Great, and it has all the housing to support it! Right? ... Right?!
The average Canadian house price is over $700,000 [1], and over $1.2 million in Vancouver, $1.1 million in Toronto. Rentals are also extremely expensive in metro areas, with 1 BR apartments over $2,700 in Vancouver and $2,500 in Toronto. [2]
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/crea-housing-data-1.6843592 [2] https://rentals.ca/national-rent-report
It's a sad reality but Canada is an endless web of special interests.
They can't get on a bus to the US for more than 6 months at a stretch, and gun ownership is heavily curtailed.
Until Ottawa makes some systemic changes -- and that sure as hell ain't gonna happen -- you're gonna participate, or freeze. They will then import a bunch of Temporary Foreign Workers to replace you.
No need to aspire to buy a new car or house or pay huge taxes.
Also, plenty of homesteading all the way up into Yukon (I lived there for four years). It's not hard to grow the majority of the food you need and hunt the rest.
If it requires going to work for more than your entire life to pay for a house, people will stop buying houses, etc.
In my family I'm the lucky one, I can pretty much live in any way that I want. But the rule is that the job cycle pretty much dictates how much freedom you've got. The financial stakes are balanced in such a way that you're likely in the tredmill for life unless you get very lucky. The big problem is that there are so many little races to the bottom that if you're not very careful you will end up participating in one or more of these effectively reducing the negotiation power of others and time shifted with yourself. Unionization is one way to solve some aspects of this (though not all and some unions have their own issues that then become dominant). Alternatively you can go it alone but that kind of risk taking isn't for everybody either.
I don't think homesteading or opting out is going to be a big driver, it would be nice if it were but I just don't see it happening. What you will see is an increase in mental issues, homelessness, personal bankruptcies and more like that. Those are the indicators that things are really not going well. But many people don't care about these things until it hits them personally.
I disagree there isn't a whole lot you can do, and I'm saying I know plenty of people doing it.
I have multiple friends that used to be Engineers and Doctors and Architects, and now just ski 100+ days in the winter and mountain bike 100+ days in the summer. These people are in their 30s. They don't want to work much anymore, so they just live cheaply and don't play the rigged game.
When a new citizen is born, there’s roughly 20 years before that person needs individual housing to be made available for them. Plenty of time to build new housing. When a new citizen is imported, they need housing _today_. And Canada is importing massive numbers of people relative to the country’s population.
People forget that construction projects aren't like AWS, you can't just spin them up and down in and instant and "poof", 500K houses, ready in a week. There's a significant amount of spin up time for this sort of stuff, nevermind the money required.
The rates have been extraordinarily greater than today.
AND of course, birth rates were significantly higher, which is what drove a lot of growth. Which can be accommodated much easier from a housing stock perspective, as mentioned earlier. The situation today isn't exactly the same.
"Foreign born" percent of population was higher in the 1800s as well.
Ultimately everything is a matter of willingness, but the world has also changed. More regulations, more bureaucracy, more money involved, more planning. It's the reason why we could definitely build the Hoover Dam again today, but definitely not in five years or for as little as we originally spent.
So, Toronto is wisely adding new transit lines. For example, the new Eglinton LRT. Unfortunately, it is already years overdue, with no definitive plan to finish it. They started construction in 2015. When will it finish? Who knows. Maybe a decade after starting?
This, of course, ties into the extremely difficult climate change situation. Transportation is a key emissions source, and without the ability to construct new subway lines, the transition away from carbon emissions gets that much more difficult
Another key problem: They keep building towers in Toronto, but not adding services. For example, the Yonge/Eglinton area has exploded in growth. Every new building has a sign that says "there's no plan to accommodate elementary students here." No new parks either. Most of the development is very anti-family, with tiny units and as many 1 bedrooms/studios as possible. Plus, these towers are usually all glass, which is a terrible from an emissions perspective.
Another example: They tried to start building "affordable" housing, funded by the government years ago. They still haven't broken ground. Anywhere. [1]
Bad planning, short term thinking, etc. It all adds up to a huge mess, and very little progress on the real problems that should have long been solved.
[1] https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2023/06/05/housing-eventual...
What kind of numbers are we talking here? Is their population increasing by 1.x% every year, with most of the population growth occurring in a fairly small geographic area, like in Canada?
Anyway UK population will overtake Germany in the next decade or two if immigration to UK continues like it has past 12 months and Germany doesn't open for mass immigration.
the stated reasons are usually that building more housing outside of existing urban areas is bad for the environment, and building more housing within existing urban areas is bad for the "neighbourhood character". but the reality is just that a housing shortage is good for a lot of people's bank accounts.
Locals that have been here 20-30 years are selling and moving into remote areas because the only way to use your home equity is to abandon the area. More houses are not built here because our infrastructure has been poorly planned for 40 years. We are also surrounded tightly by mountains and water, every new build is condos to jam in as many people as possible.
But also: yes, Canada is big. Canada will also kill you real good and hard in most places. There’s a tremendous amount of land, and a lot of it is very very cold, and you really, really don’t want to live there.
Yakutsk pop. 311,760
Omsk pop. 1,172,070
Harbin pop. 6,976,136
The maritimes are sparsely populated and have even milder weather.
If the will were there to build the necessary road and rail infrastructure, Canada could support a much, much larger population.
bollocks, it's plenty cold
> accessibility
...is a function of, among other things, weather. much of geography is also very problematic; huge portions of the country are marshes that are dicey to build on, while other parts are mountains, and often in rain-shadows
> maritimes
...don't have any jobs. the fisheries are dying and climate change is driving that, on top of excess demand collapsing fish populations. the offshore oil platforms are dead too; those guys became Alberta roughnecks.
What service companies there are in CAN have followed suit with the US and demanded all of their workers go back to the office.
Yeah it's sparse but there are no jobs and no ability to move there -- non-starter of an idea. And "milder" weather is still quite cold by most of the world standards.
There's a strong but slowly diminishing opposition to medium-/high-density housing because neighborhoods of detached single family homes have defined the character of these cities for decades.
It's been years since I lived near Toronto but the city is ringed in on all sides by the lake and what's called the Green Belt, which is a protected swathe of farmland and nature preserves. Toronto's doing a better job than Vancouver in terms of managing the density and growth, but every city has problems growing and we Canadians lack the culture of collectivism that makes Tokyo work.
The absolutely insane part is how local the recent growth has become to essentially one subregion of Ontario.
We also face a big infrastructure problem which is exacerbated by some odd urban planning decisions. As small as my city is, it’s still possible to get caught in a logjam of traffic. Add in subpar transit and the city is extremely car centric, but despite all the wide open space around us it is still relatively hard to get from point A to B at certain times of day. (Not hard compared to cities like Toronto or Vancouver but harder than people are used to).
Canada also suffers from some very difficult social issues that should be part of a grand housing solution. Unfortunately, in practice there just isn’t much political will to truly solve these issues.
First off, Canadian colonialism was a complete disaster. Between the Indian Act and its manifestations (ie - residential schools), a portion of our population has been really kicked down. In my province, for example, the last time they did a decent statistical analysis, an Indigenous man was statistically more likely to have served time in a Federal prison than to have completed an undergraduate degree. As part of treaties, Canada is responsible to provide housing on reservations. Unfortunately, the housing is so substandard that people often move to cities and then fall through various cracks in our system.
Drug abuse is a major issue in Canada. I'm not from Vancouver but spend quite a bit of time there for work/family reasons. Entire neighbourhoods are very good anti-drug commercials.
My province has been underfunding education for a very long time. That has created some really interesting side effects. For example, many professionals have chosen to leave the province behind. It's hard to get a family doctor and many people are stuck using emergency rooms for primary care. Add in covid and our once vaunted health system has become a real shit show.
Canada also has a really interesting issue with welcoming newcomers. It's odd how a country that's mostly composed of immigrants can do such a shit job of welcoming immigrants. The best way I've ever heard of to describe immigration to this country is that you'll take the absolute best and brightest, give them points for amazing professional degrees and long careers....then make them drive cabs because we don't recognize any of their experience or education. This has created a really difficult world where on one hand, people who are from here blame the immigrants for driving up the price of house. While on the other hand, many of the people who chose to come here really aren't thriving - they're barely surviving on a hodge podge of minimum wage positions.
I'm sure that you'll find a number of other people with many different views on this. But I hope that I helped a little bit!
The problem is that being better is not good enough since our immigration and growth rate is so much higher than the US. IIRC the Vancouver metro area builds about 50,000 housing units per year which is way more than a typical American metro. But that's about half of demand, so the demand/supply imbalance grows faster in Vancouver that it does in an American city.
We've had conservative and liberal governments here, our government has failed us, doesn't matter which direction you want to point and blame for our current unsustainable housing.
It's a cacophony of poor planning and people who are stuck in the past—or at least what they imagine the past to be.
But that's not how it works in our current reality. In the real world housing is a speculative asset, so every free home doesn't go to the homeless person who needs it, but to the financial institution who has bigger piles of money that that person, like BlackRock, who will added to their ever increasing portfolio and you will continue to be homeless because their piles of money will be bigger than yours and they can make more money renting that house to you.
Aint that great? /s
The Liberal Minister of Housing, who is responsible for making housing affordable (and has failed at virtually every portfolio he's ever been given), has been buying more rentals.[1]
One in three Liberal Ministers owns rentals. These are the politicians bringing in more people into a housing crisis. They are not here to serve the public. Like Trudeau, they are here to get rich, and housing is the way to do it in Canada.
The US investor may want to "trade like Pelosi", but the Canadian investor should want to "buy housing like a Liberal". It's literally a government-backed investment and they will do anything it takes to keep it from going down.
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[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/TorontoRealEstate/comments/13az7qt/...