Quote:
Originally Posted by WhipperSnapper
It doesn't matter whether the people are right or wrong. Their will is all that matters.
Are we really saying 600,000 more students in less than ten years all needing housing didn't have an impact on the Waterloo Region or small towns in Eastern Canada with stable populations and high home ownership and small apartments markets. Toronto is too complex. A place like Charlottetown is alot easier to determine the 0% apartment vacancy.
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My intention wasn't to debate the causes of the affordability crisis again but simply to point out that the government decision in no way proves the correctness of any theory about its causes. Certainly no more than say, their decision to increase immigration rates or accept more international students proved that those increases were necessary at the time. You can just as easily imagine a pro-immigration person at the time proclaiming, "I've been saying all along that Canada's problems require greater population growth and more immigration. The Trudeau government's decision to increase immigration rates proves that I was right!"
But really, decreases in affordability are often too complex everywhere to be distilled down to one or two simplistic factors. While housing costs vary across the country and the western world as they always have, the least affordable places generally remain least affordable and pretty much every part of the country (and other affluent western countries) is struggling with increased housing costs. And that transcends the presence of any one or two simplistic factors. If you watch media from other places you'll see people in the US, UK, etc. also complaining about a housing affordability crisis as much as we are. One of my favourite Youtube channels which happens to be UK based just did a nearly hour long deep dive into their housing crisis. So I guess our foreign student numbers must be higher than I realize for even them to be affected.