[someone123]

Some aspects of housing affordability that go beyond the municipal level, or the ability of the government to control what is happening in the near term or at all:

- Family sizes shrinking. Society is more atomized, social capital is weaker, trust in society is dropping. Some of the people who would have just lived at the family farmhouse in 1920 now have nobody who can help them.
- Low productivity growth in Canada, globalization, now a pandemic disrupting supply chains and changing migration patterns.
- High government debt, low interest rates, cheap credit, and tons of investment flooding real estate markets. Real estate in Canada is now a global commodity and for many people, their equity is their retirement fund or ATM.
- Population growth, primarily through immigration. Canada's population would not be growing much or at all without it. I think immigration is good for Canada but a lot of people don't seem to want to plan for population growth even as the federal government promotes it.

I know people complain a lot about apartments in Halifax because the city has gotten less affordable but it is not as far along the "bitcoin-ization" of real estate than here in Vancouver or Toronto. Around here there is ~0 apartment construction unless the government gets involved. Everything is condo and a lot of it gets snapped up by investors who then operate as amateur landlords. Halifax could easily kill off its vibrant apartment construction industry and make things much worse for tenants as a whole. Building affordable housing, maybe subsidized, is good, but you want the volume of private apartment construction to go up too.