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Comment by throwaway5752 | Hacker News Reader

absolutely unhinged

It seems less than ideal, or maybe even illogical, but calling it "absolutlely unhinged" feels a bit dramatic. I'm not from Canada - how does Canada currently relate housing and immigration policy, and how would you propose they change it?

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As I understand it, the government sets targets / limits for immigration, and sets goals for housing. While the latter may be somewhat informed by the former, these two goals are not mathematically linked, and if housing construction falls short of the goal, that's just treated as an "oh well, we'll try again next year" scenario. I agree that "unhinged" is dramatic, but I would say this is not very coordinated or effective.

A more direct method would be to apply hard caps to the following year's immigration numbers based on the previous year's actual measured housing completions. I think this would much more powerfully align pro-immigration interest groups with pro-housing-construction interest groups, resulting in much more home construction, whereas presently there is substantial conflict between the two (especially landowners who benefit from rising demand for scarce housing).

> sets goals for housing

I don't think the federal government does that at all but please someone correct me. Immigration is a federal issue that gets decided mostly on the federal level. Housing is not a (direct) federal responsibility, again correct me if I'm wrong. The government can give incentives but it can't dictate how much housing needs to be build by the provinces/territories, municipalities, etc.

Here's an example, how the BC government is explicitly trying to get more housing built: https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/housing-tenancy/local-gov...

Edit: It's actually not that simple as I thought. This is a good read about the topic: https://theconversation.com/housing-is-a-direct-federal-resp...

There's a lot of jurisdictional overlap when it comes to housing, but Canada certainly does have a federal Minister of Housing, Infrastructure and Communities, the office of which is currently occupied by Sean Fraser (who was formerly the immigration minister). But even if housing were entirely out of the federal government's hands, that wouldn't be an obstacle to them mathematically linking immigration targets to measured housing builds; they can link it to any variable they want to, even the weather on Mars.

You're right, I've changed my mind a bit about this now.

That's a reasonable idea. I wonder how units that are operating as AirBNB rentals would or could be accounted for under that policy, though.

I'm not sure they would need to be accounted for. I think opposition to AirBNBs is a product of severe housing scarcity* and in a scenario where housing is abundant and rents are low, people would be much more welcoming of AirBNBs.

* (Or in some places like Kyoto and Venice, it's due to over-tourism complaints, but I don't think anywhere in Canada is struggling with that problem.)

Tourism is a major industry in Montreal, probably as much as venice and Kyoto with year long festivals and the fact that it is an Island is also an issue.

If opposition to AirBNB in Montreal is mainly coming from locals being upset about the excess of tourists rather than the deficiency of rental vacancies, then I stand corrected.

Currently, housing availability is not a factor in immigration policy. Canada allowed over 1.2 million new residents last year. There were approximately 200k new houses built in that same time frame. Interpret this as you will.

Yes, it is hard to overstate: the current admin has given zero thought to anything other than "bring more people in".

Housing supply, healthcare, broad service capacity, everything that is meaningfully impacted by adding more residents, has mostly been ignored for years.

Housing supply in particular was already in bad shape 10 years ago, so we are seeing the compounding effects of that in 2024 as immigration skyrockets.

Imagine adding 1.2 millon people to a country with only 39 million already, in just one year! I think it's pretty clear there are many wrong/bad ways to pull that off, and we chose most of them.

How many vacancies are there? How many of the new residents are joining an existing household, and how many are family groups that will share a house?

The numbers you've cited don't sound completely out of line. The counterpoint is that housing prices have increased so dramatically.

I don't see it mentioned, but I assume wealthy people without price sensitivity around the world are purchasing extra properties in Canada as climate refuges in a relatively stable democracy, and using AirBNB to generate income from them while they are not needed.

> I don't see it mentioned, but I assume wealthy people without price sensitivity around the world are purchasing extra properties in Canada as climate refuges in a relatively stable democracy, and using AirBNB to generate income from them while they are not needed.

Yes, this has been happening exactly. Although some foreign investors are also just speculating without running an Airbnb. Recent taxation introduced on unoccupied housing has combatted this somewhat, but it's still a problem. But it's also worth noting that this only accounts for a small portion of the housing stock, probably dwarfed by Canadian nationals or corporations buying multiple properties and using them to run Airbnbs, or real estate companies buying property and keeping it unoccupied while it's on market.

I do think the "foreign investor" complaint is exaggerated as a root cause of our systemic housing issues (likely because people find it easier to point the finger abroad), though it is still a contributing factor.

Don't forget other factors being ignored like healthcare and transit

Canada is bringing in 1.3% worth of its population in immigrants every year. IIRC the births and deaths are nearly even, so without immigration the population increase would be something like 0.02% per year. The federal government is likely incentivized to create high immigration targets by big industries (because more workers creates a race to the bottom for wages, and most people are not making a living wage in Canada), as well as the federal pension program which will be paying out record amounts to new retirees as the last of the boomers are retiring now.

If you can't increase the housing stock by 1.3% every year (I suspect it's more like 0.2%-0.5% growth per year, but can't find numbers), but you choose to increase the population by 1.3% every year, you can see how this would contribute to a soaring cost of housing and consequently the record numbers of homelessness in Canada (which includes tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people now living in their vehicles).

BC is moving in the right direction with recent policies which make it much more difficult to run an Airbnb, which will return some of the housing stock to the long-term housing supply when the changes come into effect, but the municipal governments of most of its largest cities (including Vancouver, whose metro area has 50% of BC's population) have made it difficult to build housing in general, as well as restrictive of high-density housing.

If you're not from Canada, you honestly can't fathom how bad things have gotten for people living here.

I agree with you its' gotten bad here but I think immigration is a bit of a red herring. It's not the immigration numbers that are the problem per se, it's that the people immigrating are net consumers rather than providers of skills that are in shortage and I think that in itself is a relatively small problem compared to the nuts and bolts of how housing is actually built in Canada and the primary cause of this problem is the government's regulation of that process. We aren't setting new highs from the building boom of the 1970's when our population was 60% of what it is now when we should probably be producing housing at double the rate of the 1970's boom, given our much larger population and immigration and a large part of why is the large cost of dealing with the government on each new build. The time it takes to go from buying land to getting it rezoned for higher density and the building process is often very long, permitting is expensive and time consuming beyond the rezoning aspect, every spot where a trade touches anything outside the lot has a government cartel on it charging double or triple what the trades working on the residence charge, inspections are arbitrary and archaic, making it very hard to bring in modern building practices at scale, etc. We need to go in and bulldoze all those barriers and get housing in production if we expect this problem to solve itself. BC is moving in the right direction on one thing though, they jsut proposed automatic upzoning of all land within 800 meters of a major transit stop. That would relieve a decent chunk of the first part of the problem.

> If you're not from Canada, you honestly can't fathom how bad things have gotten for people living here.

100%. People outside of Canada really don't realize how bad it has gotten here.

Yes, housing costs are up all over the world - but Canada's housing crisis is off the charts. Hell, even many Canadians that are comfortably housed don't even realize how bad it has gotten.

Immigration is a federal responsibility. Housing is a free-market responsibility with limits imposed at the municipal level (where it is strictly restricted to anywhere but my backyard).

That's why the two are unrelated.

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