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When more people show up, you should build more housing. Canada is a big place with a small population relative to its size — you have plenty of space. Your argument might work if Canada was a small island like Singapore, but it is one of the largest countries by land area in the world.

What prevents you from just building more housing in all that extra space you have? Zoning laws and nimbyism.

>What prevents you from just building more housing in all that extra space you have?

There is plenty of cheap, available housing in the hinterlands of Canada. And yet, nobody wants to move there. Why do you think that is? Prime locations are scarce no matter how much land mass you have.

Because people want to move where jobs are available. There is a decades-long trend of urbanization throughout the world, as economies continue their transitions towards services.

Canada has a deep labor shortage in its urban areas, with plenty of pent-up demand for growth.

It's certainly true that if we must perpetually conserve each and every single family home in an urban area, then we'll remain housing-constrained. If that's what everyone wants to do, that's their right, but it's necessarily going to result in lower income and living standards for the country.

I thought Alberta has a ton of free space available. No?

Honest question: where are these cheap, available houses? I thought I did live in the hinterlands, and there's nothing in that category here that doesn't need to be torn down. Since I work online, I might be able to move if the prices are right.

>"What prevents you from just building more housing in all that extra space you have?"

That's the wrong way to look at the problem. Developers can already build in the hinterlands, but there's virtually no demand to do so because the economic activity is concentrated in the established cities. You also run into the Siberia problem where despite having massive tracts of "free/undeveloped" land in the taiga, actually inhabiting it is very expensive because of how brutal the weather can be. Unless you have something like a literal gold mine or oil well, the expense of heating the buildings and maintaining the equipment is not at all economically viable.

What stops you from building more housing where there is demand?

We know the answer to that, but the GP was asking why we aren't building in "all that extra space you have" and that's what I was responding to.

You don't need to build in the hinterlands. Looking at a map I see space around many major Canadian cities.

Vancouver may be the most constrained geographically but quite a lot of it looks suburban and could be built up if the political will existed.

Or, Canadians could choose to build nothing but single-family homes, but if they make that choice, they should own it and admit it is the real reason rather than blaming foreigners.

In what world are "temporary" foreign workers buying homes in Canada? With what salary? Same with Refugees, students.

Funny how in the first hundred years in Canada, we didn't have any issue with housing costs, despite accepting vast amounts of refugees. I'm not saying it's not making the problem worse, but to SOLELY pin it on them is IMO willful ignorance.

if we banned all immigrants, of any kind, tomorrow, would Canada's housing prices collapse? I'd suspect not: credit is still cheap, and every day canadians still want homes.

>Same with Refugees, students.

There are Twitter accounts dedicated to calling out multi-million dollar homes in Vancouver and Toronto, owned by "students".

Are you saying that Canada's housing crisis are caused by these individuals?

If you're referring to mainland Chinese people, China has banned capital outflows in the last two years. It's so bad and strict that mainland Chinese people are freaking out that they can't move their own money outside of China. Game's changed. Wrong scapegoat.

https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3012312/c...

In the real world! There's enough rich people in the world, that some of them send their kids to Canada for school. And some of them buy houses. Why does near every American assume that everyone outside of America is poor.

I'm Canadian, but thanks.

If you pour water into a bathtub it will handle all the water... until it can't, and then it overflows

Temporary Foreign Workers is everyone with a work permit for their first three years (or longer!) regardless of qualifications -- NAFTA means doctors, engineers, and software developers are TFWs for a few years at least until/unless they apply for permanent residency. The idea that they are somehow less wealthy than the average immigrant is incorrect. So to answer "with what salary?": The one from their jobs.

This is factually incorrect. NAFTA workers--TN visas--are not part of the the TFW program, which is something entirely different and requires market assessment impacts.

https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/progr...

My residence status for three years under NAFTA was Temporary Foreign Worker. I still have the paper permit. I was exempt from a labor market opinion but all other requirements, such as a single employer sponsor, applied until permanent residency.

Demand for housing is not artificial merely because it doesn't come from a citizen.

Separately, Canada's population growth rate is the lowest it's been in over a hundred years, and it isn't close. The lower trend continues for decades and decades. The last time the population growth rate was increasing was in the 1950s. So this is a very strange argument to make.

> There are 9 million people in Canada (a country of around 40M) currently living here on 10 year visa's. - Crazy!

Talk about distorting statistics in bad faith to further xenophobia…

The 10 year visa is a non resident visa that allows temporary enter into Canada during that period.

It doesn’t let people work, and just because someone has the Visa doesn’t mean they’re currently living in Canada

> And I am low balling that number. It could be closer to 1 million.

Canada's population has increased around 4 million over the past ten years, so I don't know if that velocity of closer to million tracks.

> Canada accepts _at least_ 500,000 people per year through various channels, "temporary" foreign workers, international students (many of whom stay), refugees, and of course, normal immigration. And I am low balling that number. It could be closer to 1 million.

> When you bring in an entire large city worth of people, it stands to reason that this will cause massive pressure on housing prices. Now sustain that yearly increase for decades, and you have the problem we face today.

You make it sound like those people enter Canada and then just sit there doing nothing. Which is wrong.

As long as they're LEGALLY in Canada, I don't see a problem.

They're studying/taking up jobs or whatever, and they're also spending the money that they make in Canada, in Canada. This helps the existing Canadians as well. And some of them start their own businesses. That's how the economy develops. Money should keep rolling.

> There are 9 million people in Canada (a country of around 40M) currently living here on 10 year visa's. - Crazy!

What's so crazy about that? You should check the numbers for USA.

As for the 10 year visa part. From what I know, Canada grants B1/B2 visa with a 10 year validity for businesspeople and tourists. It does not mean they can enter and stay for 10 years. They can enter, stay for sometime (they have to state how long they intend to stay at the time of entry), and then they leave. Or atleast, the vast majority of them do. They have better things to do back home.

By the way, you might also want to look into Canadians emigrating to USA. Not that there's anything wrong with it. Just saying that it happens.

Plenty of those immigrants work in the housing industry building houses. Immigration is increasing both the supply and demand of housing.

Labor generally ranges from 20-40% of the cost of a home, the land and materials make of the majority. An absolutely massive percentage of all immigrants would need to be in construction to outweigh the increased demand from their presence.

I assume the response would be that with policies that allowed for rampant building/sprawl, the market would sort this all out regardless of the population.

However, these kinds of price spikes still happen in lots of places that have neither a ton of immigration or constraints on building, so it's not clear to me that either one is really a singular root cause.

A price spike, maybe. A long term unending price increase, no. Would love to see an example of a place that doesn't have such constraints on building that has high prices.

So you're saying supply isn't meeting demand. Why isn't supply meeting demand? What's preventing buildings from building more and faster?