Quote:
Originally Posted by Changing City
because household growth, (which determines the demand for housing) and population growth are not the same. Household size has continued to fall since 1861, so even if the population stayed the same, you'd need more homes. (That's not factoring in the demand for recreational properties, or second homes - which are all part of the housing demand too).
[ Business Council of Alberta showing Statistics Canada data]
The Australian article suggests immigration adds to the demand, but maybe not as much as the Australian demand for more housing.
|
The shrinking of household sizes is happening pretty slowly though. From that graph, we've gone from about 3.0 people/home in 1970 to 2.4/home today. That's an average annual decline in household size of 0.012 people/year.
Some back-of-the-napkin math here, but that means that in a hypothetical stagnant/no-growth scenario where the only demand for more housing came from new household formation & shrinking household sizes, you'd need to increase the housing supply by a very manageable 0.4% per year (working out to roughly 85,000 units in today's Canada).
In reality though, Canada is growing by 1.3 million+ per year through immigration, which means an additional 542,000 households (assuming an average of 2.4 people/household) are being added to the net ~85,000 new households being formed internally - all of whom also need a housing unit. In other words, we need approximately 627,000 new homes built every year just to meet base-level demand - that's a lot of competition for the ~240,000/year that we actually build.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MolsonExport
I am under no such obligation. I was posting in good faith, with an element of sarcasm (well below that made by many others in this thread), because I have read, here and in many other threads, how the current federal government bears responsibility for most of the escalation in housing prices, despite ample indicators that similar things are happening in other countries.
|
So in other words, my point stands in response to that article, that:
A. Our federal government's policy choices have been a significant contributor to Canada's housing crisis.
B. Canada's housing crisis is more severe than that of any other peer nation, largely as a result of A.
Other countries have problems too - in some cases for similar reasons, and some for completely different ones - but ours has been caused by
our governments, and the particular severity of it nation-wide has largely been exacerbated by deliberate policy choices made by the feds.