8 ms·

>Which of these will be sustained in the next decades remains to be seen. I imagine that Europe's demographic issues are going to force something needing to gi

>Which of these will be sustained in the next decades remains to be seen. I imagine that Europe's demographic issues are going to force something needing to give on the QoL side of things.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
Europe can (and does to some degree) solve this issue the same way we do here in Canada: high immigration rates. It has downsides, esp to the xenophobes, but in the long run, redistribution/migration of populations from the south -- where climate change is going to have the most serious impacts -- is just going to be part of life.
- Tade0 3y ago
  > Europe can (and does to some degree) solve this issue the same way we do here in Canada: high immigration rates. That worked great in the XX century, but the supply of potential immigrants from countries with a high(90%+) literacy rate is dwindling due to fertility rates falling below replacement in source countries. As it stands most such people currently reside in South East Asia. This is not a viable strategy for the next 20 years, let alone 50 years.
- endisneigh 3y ago
  I highly doubt western europe will open up their doors. It's already difficult to immigrant there now. Once pressed I imagine the opposite scenario. No way Europe can sustain immigration accessibility on the level of USA and still include all of the benefits.
  - elzbardico 3y ago
    It is hard if you are a qualified professional looking for work in your area, not if you are classified as a refugee.
    - schnitzelstoat 3y ago
      Which is the opposite to how it should be.
      - sofixa 3y ago
        Why? The whole point of accepting refugees is that they're running away from a horrible situation from where they came from (persecution, war, famine, genocide, uninhabitable weather, you get the gist) and accepting them is saving their lives. They are, in theory, the ones most in need. Of course there are people just looking for better economic opportunities, and people who target specific Western countries to be a refugee in (e.g. Pakistanis that show up in Germany - if they were really fleeing from a critical situation they would stop in the first place that is calm and safe, not continue the journey to a richer country), but they aren't really refugees in the actual sense of the word.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - sofixa 3y ago
    Define difficult? Take France for instance, 10% of people living in France in 2021 were immigrants (born in another country). Net Migration is in the 100-200k range per year. https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/03/30/one-in-10-people-in-france-an-immigrant-statistics-agency_6021240_7.html https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/03/30/one-in-1... https://www.statista.com/statistics/686137/net-migration-france/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/686137/net-migration-fra...
    - endisneigh 3y ago
      France, Spain and Germany are among the betters in terms of immigration. If you consider the rest of western europe, not so great. Even france in particular isn't really that accommodating.
  - carlob 3y ago
    It's not like we're going to have any choice in the matter. Vast regions of the world are quickly becoming uninhabitable both because of climate change and of the damage done during colonialism and its political consequences. We can either choose to open the doors willingly or they are going to be blown open. I personally think it would be more ethical and pracical to open them now, but I seem to be in the minority.
    - logicchains 3y ago
      >Vast regions of the world are quickly becoming uninhabitable Have you got any concrete examples? The temperature range for human habitability is pretty wide; the temperature regularly gets up to 50 degrees in summer in the Gulf States (like UAE and Saudi) yet the quality of life there is quite high, in spite of it being a literal desert. Most of the refugees entering Europe are fleeing good ol' fashioned wars, not environmental catastrophes.
      - carlob 3y ago
        You don't need to have a very high average. It's sufficient to have a high wet bulb temperature for a few days to kill off large portions of the population. Also consider that Africa is going to represent most of the demographic growth of the world in the next few decades. And consider the effects of all this combined with political instability you quickly get into a situation like the floods in Libya.
    - blibble 3y ago
      > We can either choose to open the doors willingly or they are going to be blown open. I'm afraid the reality is likely to be that once the doors are blown open, electorates will vote for people that will man them with machine guns
    - leetcrew 3y ago
      > We can either choose to open the doors willingly or they are going to be blown open. why do you think this? it's next to impossible to completely stop piecemeal border crossings. but beyond a certain scale, it becomes something that militaries can oppose directly. are you suggesting the europeans would not have the stomach for military action against migrants, or that the migrants would somehow defeat them in sheer numbers? if it's the former, I would point out that were are already seeing questionable events with migrant ships in the mediterranean.
  - Gravityloss 3y ago
    I've hired IT professionals from a lot of non-EU countries to a EU country and it was quite easy. I don't know where does this argument come from. I think it's much harder to get to USA.
    - endisneigh 3y ago
      I'm talking about citizenship. I'm not familiar with every single country's policies, but it's simply a fact that the USA is more accommodating to immigrants than Germany and France, for example. France for instance barely provides support for English speakers, god forbid any other country that speaks other languages. An immigrant who finds themselves in New York City, to contrast, will see that the city provides government assistance in dozens of languages and proof of address and things of that nature aren't even required.
      - Gravityloss 3y ago
        Maybe some bigger countries have this expectation that most people talk their main language and movies are dubbed etc. Certainly also USA. Smaller countries this is not the case. For example in nordic countries you can get by quite fine with English.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- elzbardico 3y ago
  The difference is that canada is taking qualified professionals as migrants, people who have the training to work in a developed economy, that know English or French. Europe is taking refugees with very low work qualifications, a lot of them barely literate in their own languages, and who can't communicate on their host countries language. If anything, the way foreign migration is done in most of Europe, it is making things worse, as it is severely burdening their social budgets.
  - bryanlarsen 3y ago
    Counterintuitively, research shows that the European approach is better for the economy and for native European workers than the Canadian approach is. An example: Canada lets an English or French speaking engineer in, Europe lets in somebody with poor European language skills and no relevant skills that ends up working as a janitor. The engineer comes in near the top and displaces Canadians downward. The immigrant engineer is unlikely to put a Canadian engineer out of work, but they do ease the upward pressure on engineering wages. OTOH The janitor comes in at the bottom and pushes Europeans up. That high school dropout who was previously stuck being a janitor now competes favourably for customer-facing retail managerial roles. Jobs are not a zero-sum game. Every working person a country has increases the demand for jobs by a significant amount. The zero-sum intuition most people have is highly misleading. ETA: source: Bryan Kaplan's books & articles.
    - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
      Yeah I think the approach here in Canada has also contributed to the housing price crisis because it's cherry-picking immigrants with large initial investments, and they're coming here and dumping $$ into "sure thing, number only go up" housing. And we've ended up with a bit of a shortage of working class unskilled labour, while at the same time screwing skilled immigrants who came here thinking they were coming to a land of prosperity to be an engineer or doctor and they end up as taxi drivers or convenience store clerks.
      - hnbad 3y ago
- logicchains 3y ago
  > Europe can (and does to some degree) solve this issue the same way we do here in Canada: high immigration rates. This only works if it's difficult for migrants to get on welfare. Otherwise you attract migrants who just want to live off welfare, not work, which doesn't contribute to supporting the growing retired population. (Not that migrants should be blamed for this; if you could get a better life for yourself and your family just by moving to a country that paid you for not even having to work, of course it's a rational decision).
  - Tade0 3y ago
    > Otherwise you attract migrants who just want to live off welfare, not work, This is a common misconception. Those people on welfare work, it's just that it's mostly illegal employment. This is a widespread phenomenon everywhere in Europe, particularly in construction.
    - hnbad 3y ago
      Exactly. Actually many people in trade jobs (construction, hairdressers, etc) additionally work in illegal employment (or do paid "favors" for acquaintances), at least speaking from my experience as a German in Germany. This usually has to do with those jobs being too badly paid to attract enough people to do all the available work as well as those jobs not paying a sufficiently livable wage and welfare being tied to unemployment or fully deducting any income 1-to-1. A naive solution would be converting welfare to something of a reverse income tax (so e.g. for every €2 you earn your welfare would be reduced by €1 rather than €2, down to zero, and no income tax would be paid on any income up to 2x of welfare). But politicians seem to be more interested in squeezing welfare recipients harder because they think people who aren't working (legally) must be punished until they start working - nevermind that some of those welfare recipients are not part of the work force due to age or legal status and thus can't legally work.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    In most countries it's _impossible_ for immigrants to get on welfare, until they become fully naturalized. This is a myth that's put about by the right. There is however a state obligation towards asylum seekers while their claim is pending, and a basic interest in not allowing huge camps of starving homeless people to develop.
- g232089 3y ago
  >In October the finance ministry, in its annual report on the issue, estimated that in 2018 immigrants from non-Western countries and their descendants drained from public finances a net 31bn kroner ($4.9bn), some 1.4% of GDP. Immigrants from Western countries, by contrast, contributed a net 7bn kroner (see chart). https://archive.ph/TSsQa#selection-1021.77-1025.92 https://archive.ph/TSsQa#selection-1021.77-1025.92 So yes, it has downsides... The downside of not working at all. (In this comment, I am separating Western and non-Western immigrants, since you mentioned xenophobes)
  - Scarblac 3y ago
    Contributing to public finances isn't the only thing for which we need people, it's not even the most important thing. We are going to need a lot of people to care for the elderly, people working in construction, etc. Which particular group then does the much higher paying jobs that contribute more taxes is less relevant.
    - kergonath 3y ago
      Also, things like building roads and infrastructure, picking fruits, logistics, etc. The value of these jobs for the society are not commensurate with their wages.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    > immigrants from non-Western countries and their descendants Key word "descendants". Are those by any chance children, who were born in the country (therefore are not themselves immigrants) and need to be educated? It seems dishonest to count them as not contributing when they're not old enough to. Again, most immigrants are not eligible for any welfare until they are fully naturalized.
    - throwaway6734 3y ago
      Look at the chart that op shared
- throw0101c 3y ago
  > Europe can (and does to some degree) solve this issue the same way we do here in Canada: high immigration rates. > It has downsides […] The main downside you have to counter is building enough housing, which Canada is not. The federal government (AFAICT) sets immigration targets/numbers without consulting the provinces and municipalities to see what they can handle. The US (pop. 330M) brings in 1M immigrants in the last few years, while in Canada (pop. 40M): > In 2022, Canada welcomed 437,180 immigrants and the number of non-permanent residents increased by a net 607,782 people. Both figures are the highest levels on record and reflect "higher immigration targets and a record-breaking year for the processing of immigration applications," StatsCan said. * https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canada-record-population-growth-migration-1.6787428 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canada-record-population-grow...
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    So. The narrative here in Canada has shifted to blaming immigration for housing woes. While there might be something to it, it smells suspiciously like shifting the blame away from monetary/fiscal/legislative policy. 20 years of low rates (federal concern), and an under-regulated real estate market (provincial concern). Notably not all parts of Canada have this problem, despite having high immigration rates. Immigration is still high to, e.g. Edmonton, and employment rates are good, etc. but housing affordability there is "fine" (relatively, for now). I think you started to touch on the problem here, which is the dysfunction of our federal/provincial relations. Political trends right now want to blame Trudeau (I don't like him either, but whatever), so they're pointing the finger at immigration. But the provinces (esp Ontario and BC) have failed to accommodate the immigration rates by building housing and densifying. Now that they're caught with their pants down here in Ontario their answer is to pave over farmland and build more low-density McMansions, which, well, it's blatant vote buying and corruption because the people in those 905-belt houses vote Tory and the developers contribute to the PC party. That and building public housing is something people in western G7 countries have become disturbingly allergic to. The last time we had housing crisis at this level, that was one way out of the problem: we built massive rental towers all over the place, along with public housing projects. In large part what we have here is a powerful baby boomer electorate that has up until now felt itself benefited by skyrocketing real estate prices. The increases in their home values allowed them to ignore their pathetic retirement savings. It was an "Eat The Young" mentality that just assumed "Number Goes Up" forever on real estate prices. And governments -- both prov and fed -- were perfectly willing to just keep feeding that fire. It's also not fair to point at 2022 immigration numbers, when 2020/2021 had far lower immigration rates, due to COVID. The temporary foreign worker program was effectively suspended, and immigration rates were low. So the numbers spiked afterwards for a bunch of causes, partially recovery from that, partially policy, and partially refugees from the war in Ukraine.
pjc50 3y ago
The low birth rate is a solution to the housing problem.
- ben_w 3y ago
  I'm not so sure. The UK, for example, has significantly more empty homes than homeless people[0]. I don't know the physical distribution of these properties, so purely hypothetically: if the empty properties are in deprived areas of the country that don't have jobs, they might as well be in Montserrat for all the impact they have on the UK housing market in the places with jobs. [0] exact number depends how you count, this link is obviously trying to do politics so pinch of salt, but it still illustrates the different measures: https://www.actiononemptyhomes.org/news/national-empty-homes-week-2023-sees-call-for-action-on-one-million-homes-nobody-lives-in https://www.actiononemptyhomes.org/news/national-empty-homes...
  - twixfel 3y ago
    The UK has very few empty homes compared to peer countries, though. We have very little spare capacity, we need to actually build more homes.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      Are you suggesting that the reason that 250,000 houses that have been empty for 6 months isn't enough for 250,000 homeless people, is something other than the houses being nowhere near the job opportunities?
      - twixfel 3y ago
        The housing problem in the UK is so much more than simply homelessness. Bad location, shit quality, low density, small, expensive, leasehold, nothing being built...
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  It won't. Those homes will just go in fewer hands so the rich will be richer the poor will be poorer. We've already had a low birthrates for a while and property prices (where the jobs are) have gone nowhere but up, outpacing Inflation, wage growth and sometimes even the stock market. Nobody cares the desolate countryside homes are sitting empty because there are no jobs there.
ben_w 3y ago
Increasing working lifespans is a partial solution (people aren't fans of this for obvious reasons): Optimistically we do have a lot of work being done in regenerative/SENS medicine (I'm completely unqualified to judge how good that research is, but it is happening); Pessimistically this is just increasing the pension age. Another solution is automation and robotics. This is further away than the flashy demos from Boston Dynamics and Tesla suggest, but not fundamentally absurd especially as it doesn't really need the robots to be humanoid. Given the power/compute requirements and the difficulty of vision processing, I assume this will be about 5 years behind self-driving cars.

>Which of these will be sustained in the next decades remains to be seen. I imagine that Europe's demographic issues are going to force something needing to give on the QoL side of things.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago

Europe can (and does to some degree) solve this issue the same way we do here in Canada: high immigration rates. It has downsides, esp to the xenophobes, but in the long run, redistribution/migration of populations from the south -- where climate change is going to have the most serious impacts -- is just going to be part of life.

Tade0 3y ago
> Europe can (and does to some degree) solve this issue the same way we do here in Canada: high immigration rates. That worked great in the XX century, but the supply of potential immigrants from countries with a high(90%+) literacy rate is dwindling due to fertility rates falling below replacement in source countries. As it stands most such people currently reside in South East Asia. This is not a viable strategy for the next 20 years, let alone 50 years.
endisneigh 3y ago
I highly doubt western europe will open up their doors. It's already difficult to immigrant there now. Once pressed I imagine the opposite scenario. No way Europe can sustain immigration accessibility on the level of USA and still include all of the benefits.
- elzbardico 3y ago
  It is hard if you are a qualified professional looking for work in your area, not if you are classified as a refugee.
  - schnitzelstoat 3y ago
    Which is the opposite to how it should be.
    - sofixa 3y ago
      Why? The whole point of accepting refugees is that they're running away from a horrible situation from where they came from (persecution, war, famine, genocide, uninhabitable weather, you get the gist) and accepting them is saving their lives. They are, in theory, the ones most in need. Of course there are people just looking for better economic opportunities, and people who target specific Western countries to be a refugee in (e.g. Pakistanis that show up in Germany - if they were really fleeing from a critical situation they would stop in the first place that is calm and safe, not continue the journey to a richer country), but they aren't really refugees in the actual sense of the word.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- sofixa 3y ago
  Define difficult? Take France for instance, 10% of people living in France in 2021 were immigrants (born in another country). Net Migration is in the 100-200k range per year. https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/03/30/one-in-10-people-in-france-an-immigrant-statistics-agency_6021240_7.html https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/03/30/one-in-1... https://www.statista.com/statistics/686137/net-migration-france/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/686137/net-migration-fra...
  - endisneigh 3y ago
    France, Spain and Germany are among the betters in terms of immigration. If you consider the rest of western europe, not so great. Even france in particular isn't really that accommodating.
- carlob 3y ago
  It's not like we're going to have any choice in the matter. Vast regions of the world are quickly becoming uninhabitable both because of climate change and of the damage done during colonialism and its political consequences. We can either choose to open the doors willingly or they are going to be blown open. I personally think it would be more ethical and pracical to open them now, but I seem to be in the minority.
  - logicchains 3y ago
    >Vast regions of the world are quickly becoming uninhabitable Have you got any concrete examples? The temperature range for human habitability is pretty wide; the temperature regularly gets up to 50 degrees in summer in the Gulf States (like UAE and Saudi) yet the quality of life there is quite high, in spite of it being a literal desert. Most of the refugees entering Europe are fleeing good ol' fashioned wars, not environmental catastrophes.
    - carlob 3y ago
      You don't need to have a very high average. It's sufficient to have a high wet bulb temperature for a few days to kill off large portions of the population. Also consider that Africa is going to represent most of the demographic growth of the world in the next few decades. And consider the effects of all this combined with political instability you quickly get into a situation like the floods in Libya.
  - blibble 3y ago
    > We can either choose to open the doors willingly or they are going to be blown open. I'm afraid the reality is likely to be that once the doors are blown open, electorates will vote for people that will man them with machine guns
  - leetcrew 3y ago
    > We can either choose to open the doors willingly or they are going to be blown open. why do you think this? it's next to impossible to completely stop piecemeal border crossings. but beyond a certain scale, it becomes something that militaries can oppose directly. are you suggesting the europeans would not have the stomach for military action against migrants, or that the migrants would somehow defeat them in sheer numbers? if it's the former, I would point out that were are already seeing questionable events with migrant ships in the mediterranean.
- Gravityloss 3y ago
  I've hired IT professionals from a lot of non-EU countries to a EU country and it was quite easy. I don't know where does this argument come from. I think it's much harder to get to USA.
  - endisneigh 3y ago
    I'm talking about citizenship. I'm not familiar with every single country's policies, but it's simply a fact that the USA is more accommodating to immigrants than Germany and France, for example. France for instance barely provides support for English speakers, god forbid any other country that speaks other languages. An immigrant who finds themselves in New York City, to contrast, will see that the city provides government assistance in dozens of languages and proof of address and things of that nature aren't even required.
    - Gravityloss 3y ago
      Maybe some bigger countries have this expectation that most people talk their main language and movies are dubbed etc. Certainly also USA. Smaller countries this is not the case. For example in nordic countries you can get by quite fine with English.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
elzbardico 3y ago
The difference is that canada is taking qualified professionals as migrants, people who have the training to work in a developed economy, that know English or French. Europe is taking refugees with very low work qualifications, a lot of them barely literate in their own languages, and who can't communicate on their host countries language. If anything, the way foreign migration is done in most of Europe, it is making things worse, as it is severely burdening their social budgets.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  Counterintuitively, research shows that the European approach is better for the economy and for native European workers than the Canadian approach is. An example: Canada lets an English or French speaking engineer in, Europe lets in somebody with poor European language skills and no relevant skills that ends up working as a janitor. The engineer comes in near the top and displaces Canadians downward. The immigrant engineer is unlikely to put a Canadian engineer out of work, but they do ease the upward pressure on engineering wages. OTOH The janitor comes in at the bottom and pushes Europeans up. That high school dropout who was previously stuck being a janitor now competes favourably for customer-facing retail managerial roles. Jobs are not a zero-sum game. Every working person a country has increases the demand for jobs by a significant amount. The zero-sum intuition most people have is highly misleading. ETA: source: Bryan Kaplan's books & articles.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    Yeah I think the approach here in Canada has also contributed to the housing price crisis because it's cherry-picking immigrants with large initial investments, and they're coming here and dumping $$ into "sure thing, number only go up" housing. And we've ended up with a bit of a shortage of working class unskilled labour, while at the same time screwing skilled immigrants who came here thinking they were coming to a land of prosperity to be an engineer or doctor and they end up as taxi drivers or convenience store clerks.
    - hnbad 3y ago
logicchains 3y ago
> Europe can (and does to some degree) solve this issue the same way we do here in Canada: high immigration rates. This only works if it's difficult for migrants to get on welfare. Otherwise you attract migrants who just want to live off welfare, not work, which doesn't contribute to supporting the growing retired population. (Not that migrants should be blamed for this; if you could get a better life for yourself and your family just by moving to a country that paid you for not even having to work, of course it's a rational decision).
- Tade0 3y ago
  > Otherwise you attract migrants who just want to live off welfare, not work, This is a common misconception. Those people on welfare work, it's just that it's mostly illegal employment. This is a widespread phenomenon everywhere in Europe, particularly in construction.
  - hnbad 3y ago
    Exactly. Actually many people in trade jobs (construction, hairdressers, etc) additionally work in illegal employment (or do paid "favors" for acquaintances), at least speaking from my experience as a German in Germany. This usually has to do with those jobs being too badly paid to attract enough people to do all the available work as well as those jobs not paying a sufficiently livable wage and welfare being tied to unemployment or fully deducting any income 1-to-1. A naive solution would be converting welfare to something of a reverse income tax (so e.g. for every €2 you earn your welfare would be reduced by €1 rather than €2, down to zero, and no income tax would be paid on any income up to 2x of welfare). But politicians seem to be more interested in squeezing welfare recipients harder because they think people who aren't working (legally) must be punished until they start working - nevermind that some of those welfare recipients are not part of the work force due to age or legal status and thus can't legally work.
- pjc50 3y ago
  In most countries it's _impossible_ for immigrants to get on welfare, until they become fully naturalized. This is a myth that's put about by the right. There is however a state obligation towards asylum seekers while their claim is pending, and a basic interest in not allowing huge camps of starving homeless people to develop.
g232089 3y ago
>In October the finance ministry, in its annual report on the issue, estimated that in 2018 immigrants from non-Western countries and their descendants drained from public finances a net 31bn kroner ($4.9bn), some 1.4% of GDP. Immigrants from Western countries, by contrast, contributed a net 7bn kroner (see chart). https://archive.ph/TSsQa#selection-1021.77-1025.92 https://archive.ph/TSsQa#selection-1021.77-1025.92 So yes, it has downsides... The downside of not working at all. (In this comment, I am separating Western and non-Western immigrants, since you mentioned xenophobes)
- Scarblac 3y ago
  Contributing to public finances isn't the only thing for which we need people, it's not even the most important thing. We are going to need a lot of people to care for the elderly, people working in construction, etc. Which particular group then does the much higher paying jobs that contribute more taxes is less relevant.
  - kergonath 3y ago
    Also, things like building roads and infrastructure, picking fruits, logistics, etc. The value of these jobs for the society are not commensurate with their wages.
- pjc50 3y ago
  > immigrants from non-Western countries and their descendants Key word "descendants". Are those by any chance children, who were born in the country (therefore are not themselves immigrants) and need to be educated? It seems dishonest to count them as not contributing when they're not old enough to. Again, most immigrants are not eligible for any welfare until they are fully naturalized.
  - throwaway6734 3y ago
    Look at the chart that op shared
throw0101c 3y ago
> Europe can (and does to some degree) solve this issue the same way we do here in Canada: high immigration rates. > It has downsides […] The main downside you have to counter is building enough housing, which Canada is not. The federal government (AFAICT) sets immigration targets/numbers without consulting the provinces and municipalities to see what they can handle. The US (pop. 330M) brings in 1M immigrants in the last few years, while in Canada (pop. 40M): > In 2022, Canada welcomed 437,180 immigrants and the number of non-permanent residents increased by a net 607,782 people. Both figures are the highest levels on record and reflect "higher immigration targets and a record-breaking year for the processing of immigration applications," StatsCan said. * https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canada-record-population-growth-migration-1.6787428 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canada-record-population-grow...
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  So. The narrative here in Canada has shifted to blaming immigration for housing woes. While there might be something to it, it smells suspiciously like shifting the blame away from monetary/fiscal/legislative policy. 20 years of low rates (federal concern), and an under-regulated real estate market (provincial concern). Notably not all parts of Canada have this problem, despite having high immigration rates. Immigration is still high to, e.g. Edmonton, and employment rates are good, etc. but housing affordability there is "fine" (relatively, for now). I think you started to touch on the problem here, which is the dysfunction of our federal/provincial relations. Political trends right now want to blame Trudeau (I don't like him either, but whatever), so they're pointing the finger at immigration. But the provinces (esp Ontario and BC) have failed to accommodate the immigration rates by building housing and densifying. Now that they're caught with their pants down here in Ontario their answer is to pave over farmland and build more low-density McMansions, which, well, it's blatant vote buying and corruption because the people in those 905-belt houses vote Tory and the developers contribute to the PC party. That and building public housing is something people in western G7 countries have become disturbingly allergic to. The last time we had housing crisis at this level, that was one way out of the problem: we built massive rental towers all over the place, along with public housing projects. In large part what we have here is a powerful baby boomer electorate that has up until now felt itself benefited by skyrocketing real estate prices. The increases in their home values allowed them to ignore their pathetic retirement savings. It was an "Eat The Young" mentality that just assumed "Number Goes Up" forever on real estate prices. And governments -- both prov and fed -- were perfectly willing to just keep feeding that fire. It's also not fair to point at 2022 immigration numbers, when 2020/2021 had far lower immigration rates, due to COVID. The temporary foreign worker program was effectively suspended, and immigration rates were low. So the numbers spiked afterwards for a bunch of causes, partially recovery from that, partially policy, and partially refugees from the war in Ukraine.

pjc50 3y ago

The low birth rate is a solution to the housing problem.

ben_w 3y ago
I'm not so sure. The UK, for example, has significantly more empty homes than homeless people[0]. I don't know the physical distribution of these properties, so purely hypothetically: if the empty properties are in deprived areas of the country that don't have jobs, they might as well be in Montserrat for all the impact they have on the UK housing market in the places with jobs. [0] exact number depends how you count, this link is obviously trying to do politics so pinch of salt, but it still illustrates the different measures: https://www.actiononemptyhomes.org/news/national-empty-homes-week-2023-sees-call-for-action-on-one-million-homes-nobody-lives-in https://www.actiononemptyhomes.org/news/national-empty-homes...
- twixfel 3y ago
  The UK has very few empty homes compared to peer countries, though. We have very little spare capacity, we need to actually build more homes.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Are you suggesting that the reason that 250,000 houses that have been empty for 6 months isn't enough for 250,000 homeless people, is something other than the houses being nowhere near the job opportunities?
    - twixfel 3y ago
      The housing problem in the UK is so much more than simply homelessness. Bad location, shit quality, low density, small, expensive, leasehold, nothing being built...
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
It won't. Those homes will just go in fewer hands so the rich will be richer the poor will be poorer. We've already had a low birthrates for a while and property prices (where the jobs are) have gone nowhere but up, outpacing Inflation, wage growth and sometimes even the stock market. Nobody cares the desolate countryside homes are sitting empty because there are no jobs there.

ben_w 3y ago

Increasing working lifespans is a partial solution (people aren't fans of this for obvious reasons): Optimistically we do have a lot of work being done in regenerative/SENS medicine (I'm completely unqualified to judge how good that research is, but it is happening); Pessimistically this is just increasing the pension age. Another solution is automation and robotics. This is further away than the flashy demos from Boston Dynamics and Tesla suggest, but not fundamentally absurd especially as it doesn't really need the robots to be humanoid. Given the power/compute requirements and the difficulty of vision processing, I assume this will be about 5 years behind self-driving cars.