self-immolation, but it has to be dramatic enough to wake people up. There are too many incumbents benefiting from the status quo that it’ll take a monumental effort to turn things around.
  • dmix 3y ago
    If the primary issue is the wealthy controlling housing then why is the brand new Toronto mayor, a representative of the working class party (NDP), have zero stuff about reforming housing policy like zoning and height limits, or anything about anti-NIMBYism? Basically the stuff that's very obviously been holding back development forever. Chow would probably be at the front of any Arab Spring type protest in Toronto championing housing. Yet her whole website is the same shit we've been sold as solutions since the 1970s: city wide rent control that has repeatedly resulted in a long term reduction in housing supply, a small set of new gov built skyscrapers that will take a decade to build and come in at twice the cost of budget, doubling down on disincentivizing renting properties by 2xing the amount of legal worries property renters have to go through when dealing with bad tenants, some weak stuff about city spending $100M to buy homes off the market so they don't get renovated (so basically 10 homes), etc, etc. https://www.oliviachow.ca/plan https://www.oliviachow.ca/plan Is the NDP the party of the wealthy elite in Toronto? Over valuing protecting a small amount of exclusive neighbourhoods with old Victorian homes at the expense of the rest of the (very large and varied) city and only ever allowing expensive skyscrapers to be built? The answer to that might be yes. But it's hard to disconnect those critiques from the language and policies of municipal politics here in Toronto... and almost every major western city. Which always sounds the same, while conventiently blaming someone else.
    • nvy 3y ago
      >Is the NDP the party of the wealthy elite in Toronto? Always has been.
• acover 3y ago
  Billboards are your plan? 70% of Canadians are happy with the situation. Even more of those who actually vote. If this was actually a problem then it would have been solved. It's not that hard to build houses. Personally I'd like to buy a house and convert it to an unreasonable number of apartments with a common kitchen. If you happen to hookup a kitchen in your apartment how would I know?
  • hackly 3y ago
    That ratio is declining by the day as more and more join the renting class. Olivia Chow’s victory in Toronto is testament to that. She ran on increasing the vacancy tax, making evictions more difficult, building 25k rental homes, etc. No wonder why the old guard like Ford and Tory tried everything to steer people away from her. But she still won. Speaks volumes of the changes in the demographics. It’s no longer 70% that are happy with the housing crisis I can tell you this much.
    • acover 3y ago
      Seems remarkably stable to me: https://www.statista.com/statistics/198969/home-ownership-rate-in-canada-since-2003/#:~:text=About%20two%20in%20three%20Canadians,slightly%20lower%2C%20at%2066.5%20percent https://www.statista.com/statistics/198969/home-ownership-ra....
      • joshlemer 3y ago
        That doesn't really capture it though. Anyone who lives in a home which is occupied by the owner counts in this figure. So if someone in their 20s is unable to afford to live on their own and has to live with their parents, they will count towards this homeowner statistic.
      • hackly 3y ago
        You assume all homeowners are happy with the situation. That is definitely not the case. Many looking to upsize or thinking about housing for their kids are not pleased with the rising prices. And this crowd is growing too.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• screye 3y ago
  As Canada gets more young citizens without building, their home ownership has continued plummeting. [1] Once there is a critical mass of single-issue pro-housing voters, we can expect to see a huge tsunami of pro-housing bills get passed for this politically lucrative issue. As of now, old homeowners are the electoral majority. So, pro-housing politics is a losing strategy. But you can only sustain it so long in a nation with at ton of younger owned-home-started immigrants. [1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-canada-homeownership-rate-drop/#:~:text=on%20the%20rise.-,The%20homeownership%20rate%20in%20Canada,-60 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-canada-home...
  • Gareth321 3y ago
    Canada is acute, but this is the same issue in many countries right now. The older, voting generation has voted, every time, to maximise their personal wellbeing at the expense of the younger generations. Because they comprise such a large voting bloc, and they're diligent voters, and they can buy political influence, policies remain catered towards them. I agree that the only solution here is through democracy, and that means demographic changes. In the next 1-2 decades, home owners will be in the minority in many countries. That's when things will get very interesting, politically. In New Zealand, for example, the younger, disenfranchised demographics have been chewed up and spat on their entire lives. We're talking everyone born after 1980. They harbour hate. The political swings are going to be wild. I think there will be enormous land value taxes levied.
    • voisin 3y ago
      > The older, voting generation has voted, every time, to maximise their personal wellbeing at the expense of the younger generations Did previous generations not do this as well, or is this unique to the boomers?
      • cyberneticist 3y ago
        No, previous generations tended to preserve the social contract of not fucking over their grandkids so they could go out to eat more and take more vacations in retirement. Before they were called boomers they were called "generation me". It should hardly be a surprise that this is what generation me would do in old age.
• throwaway2037 3y ago
  Canada is a huge country. It would be better to mention specific cities with issues. There are many cities in Canada without housing issues.
  • m00x 3y ago
    Immigrants usually go to centers that have immigration offices to help them. Going to Edmunston won't be very useful for them.
    • light_hue_1 3y ago
      Given that Edmonton's population is 26% immigrants, that's simply false. The main problem is that these cities are very small, so even though as a percentage they absorb a lot of immigrants, they can't make that much of a dent overall.
      • mynegation 3y ago
        I think your parent meant Edmundston, New Brunswick, pop. 16,437.
        • arroz 3y ago
          Lol
      • m00x 3y ago
        My man doesn't even know about Edmunston, NB. It's really that bad.
  • voisin 3y ago
    > There are many cities in Canada without housing issues. Can you name a few that haven’t seen house prices relative to household income skyrocket over the last 5-10 years?
    • joenot443 3y ago
• gnopgnip 3y ago
  >But where will these new people stay? Housing is relatively affordable outside of Ontario and BC. Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton, Quebec City, Winnepeg, Halifax, Saskatoon, Regina, and St Johns are all major metro areas where homes are less than half the price of the GTA and Vancouver metro. The obvious fix for Ontario and BC to make housing more affordable is to allow people to build more where people want to live by relaxing zoning requirements. In 80%+ of Vancouver and 60%+ of Toronto it's literally illegal to build anything besides detached single family homes. Little of the remaining land zoned for more dense development is suitable for development. There are some smaller changes like streamlining permitting, not exempting 100% of capital gains and incentivizing speculation, and a vacancy tax to discourage speculation that would help. The problem is any changes to make housing more affordable are politically unpopular, almost 70% of Canadians are homeowners and in the short term benefit from the status quo. Also younger people are ~20% less likely to vote.
  • leshow 3y ago
    > The obvious fix for Ontario and BC to make housing more affordable is to allow people to build more where people want to live by relaxing zoning requirements. The market has proven totally unable to solve the housing crisis and your solution is to relax regulation and incentivize builders to make more profits. The price of units and homes is already too high, incentives will just get us more market rate or above housing. Here's another option: start to decommodify housing by building good, mixed income public housing. Vienna and Singapore have two different models that could work here.
  • jbarham 3y ago
    > Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton, Quebec City, Winnepeg, Halifax, Saskatoon, Regina, and St Johns Yeah, all of these cities also have long, harsh winters. FWIW I'm a Canadian who lived in California on work visas for several years and relocated to Australia in 2011, where I'm now a citizen. I've never regretted leaving Canada.
    • raverbashing 3y ago
      And Toronto's winter is not harsh?
• ricardobayes 3y ago
  There are 2k+ houses for sale in Nova Scotia under 200k right now. Canada is more than the GTA area. Actually as I know the same thing happened in the US at the turn of the century. People arriving to the country finding prices high in New York ventured further, settling in Ohio, for example. Ohio has the highest hungarian population out of all states, due to this. People always adapt, and overcome. It's really not up to the "state" to solve middle-class housing issues. It's not the soviet union.
  • midoridensha 3y ago
    >It's really not up to the "state" to solve middle-class housing issues. It's not the soviet union. Yes, it is. The state caused the housing issues because of their Soviet-like zoning laws.
    • light_hue_1 3y ago
      In defense of the Soviet Union, these zoning laws don't come from there. They come from the US, as an effort in the early 20th century to keep undesirable people (jews, blacks, chinese, etc.) away from precious whites.
      • midoridensha 3y ago
        True, and I didn't mean to imply that Euclidean zoning was invented by the Soviets. Rather, the Soviets, having a planned economy and authoritarian system, planned urban development: they decided how housing would be built, where, and what type. Their choice gave them big apartment blocks, but it was because the State mandated this, not because any developers or private landowners wanted them. In the US and Canada, it's very similar, though a bit different: the State has decided that only ridiculously inefficient single-family housing is allowed to be built. Both of them are situations where the State has forced limits on what kind of housing is allowed, but the type of housing is obviously diametrically different. A better system is one where the State sets very few limits on housing, only very practical ones (no 50-story towers next to the airport, for instance), and lets landowners do what they want with their land, within reason.
• miga 3y ago
  Singapore has public housing corporations that build the high-rise housing for this reason. Given that Canada is more spacious, government expects free market will solve the housing.
  • ChuckNorris89 3y ago
    >government expects free market will solve the housing I nearly choked on my milk reading this. When in the recent period has housing ever followed the rules of supply and demand? The government policy makers, nimbys and banks are constantly doing everything possible to prevent the bubble from popping and to limit supply to ensure thier nest eggs keep appreciating regardless. If housing actually had liberated free market, without government or nimby interference, we wouldn't have a housing crisis. Same in Europe. Nobody wants the unsustainable housing bubble to pop, because everyone , from the voters to policy makers, are heavily invested into it with the idea that it must always go up no matter what. We've basically chosen going full steam ahead towards the iceberg because "line must go up".
• kderbyma 3y ago
  Canadian government is corrupt and each policy is designed to devalue our economy and make us dependent on foreign control. it's hollow out strategy
• kazinator 3y ago
  > But where will these new people stay? In better accommodations than the "berry picking talent", "retail talent", "warehouse talent" or "trucking talent" that was fashionable to bring in in previous years.