Hacker News Reader

Comment by joenot443 | Hacker News Reader

As is often the case in these discussions, my home country is forgotten.

> Canada's population is currently growing at a record-setting pace. In 2022, the number of Canadians rose by 1,050,110. This marks the first time in Canadian history that our population grew by over 1 million people in a single year, and the highest annual population growth rate (+2.7%) on record since 1957 (+3.3%).

https://www.statcan.gc.ca/en/subjects-start/population_and_d...

Canada is also going through its worst affordability crisis in recent memory. I'm happy to have gotten out, but as anyone living there now can tell you, things have gotten very bad, very quickly.

View on HN

I'm actually an immigrant in Canada, so part of the problem!

BUT: I look around me and I see oodles of space and very little new building going on. 2.7% growth should not be impossible to deal with.

When I first moved to Toronto, I was shocked to discover that there are not only actual houses in the downtown area, but entire zero-rise neighbourhoods.

I now live in Calgary, which is where half of Ontario is moving, and according to this [0] we had a "record" new housing starts last year of 5700 houses and 7700 apartments in Calgary. We probably need closer to 57000 and 77000; we have the financial system to support that, and we have enough room for it. Finding that many tradespeople might be a challenge, but we aren't even trying.

[0] - https://calgaryherald.com/business/local-business/calgary-ho....

Isn't Alberta real estate historically boom and bust?

It’s rather rich to be invited to a party and point out that if the hosts had used their resources better, there’d be enough chairs and food for everyone.

I wasn’t invited to the party, I was invited to move in to the house; and now I’m getting blamed for the lack of chairs when really we have enough room and money to literally install a nice comfy chair for every human on the planet.

That explains Canada’s housing crisis, but not America’s or much of Europe’s. I guess immigration makes it especially worse in Canada, but without immigration driving growth, it would still probably be bad.

The issue elsewhere is not country-wide net population change, it's people moving into just a few cities. So there is plenty of cheap housing where few people want to live

500k - 750k per year in the UK currently.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com