5 ms·

> Young Canadians doubly so Similar situation in Australia and US. And most of it misplaced. One major issue is trying to buy a first home where the blame goe

• ipaddr 2y ago
  Inheritance goes to young people in the same family. I doubt that is holding back the young people who get it. Immigration keeps salaries low which is great for companies bad for young people. Immigrants of a similar age want the same type of housing. Young people starting out cannot afford their parents home. They compete for the same resources. Older generations are least affected.
  • threeseed 2y ago
    a) Inheritance is a problem because instead of property going back onto the market it is instead like you say kept inside families and typically used as investment properties. b) Immigration isn't keeping salaries low. Companies are. Because they have eliminated unionisation and so workers have no means to demand for higher wages. And with so much remote talent companies always have a backup plan in case there is a supply shortage. c) As you say they compete for the same resources. Now why can't there be more homes ? Because older people fight increasing density, refuse to support taxes on investment properties and are increasingly refusing to downsize once their children move out. Remember for many their legacy depends on high property prices.
    • FredPret 2y ago
      > c) ... It's crazy to me how many old people who self-identify as conservatives / capitalists have no qualms about using their political pull to get government muscle to kill competition in real estate using the building permitting process. Free markets mean free markets. Charlie Munger was right: it's all about incentives.
      • carlosjobim 2y ago
        Traditionalist when it comes to pensions. They paid their share, so young workers should pay them high pensions for decades after retirement. Capitalists when it comes to ownership. They've made the investments, so young workers should work hard and accept lower wages to pay them shareholder profits. Company taxes should be low. Socialists when it comes to healthcare. They are old and fragile, so young workers should pay high taxes on their labour to help the old people needing socialized service. Feudalists when it comes to estates. They are the rightful owners of the land they inherited, so young workers should go into debt for life to buy it off them so that they can cash out lottery money for selling their real estate. Or even better, cash rent money while keeping the property. Corporatists... I can go on and on.
        • threeseed 2y ago
          > young workers should pay high taxes on their labour to help the old people needing socialized service Which will be largely paid for and staffed by immigrants.
    • slothtrop 2y ago
      > workers have no means to demand for higher wages And yet, many workers do make higher wages. Why do you think that is?
    • reshlo 2y ago
      How did you just argue both that companies need backup plans to keep wages low in a supply shortage and also that immigration, which solves supply shortages, does not keep wages low; and not see that those claims are contradictory?
  • m_fayer 2y ago
    Inheritance is diminishing, boomers are living longer and elder care is hugely expensive, chances are that’s where the inheritance will go.
  • dh2022 2y ago
    These days inheritance almost all the time goes from very old people (70-80 years old) to old people (50-60 years old). It almost never goes to young people
    • dr_dshiv 2y ago
      Hypothesis: Old people blow it on cruises and young people have families and start businesses.
      • FredPret 2y ago
        If true, it would explain the massive post-covid revenue bumps at Carnival Cruise Lines and Royal Caribbean. These guys are making double their pre-covid revenue, and 2019 was a really great year. They're heading to almost 3x their revenue before that: https://valustox.com/RCL https://valustox.com/RCL
        • defrost 2y ago
          Trump boosting the economy again? https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/cruises/2024/11/11/villa-vie-residences-world-cruise/76202126007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/cruises/2024/11/11/vil...
    • bombcar 2y ago
      This is more true than people realize; it seems every week in bogleheads there’s a question that’s basically “how can we use the inheritance we just got to help our grandkids get a leg up without huge tax implications?”
• hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  > And most of it misplaced. I've seen that tactic to try to discredit real, valid concerns with immigration, either by lumping it with racism (which definitely exists, but is not the only argument against unfettered immigration), or by pretending something else is the problem (something else may also be a problem, but that doesn't make the problems that people are worried about with high levels of immigration invalid). In my understanding, the backlash against immigration in Canada is relatively recent, and it's basically caused by the fact that Canada took in a huge number of immigrants, historically speaking, in recent years. This results in: 1. People feeling likes many immigrant communities are creating enclaves instead of adopting the culture of Canada. 2. Many recent immigrants are unskilled, resulting in a larger burden on provincial-based social services. When you couple that with astronomical housing prices and a stagnant economy with rising unemployment where many people see less opportunity, it's not hard to see why citizens are demanding lower rates of immigration.
  • femiagbabiaka 2y ago
    > People feeling likes many immigrant communities are creating enclaves instead of adopting the culture of Canada. Every immigrant community creates enclaves. Quebec is an enclave the size of a province. > Many recent immigrants are unskilled, resulting in a larger burden on provincial-based social services. I can find NO evidence for this whatsoever, do you have any?
    • medo-bear 2y ago
      [dead]
    • dragon-hn 2y ago
      It is important to differentiate between immigrants vs temporary workers and foreign students. What Canadians seem to have issue with is the latter, which is being abused by Canadian companies. The anger should be aimed at the rich in Canada abusing the system, as well as the paid for politicians enabling the abuse. It shouldn’t be aimed at the newcomers.
    • 3vidence 2y ago
• mrshadowgoose 2y ago
  Canadian high housing prices is certainly a multi-factor problem, but to say that the frustration with high immigration is "misplaced" is tremendously disingenuous. Unless your claim is that "supply and demand" is somehow irrelevant, the immigration rate is a knob that can be dialed down to reduce the severity of the problem. It's one of the easiest knobs to adjust too. That's why people are frustrated, and understandably so.
• louwrentius 2y ago
  In NL the housing shortage is blamed on immigrants whereas the actual reason for said shortage is absolutely the politics of the right-wing cabinets for the last 15 years who did nothing significant to improve the speed of housing construction. It’s not that strange as one of the political parties basically explicitly protects business interests and oh boy did they profit. It’s political nihilism.
  • sumedh 2y ago
    > the politics of the right-wing cabinets for the last 15 years who did nothing significant to improve the speed of housing construction. Is the population rising because NL natives are having more kids or because new people coming in?
    • crote 2y ago
      It doesn't matter either way. The population growth is lower now than it has been during pretty much the entire 20th century. If we could build houses to keep up with a 1.3% growth in the 1960s, why can't we build enough to keep up with a 0.5% growth in the 2020s? Maybe it has something to do with the Ministry of Housing and Planning being abolished because the minister believed the "country was finished", or a minister telling a woman who asked how she was supposed to afford a home to "find a rich boyfriend", or all construction being blocked because the country has been violating NOx emission laws for decades, or an insanely high tax specifically on social housing, or...
    • louwrentius 2y ago
      I see where you’re going for but asylum seekers aren’t the bulk of the immigrants, that’s Europeans that come here to work and do the work “we” don’t want to do, but is absolutely necessary to keep our country running. We can kick them out for sure, but you won’t like the consequences.
  • threeseed 2y ago
    > nothing significant to improve the speed of housing construction Young people are not their base whilst old people who care about house prices are. So it's in their political self-interest to not do anything about it.
• slothtrop 2y ago
  It's not entirely misplaced. There's supply, and there's demand. You can't point to one and ignore the other. I'm all for the YIMBY and zoning reform push, but a) that's decided on the municipal level, b) change is slow, c) immigration rates can drastically change in very little time, if the feds decide. In Canada feds wanted to have their cake and eat it too: the population grew by over 3% in a year, but infrastructure at the provincial level (e.g. healthcare) didn't budge, and housing isn't building much faster than it was before. If we understand that the key factor behind housing affordability is inelasticity of supply, then it should be easy to intuit that other things can be inelastic: policy and the law. By contrast, immigration rate might as well be a push of a button. It's not responsible to jack up the rate first and keep it that way just because it's not "the-thing-that-ought-to-change". There are of course other externalities with high immigration rates (for contrast, US immigration rate is not that high), and the downsides to low immigration are overstated. Older generations won't live forever, but what I generally see is a call for unnecessary wealth transfer from young generation to old. Boomers are the wealthiest demographic already. We don't need to give them more freebies.
  • threeseed 2y ago
    We have a very similar situation in Australia which proves you wrong. Federal government gave billions of incentives to states to build more houses who in turn enacted higher density zoning and overrode the concerns of municipalities. And suddenly we have lots of houses being built. Less immigrants makes the house situation better but not does not solve the problem. Having a continuous system for building lots of houses does.
    • slothtrop 2y ago
      > Federal government gave billions of incentives Canada did this with a housing accelerator fund, for municipalities. Did not amount to much of anything. It's not clear if provinces can override but there's no political will for it. Without reading the numbers for Australia, I expect reform has been modest. > Less immigrants makes the house situation better but not does not solve the problem. You contradict yourself in the same sentence. The same result can be achieved whether improving elasticity or reducing the immigration rate. "the problem" is the affordability, not the elasticity. That is your just preferred vector. Even if zoning is improved, you can't defy the laws of physics; housing will still be relatively inelastic, whereas immigration rate can be much higher. Australia's population growth rate was less than 1% last year, basically on par with US. Canada's was 3%. Incomparable. No amount of zoning reform will be enough to handle that sustainably.
• protocolture 2y ago
  Our problem is that state governments have never reached their population growth based land release targets. And zoning laws are fairly ridiculous. One study found that something like 70% of the cost of owning a home in Sydney comes from zoning and land release issues. That is, a bit of reform in zoning laws and a heap of land being released could see a 1 million dollar home being available for 300k. That said, so much of australias economy is based on the false premise that housing is a stable long term investment. If you dropped housing on its face you would probably bankrupt the country for a generation. That said, better now than later.
  • bombcar 2y ago
    That’s just supply and demand in another way, you could also argue the number of houses is fine you just need fewer people. In either case you’re saying “make the number of houses correct for the number of inhabitants” - of course an obvious answer is “build more houses” but that can’t always work - San Francisco can’t remain SF at the density of Singapore. It’d still exist, but it wouldn’t be what it was.
    • protocolture 2y ago
      You have a system designed around 2% growth. You dont release enough housing to support 2% growth. (You also have zoning restrictions pushing the majority of housing prices) It doesnt matter where they get the growth from, it could be baby bonuses, immigration, kidnapping migrant workers. >San Francisco can’t remain SF at the density of Singapore. It’d still exist, but it wouldn’t be what it was. I couldnt give 2 shits about some appeal to locale identity.
    • fragmede 2y ago
      It's already "not what it was" before Covid and that was just under five years ago. > No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man. -Heraclitus