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When governments burn the future to save the past they do it with housing
In the United States, there is a clear age gradient for voting: the young vote for the left, the old vote for the right. This is partly due to changing racial composition, but not entirely. Young whites are much more likely to vote Democrat than Republican. But in Canada, this is not the case. Here, there is almost no age gradient at all in vote intentions.
A standard model for politics is a combination of (1) people’s opinions on social issues settle fairly early in life and as Cthulhu swims leftward their views end up further and further right, and (2) as people age they become more economically secure and less and less likely to benefit from redistribution.
Canada violates this model for a few reasons. Our welfare state – which spends lavishly on the old – is the lynchpin of our nationalism: “We aren’t like those damn Americans” the Boomers cry as they hold on to their OHIP cards and wait for 8 hours in an emergency room. What it means to be a Canadian these days is to support large government and this keeps the old attached to the left. The right in Canada is also pretty neutral (neutered?) on social issues so issue #1 above is not that important – at least until abortion trots out during the election.
However, this has all be throat-clearing for my actual point. Canada now has a special issue which creates cross-cutting electoral incentives by age: housing. For decades one of Canada’s selling points has been that it’s a peaceful, moderate place that is cheap to live. That has been completely destroyed over the past decade under the leadership of the Liberal Party. The Liberals are the party of the status quo and don’t see it as a problem that prices are high. Just yesterday, Prime Minister Trudeau gave an interview where he said: “Housing needs to retain its value. It’s a huge part of people’s potential retirement and future and nest egg. So yes, we need to keep housing stable and valuable”. On the policy front and despite high interest rates, the government is letting people pull money out of RRSPs (equivalent of 401ks) for downpayments, instructing the Bank of Canada (equivalent of the Fed) to buy mortgage-backed securities to make borrowing cheaper, and creating new tax vehicles for home buyers. Despite promising to lower net migration, the stats show that a record 400,000 people arrived in the first three months of 2024.
In other words, the Canadian left (the lefty NDP party is in coalition with the Liberals) is spending more and more tax money to prop up home equity and price its young people out of homes on purpose. In Canada the institutional left sees its role as protecting middle class wealth. High house prices have existed in our big cities for decades and prompted a steady stream of Canadian outmigration to cheaper places. Cities kept growing because of replacement immigration. In 2020 however due to the pandemic and a surge of workers and student immigration to rural areas, unaffordability has spread nationwide and now literally nowhere is spared. Houses in small towns hours away from major cities generally cost over $400k. This has caused a deep well of anger and despair among the young. It shows up in polling to some extent, but anecdotally: one of my friends just moved to Colombia to become a remote worker … because of housing, another one abandoned trying to get pregnant … because of housing. A friend circle I’m near to is fracturing because half of it inherited homes and the other half will rent forever, and that fact is too corrosive to the friendships. Its just too hard to watch your kids grow up in an apartment you can barely afford while your friends live in a better neighbourhood and go on vacations.
In a normal society, housing is not a politically important issue. Its just a good like any other. But if house prices rise as they have here, your society has made a Faustian bargain. The older generation become millionaires despite barely saving, but it comes at an enormous cost. Social cohesion frays, more and more GDP gets paid to parasites realtors, high land costs mean new building also consumes more and more GDP, without the basics covered young people wont start businesses, cost of living soars for the poor and young, governments face pressure to both get new buyers into homes and preserve home values which means wasting money and mass immigration, etc. And the lucky ones who see their asset prices rise? They aren’t always better off either! Most will see their kids move far away or borrow against their homes to give their kids downpayments. Housing in a world like this is a special issue because it is truly zero-sum: one person's cost of living is another person's asset. Depending who you are, you want prices to be higher or lower. This is a nightmare for governments because there is no easy third option: your policies will inevitably hurt one group or another on the single most important factor for their financial health.
In short, it’s a disaster. Given how far its gone, there is no way for normalcy to return with economic growth (it would take decades for real incomes to rise sufficiently) so there are only three end games: (1) Canada becomes like Southern England or San Francisco, a dual society of property owners and proles, (2) inflation re-ignites and incomes rise enough in nominal terms to re-establish affordability, or (3) the crash and ensuing recession. I don't know which of the three is my prior or even which to root for. The new political consensus is for government to respond with overwhelming force to economic downturns and do what it takes to protect assets, especially housing assets. Political forces are arrayed in pursuit of outcome #1. Its possible that inflation is re-establishing a limiting principle for how much this will work in future, but it may not and we get scenario #2. There may also be a sui generis event or a conservative ideological policy mix after the next election that causes #3.
Technically, the NDP and the Liberal Party are not in a coalition which would be if they were both part of the government, but only the Liberal Party is. They support them in votes of confidence, but they don't have any of their caucus in the cabinet, so it is not a coalition government, which we've never had.
Land costs have no effect on GDP because GDP only counts the production of new goods and services. Existing assets like land aren't part of GDP.
Real estate is the biggest economic sector in Canada and the second biggest in the us.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Canada#Key_industries
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-u-s-gdp-by-industry-in-2023/
This includes only rent seeking and overheads - construction is not included.
Yes, but it doesn't count land purchases.
Realtors are usually paid a fractional commission.
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Realtor fees are though, and these are usually based on a percentage of sale prices. (as are contractors' margins and lots of other things, explicitly or implicitly)
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Unfortunately, not only housing, but yes.
It turns out people want house prices high (maintain property values) and low (affordable housing). It is rather difficult to deliver on both of these at once.
One group wants higher prices, the other lower prices.
Therefore stable prices are best.
What was allowed to happen during Covid, where governments injected tens of trillions of dollars into an already hot economy was criminal. Especially the post 2020 stimulus.
In less than 2 years, the median U.S. house price increased by 36%: https://www.zillow.com/home-values/102001/united-states/
Just another way that young people were thrown under the bus during Covid.
That does not follow. One group wants lower prices, another wants higher prices is always true (there's always a buyer and a seller), but you want, as a country, the cost of things to be going down and productivity to be going up.
It seems to me that all central banks and almost every economist under the sun wants inflation.
What you want is for the cost of things to go up but for productivity to go up even faster.
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Compared to the rest of the Anglosphere Americans still have it good (while simultaneously earning a lot more).
Lot of that is the sheer amount of productive US metro areas versus other countries.
In Australia for a lot of professional roles you've only really got a serious choice between Melbourne, Sydney and maaaaybe Brisbane. The first 2 of which have 10x income multiples for a reasonable house and the later racing quickly to catch up to them. Those equivalent markets do exist in the USA but they're largely focused around the world class cities like NYC and San Fran. Still plenty of scope to pick a mid-tier city and get a reasonable property for 3-4x income.
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Housing in America is cheap. America doesn't have a housing problem, it has a policing problem. Housing is cheap in America.
Fire up Redfin, and sort by low to high. You can buy a "missing middle" townhome in Philly, in a medium density neighborhood, close to mass transit, for the same price as the median new car. On the other coast, you can buy a place in Long Beach with a three digit mortgage. In the middle, there are houses that are literally free.
If you buy any of these affordable houses, you'll find yourself living next to People of Affordability. I wouldn't live in Kensington if you paid me to.
Since you can't separate yourself from criminals through law enforcement, you do so by proxy using price.
If you are a landlord or a developer, you need to price your rentals high enough that a family of fentanyl zombies plus a few hangers-on can't scrape the money together. That usually means setting your price floor at the point where two young professionals can just about pay for it, if they struggle. Price it any lower and you might get good tenants, but you'll eventually get your good tenant's dirtbag sister, and then your good tenant's dirtbag sister's baby daddy/dealer, and eventually your building gets condemned.
In the 1960s developers were building 2/1 houses with a car port, on small lots, and selling them at a profit to young middle class families. Build the same housing now, and nobody will buy them, because they know that such a neighborhood will quickly become unsafe.
If you want middle-class buyers who will make regular mortgage payments, you need to build a house big enough that the People of Affordability can't afford it, far enough from the city center social services that they don't live nearby, and far enough from mass transit that they can't get to you. Not only do you need to price out the dirtbags, you need to price out normal middle-to-working class people who might have a daughter that had a baby with a dirtbag five years ago.
The equilibrium point here is the only housing you can find in a safe neighborhood is just barely affordable for two young childless professionals or an established PMC family, and everyone else is screwed. Decent working class people with in-person jobs can either live with the underclass or commute for two hours each way, and middle-class people will take a big pay cut to work remote or in the exurbs so they can live someplace where their family will be safe.
"Housing" was never the problem in America. You can buy a cheap house. You can buy land cheaply. You can build cheaply. Outside of a handful of counties, you can even get a cheap permit. There are cheap places in the cities. There are cheap places in the inner suburbs. There are cheap places that are dense and cheap places that are open. You just don't want to live in those places because of crime.
I've seen this claim numerous times but never backed up. Are people really taking commuter rail to bedroom suburbs, committing crimes, then taking commuter rail home? It seems... Hard to believe.
For what it's worth, this happened to family of mine in Calgary. People would take the C Train, walk around the (very nice) neighborhood at the end of it, check car door handles, and then train back to wherever they were from. Locals got wise and started following/putting in ring cameras and realized they weren't local.
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While that is more or less what suburban NIMBYs imply when they protest against new transit developments, I think the truth is more that our inability to police low-level crimes or keep homeless people off the street inhibits growth that would occur naturally around transit stations after they are built i.e. some new Metro stop on the Silver Line in the DC area is currently surrounded by a mostly empty parking lot used by a small number of commuters into the city, and is pretty clean and well-maintained, but for it to not be a permanent money pit denser housing and businesses would have to be built in the area and that would attract unsavory characters and run the risk of it becoming like a BART station (shudders) and spoiling the entire vicinity, so why build it in the first place?
It seems to me that there are some pieces missing from this argument.
Why should a small station be a money out?
If there were apartments built by it, they would probably be "luxury apartments" with fairly high rents (as is typical for new construction). Why should that attract unsavory characters?
There are plenty of unsavory BART stations in SF/Oakland, but there are also perfectly fine stations with no homeless around such as Warm Springs (which is surrounded on one side by million dollar newly built condos) (pay no attention to the industrial zone on some of the most expensive real estate in the country). That suggests that it's in large part due to local policies about what to allow, and if the local constituents are suburban nimbys they are probably going to demand some actual policing.
Because its public works in America, in this case in a blue area. All public works of that sort are money pits.
Because high concentrations of people with money creates opportunities for peddlers and beggars. Peddlers and beggars will travel to such real estate so long as their drug supply is close enough. The closer to the city center the more will come. Then once enough peddlers and beggars locate there a few dealers will be attracted to that supply of customers and located there.
Indeed, but the argument is you have to get out of SF/Oakland because the residents of those places are huge libs and softies and will never let you do your own thing, and you only can do your own thing by evading the libs and also being far enough away for them to ignore you.
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I don't expect every station to be a moneymaker, but I would rather population growth and infill occur naturally around existing stations, which at some point become profitable and can help support the next extension, as opposed to the sort of stasis that suburban voters and zoning regulations implicitly promote. The high levels of dysfunction we see around urban transit centers probably require population densities that wouldn't be reached for a long time, if ever, around new suburban stations, but the correlation between density and homelessness/crime is observed by all and hardens the resistance to any movement in that direction. I will admit that it's hard to tell how much of this is a result of national factors and how much is a result of voters with different policy preferences on policing self-segregating into different communities, and we will never know for sure without some kind of impossible social experiment involving large-scale population transfers.
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Luxury apartments with high rents tend to be more profitable to rob.
This proves too much. The existing homeowners are wealthy and therefore are already profitable to rob.
Yes, which means that the station will also be a problem if there are existing homeowners who are left there withouyt building new apartments.
But RR's scenario is that the luxury apartments are built instead of "a mostly empty parking lot used by a small number of commuters into the city," In that case, luxury apartments would be more attractive to thieves than the alternative.
The station isn't built in the middle of nowhere, so yes, there are existing homeowners already. Navigating past a parking lot is not a problem, this is America and everyone has a car.
Apartment buildings are probably less vulnerable to burglary than your average SFH, if only because you need a key to get into the lobby and smashing the lobby windows would attract too much attention. With a SFH it's easy to just go around the back, probably nobody will even notice in less dense neighborhoods.
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How are we going to be able to prove this to your satisfaction? We couldn't even get a consensus that retail theft, homeless misbehavior, and bad driving skyrocketed in 2020-2023 despite all the evidence. People who didn't want to acknowledge it just went "oh ho, I see you're falling for fox news scaremongering, didn't you know crime is down?"
I don't know, consider my question more like "what is the evidence for this?"
For what it's worth, I'm pretty sympathetic to the claim that property crime is underreported in certain jurisdictions (less so for murder).
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I do not know whether criminals are doing this. But I do know that homeowners believe that this happens, and in my area they have been trying to stop or slow down the expansion of mass transit into wealthier and quieter areas, for this exact reason, sometimes explicitly so. The dynamic still works based on fear alone.
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I think people aren't worried about cat burglars, they're worried about vagrancy and the associated crimes that come with it. With nonexistent fare enforcement vagrants can ride just for fun, or to get out of the elements, instead of being constrained to a relatively small area.
This was a concern in my area, but the local government gave us a huge confound by opening a big no-barrier shelter in our wealthy enclave a year before the light rail was due to be completed.
Its also true that they feed off each other. Vagrants need their drugs, so drug dealers will migrate to where they are. Then those dealers have existing criminal networks so their coordinated robbery of CVS and Walgreens for all the razors and tide they have every Monday has a resale network. Then the dealers have the money to move to that area permanently, and all of the sudden the local high school has replaced a weed problem with a fentanyl problem.
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Also lots of these crimes are more crimes of convenience than 'cat burglar drives 2 hours out of their way to a random middle class suburb and conducts elaborate stake-out to steal their TV'. I also genuinely believe that burglary is less lucrative than in previous eras unless you happen to land on a house where there's significant amounts of jewellery. Tech is cheap (and increasingly secured + the expensive bits are mounted flat screen TVs), people hold less cash.
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I am not an expert in patterns of contemporary American criminality, however when the first railroads were constructed in Japan during the Meiji era, many people opposed building a station near where they lived. In particular, when the Mito Line was supposed to go near Ueno, Makabe District, Ibaraki Prefecture, the villagers disputed this decision on the grounds that railway would bring burglars. Those suspicision were not unfounded as not a few train travelers caused trouble in the provinces:
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No, they’re not, although opportunistic thieves will use highway exits/on ramps opportunistically to get out of dodge before homeowners come to investigate(homeowners in DFW are presumed armed).
Homeowner-class people clearly prefer living far from apartments but don’t identify commuter rail or bus stops as a problem.
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Some commuter rail can mitigate the problem by jacking up the fares and aggressively policing evasion.
But on the bus (in America) you see a certain kind of clientele no matter how gentrified the neighborhood is.
Even that isn’t intractable; there are countries where the middle class take the bus.
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Not strictly related, but I was musing the other week that, to some extent, anti-natalist policies and sub-replacement birthrates provide a "burning the seed corn" sort of economic stimulus that looks good on paper -- for a generation or so. You get an immediate benefit from freeing up childcare workers and educators for more immediately-useful tasks.
I don't have any hard data for this, but it feels like what Japan and Korea, and likely soon China too, are going through. And the West may not be too far behind.
Yes, it's not just "to some extent", it's a giant effect. It's all about the fundamentals, baby. One of the things even strategy video games are teaching you is that by far the worst thing you can have is a dependant, i.e. a person that produces nothing but eats resources. For a toy example, imagine that you have 100 people each producing 1 unit of [resources], and using up 0.6 of [resources] (which is already quite optimistic). So you generate a surplus of 40 with a full pop, which can be invested profitably (often according to an exponential growth function, which means that looking only at the original surplus is vastly underestimating the differences). With 10% dependants, it's 90-60=30, so a 25% loss of surplus. With 20% dependants, it's 80-60=20, a whopping 50% loss. Yes you can often get a few extra % with some smart organising, but you can't really overcome even just modest differences in the fundamentals.
This is the same for companies. An employee that doesn't produce anything not only eats up pay, they also takes up office space, HR resources. In reality, an employee often just creates a modest surplus above their pay, so even being slightly less productive will put the employee into the negative unless the pay gets substantially slashed. Which is the reason why firing the least productive employees should be the first thing every company does once it gets into the red. There is good reasons why we try to make jobs as safe as possible, but we shouldn't kid ourselves, it costs us big bucks.
Which leads us to countries. Both children and pensioners are about as pure examples of dependants as is possible irl. But unlike pensioners, children are actually a de-facto investment into the future; In fact arguably the most important one, since they directly control the ratio of productive vs dependant in the near future. People like to talk about how if we just had invested our retirement money better we wouldn't have problems, but this is again ignoring the fundamentals. For another toy examples, if people had no children but would invest their money sensibly, everyone would still be fucked once retirement hits, because whom to even give the money? It's worthless numbers on a screen at that point, with nobody actually producing anything. You can trivially extend this to low TFR and conclude that no matter how sensibly it would have been invested, it gets mostly eaten up by inflation, since what actually matters is the number of working people available who provide for the pensioners.
Yes there are alternative strategies to sustainable TFR, but they need to be done thoughtfully, and well. Investing into high-quality immigration is one; For example, one of my wife's former roommates is a thai nurse who was taught german already in thailand, in a school partially financed by germany, with a direct preparation for getting accredited as a nurse in germany. If they didn't put in the work at the school, they failed, and wouldn't go to germany. This is how you do it, and she correspondingly was a model immigrant. It's cheaper than having children yourself, but it's still a substantial amount of money you need to invest, and has some added extra risks. It's also inherently symbiotic/parasitary, as it requires other countries with spare TFR. This idea of just letting everybody in, and then just hoping it will go fine not only doesn't provide the necessary workers, it actually puts extra stress on the system as we have more dependants now, not less. The average MENA immigrant in germany is substantially net-negative.
We produced a giant surplus for a while, but we used it mostly for early retirements, going on lots of vacations, and an education system that is both unusually long and inefficient. Maybe we get bailed out by AIs in some fashion, but I don't like blindly hoping for a tech that isn't quite there yet. And the most likely trajectory I'm seeing there, though not apocalyptic, doesn't really seem particularly appealing.
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Also, it looks better for any resources that do not easily grow with more people, if you are measuring per capita.
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Yes, generally, this is the demographic dividend, and is generally acknowledged as part of they story of why China experienced such rapid growth (besides capitalism). Same thing with Korea, Japan, Ireland, etc.
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Housing is so utterly fucked, it's almost incomprehensible to me how to fix it. The degree to which it creates a class of haves and have nots boggles the mind.
Putting aside how turbo-fucked the current situation is with historic, never before charted levels of unaffordability, even in normal times, the struggle to save up a down payment faster than housing prices are rising is real. My whole 20's and 30's was spent in an effort to save 20% down for a property, scrimping, saving, budgeting, getting set back, while my goal moved further away from me faster than I could catch up. This as a single man, with no family, making a generous middle class salary, and being rather frugal.
And yet, as soon as I finally got close enough to make one last valiant push and leap across the finish line in 2021, thank god, things went and got so bad, if I hadn't, it's unlikely I ever would have bought a home. I'm not sure I'd want to become a first time home owner in my 50s!
But, thanks to the benefits of a 30y fixed rate mortgage, a true luxury that exist almost singly in the United States, my largest expense is now greatly shielded from inflation. My mortgage has crept up $200/month for taxes and insurance, but equivalent rent where I used to live has shot up closer to $1000! And that's money right back into my pocket I'm now investing, getting even further ahead. The degree to which this single decision secured not just my future, but my ability to contribute to the future of my children, cannot possibly be overstated.
The worst part is, almost every solution I hear about is worse than things currently are. The complete and total failures of rent control are well known. Subsidized housing annihilates cohesive pro-social communities faster than actual warfare. Building more housing seems like the most obvious solution, and yet economic incentives have basically gutted the economic viability of constructing starter homes. And unfucking that quagmire, where the cost of land, materials, permitting and labor strongly incentives only "luxury" homes to be built and sold seems as likely to run into the same perverse incentives that causes rent controls to always fail. It's like the only way out is for an apocalyptic reset, and to revert back to living in cheap, affordable mud huts on whatever land your tribe can secure through 3rd world brutal violence.
Tangent to all the point missing nit pickers who will chime in "You don't have to put 20% down!" I know. But the fees associated with all the other loan packages that allow you to not put 20% down seriously eat into the benefits of buying a house. Depending on the terms of your mortgage, the PMI may be something you are stuck with even after you've built up 20% equity in the home. It may require refinancing to rid yourself of, which in this rate environment is utterly retarded. To say nothing of how having that 20% down gives you a leg up in having your offer considered, probably second only to all cash offers. In a competitive environment it's a real asset.
Building housing is actually doable. Sure, starter homes will have to go for more than in previous generations, but you can still build them. Relaxing zoning restrictions also brings prices down.
Now that being said, there are places like New York which just don’t have much to be done, due to density.
Some of that is also due to changing standards of living: Manhattan has fewer residents now than a century ago.
Sure, but ‘let’s all be much poorer’ is a tough sell.
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There are a tons of programs that are 0% down or 3% down for first time home buyers that have low cap PMI/no PMI or get rid of it at some equity goal like 20% paid off etc.... The fees don't even factor in. The saving 20% thing hasn't been true for almost 40 years. It doesn't make your offer more attractive than a higher one at 3%. Not in any way that matters, cash sales are nice because you can wave all kinds of stuff and get it done fast, anything else is mostly the same with some caveats. I'm glad you were able to get in when you did, but clearly you wanted to buy earlier, and you easily could have, even faster if you had done it with a partner. I didn't scrimp and save, I bought my first property in foreclosure with 5% down that I put on a credit card and they handed me a 15k check at closing.
Most people in the USA own houses, around 2/3rds, so is 1/3 of the population renting really a crisis? It is historically average for modern times.
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Well, I suppose the government financing public housing projects again would at least alleviate the problem.
Then you're just paying through your taxes, and you're getting far less for your money.
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Not if they become highly affordable crime-ridden dysfunctional wrecks that no one wants to live in, which already exist. The chances of these being remotely safe in any kind of current-day city is virtually nonexistent at this point.
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I think it’s actually easy to fix housing. Voters don’t want to in blue states where I am guessing you are located.
You never directly build affordable housing. You build new high end housing. The old high end housing depreciates and in 20 years is affordable.
The only hard thing now is addiction to fiscal policy which drove up inflation and private investments (rates). Which curtails new construction where they let you build.
The other, non-governmental, issue is the Blue Tribe's desire to centralize everything in cities. As you concentrate more and more economic activity into a small space, the housing located near it naturally becomes more desirable and thus more expensive.
Even then you need significant geographical barriers limiting growth. Only a few places are Tokyo dense.
The thing that most surprised me about visiting Tokyo is that there are (tiny footprint) freestanding single family homes within walking distance of even the densest areas. It isn't all apartment blocks as far as the eye can see, although those are there.
Yes, Tokyo and Paris prove that you don't have to build 50-storey condos to reach the required density.
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https://josephheath.substack.com/p/a-critical-theory-of-or-for-america
I think Canada is moving to build more housing, despite Trudeau's lip service to protecting housing prices. There's just a delay between realizing there's a crisis and actually getting housing built.
It's not even close to the scale required to address the problem. The important number is nestled in the middle of OP's post, so you might have skimmed over it. 400,000 people in 3 months. Graph of population increase vs housing completions.
Canada is taking in over a million people a year, and building maybe 1/4 of the housing (not to mention the other infrastructure) needed to support that growth.
That's not typical though. A lot of that is temporary residents. The government is targeting 500,000 a year, so you can expect that to be the long run average.
The government says they're targeting 500k a year, but should we believe them?
In flagrant violation of the first law of holes, they have not stopped digging. There is a massive housing crisis in the country, and immigration is the first and most available lever the federal government has on the problem. Ottawa (mostly) can't build homes directly, at least not on the scale the country needs. Trudeau's "ambitious housing plan" is a paltry 2 million additional homes across 8 years, with half of that covered by the provinces and municipalities, and that's if it actually goes to plan. If you're bringing in a million people every year.., the math ain't mathing, as the kids say. Even at their target of 500k, it seems like not quite enough.
As for temporary vs permanent, I'm not sure. I've known many temporary residents, all waiting around for PR, some staying long past their expired work permits: my friends and coworkers - good people, for sure, but they have to live somewhere. It also seems like no one really ever gets deported. Famously, you have to kill 16 people, but less anecdotally, the country is only deporting a few thousand a year, equivalent to a few days worth of immigration.
I have talked to a number of recent immigrants on dating apps, and a huge number are students or recent graduates of a very low ranked local university that I've never even heard of any local going to, and whose student body seems to be about 90% international students. I don't think it's bad enough to be called a diploma mill, but it's not good. It makes me doubt that we're really attracting the brightest people. The standards of the higher ranked universities themselves are dropping. All of these universities have a huge problem with cheating from what I've heard and the lower ranked ones have pretty low standards for passing.
I don't think the immigration rate should take the price of housing into account though. The average Canadian benefits from higher prices. The problem is that cities refuse to allow development. The median voter supports immigration but doesn't want his own neighbourhood to change. And they don't want urban sprawl either. But even if they doesn't happen, the average Canadian is still better off with high property values.
Yeah.. some of that is true.
My steelman for the government's actions is that they're doing what they feel is best for the country because something something Century Initiative. Country needs population to support its social program Ponzi scheme (and I mean that with love. Free healthcare is great, but it is expensive. So is OAS). It needs to be paid for with an expanding population's taxes, and where that population lives is not Ottawa's problem. It's not Trudeau's fault most of Vancouver still looks like this.
But no. I don't think the average Canadian benefits from higher home prices. The average voter? maybe. So then you have the PM just come right out and admit it. "Home prices cannot be allowed to fall". It's generational warfare, and our politicians have picked the side their votes come from. The boomers get to retire. You get to eat the bugs.
How can the average Canadian not benefit from higher property values if the vast majority of property is owned by Canadians?
It's not generational warfare. People are free to give the proceeds of higher property values to their children, and most of them do. It's not the government's fault if some people don't want to help their children. But when the government does intervene and artificially suppresses property values or taxes them to redistribute to the young, a large share of that is redistribution to immigrants or their children. This is the opposite of what the government should do if it wants to help Canadians at the expense of foreigners as so many claim it should.
"Generational warfare" was perhaps hyperbolic. I mean that the government is propping up assets that, absent their meddling, should come down in value, if things were at all sane like in the US.
It doesn't help the younger generation of Canadians now if their parents will eventually croak in 25 or 30 years and leave them the house (along with god knows what owed in deferred property tax. Have fun with that, kids! Edit: actually, maybe this is only a BC thing), nor does it help those who can't bank on an inheritance.
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Canada is also importing PRs at a rate that is frankly insane -- something like 5x that of the US per capita, and heavily concentrated in ~3-4 major cities. It's debatable whether the capacity even exists to build 100k+ units per year in these places, and the strain is showing. (in addition to turning those cities from pretty nice places to overcrowded unlivable hellholes over the past couple decades, with the possible exception of Montreal; I haven't been lately)
I don't think they're that concentrated. Every province is getting a lot of immigrants.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/444906/number-of-immigrants-in-canada/
I'm surprised to see that many heading to Saskitoba TBH -- I would not have imagined the huddled masses yearning for a better life in Moosejaw. But I think my point stands. (other than that the GTA has technically been a bit of a hole since Justin was in short pants -- there's a lot of ruin in a town I guess)
Nova Scotia is also getting a lot of immigration. Most my life, we had very little and there was basically no population growth. Now, it seems like half the population downtown is Indian. I also see a lot of immigrants in smaller towns. Most of them are only here temporarily to get their PR though before they move to Toronto. But the immigration rate of any Canadian province is about as high as any US state.
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Montreal is getting fucked slower than the other major cities, but it is still getting fucked.
The effect is slower because Montreal attracts poorer immigrants (as french speakers are prioritized), so the immigrants that arrive here are more competing at the bottom for rents than for houses and condos, but the effect at term is the same, as high rents push more renters to consider ownership.
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I don't think this is true. Housing will always be a politically important issue, and it should be. There are so many tensions pulling different ways. Old people want to keep value and pass it to their kids, young people want affordable housing (unless they are getting the inheritance!), what type of housing and how much is something people complain about all the time. Whether it is a neighbor complaining about a single house being built too tall or a community complaining about low-rent housing. 30 years ago half the complaints I was dealing with in a local authority in the Midlands in England were about housing one way or another.
It's impossible to satisfy all the competing demands at once, which means politics. Housing is not a good like any other because you can't pick it up and move it with you. It is tied to a locale and to a community. HOA's as much as people hate them form for a reason. Where we live, how much it costs and who gets to live next to us, is probably one of the fundamental bedrocks of politics, from HOA's to redlining and segregation, affordable housing NIMBY/YIMBY.
So I would say it can be both that Canada is a normal society, that housing is a politically important issue and that getting the balance of competing interests wrong can have a huge knock on effect onto society.
It's even more obvious if you move a step down from housing to land-ownership. Who owns the land has been a political question since Ur and Leviticus.
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I think it's fair to say that things become political issues when they are broken.
In Sweden, in 1990, I doubt crime was a political issue. Now it is.
There have been times when housing wasn't on anyone's political radar. Now it's one of the most important issues is many countries. That's because housing is broken now.
1991 was actually the first time when Sweden elected a right-wing populist party to the Riksdag, and at least according to Wikipedia, they "wanted to invest heavily in the fight against drug abuse and street violence, and impose severe penalties for what it called related "gangster activity." It wanted to implement harder punishments for violent crime, and life imprisonment for the most dangerous criminals", so there must have been something there.
That wasn't really why they were elected though, since it wasn't much if a salient issue. The overriding political issue was the extremely severe financial crisis and the financial mismanagement by the social democrats, not anything else.
They were elected as combination of being a protest party, general (rightwing) economic populism and anti-immigration.
That said, there were definitely problems with crime and the great Nordic biker war started in '94.
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