Quote:
Originally Posted by mikevbar1
If anything that lack of depth reflects how tight supply has always been in Canadian cities. I recall someone posting an article about how there were housing crises in the interwar or postwar period (can’t remember). It seems to be a function of the Canadian economy to only build “just enough” housing, so any rapid shift in demand causes big problems because there’s no capacity to absorb it anywhere. Even cities where logically there should be lots of cheaper housing available, like mid-sized Ontario cities (Hamilton, London, Windsor) where economic stagnation took root in some, have seen the same cost growth. Each has its own factors, but clearly housing costs are not scaling in proportion with economic growth- it’s as if there is never excess anywhere by virtue of how we have always built housing. It’s as if housing supply delivery is fixed and not at all tied to economic growth; it is merely delivered by a sector made up of the same players with the same capacity, and we are seeing only growing demand for their work with no scaling in the industry to match. This is not new, this is clearly how the economy has worked for nearly 50 years or whenever housing starts plateaued.
As much of an impact as YIMBYist policies can have, and as impactful lowering immigration might be, both of these seem to orbit around the real issue of (not) being able to increase housing starts. It doesn’t matter how many types of housing units you can build if you can’t actually build more of them in a shorter timeframe (ie, faster!). Frankly we should have tackled this a long time ago because it’s a labour issue, and if we start now it will take years to find equilibrium. Unless we import cheap construction workers like the US, but we don’t have the luxury of having a nation like Mexico nearby where the market drives it under the table. Legality and morality aside, it has clearly allowed development to scale much better in the southern US.
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I don't think either of these are true (the difference in outcomes or the reasons you've cited for the differences).
Since 2015, the Americans have built anywhere from 800k (2015) to 1.15 million (2022)
housing units annually. We had 250k completions
in 2022 which would have us building roughly twice the amount of housing per capita annually compared to the Americans. Statcan is glitchy and isn't letting me pull up past data at the moment, but from third party sources it appears this trend has true for quite some time.
Our NPR/TFW/International labour pool is also larger than the pool of illegal immigrants and NPRs in the USA proportionately(
2.2 million NPRs in Canada 2022 vs
12.7 million illegal immigrants and NPRs combined in the USA in 2017). The American numbers are older, but
they have not seen a significant increase in their foreign born population since that time so the comparison likely holds true today. The share of foreigners in the us housing construction industry is also
dwindling. If the makeup of our immigrant labour market is the issue this is pretty clearly a policy failure since the Canadian public has shown in the last few years that it has no problem exploiting this segment of the population.
If this country has a shortage of skilled labour then we need to be bringing in people with those skills that are in shortage, rather than our current policy of bringing in a million business students a year. I suspect the reason we don't do this is because we simply aren't competitive at attracting people with desirable skills, so we take the consolation prize of economic growth through real estate and a ballooning post secondary education industry. If there is a shortage here, then its likely there is a shortage world wide and Canada does not seem to be a desirable place for people with in-demand skills to go to.
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That's not even funny because, well... I think you why it isn't.
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