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Comment by naasking | Hacker News Reader

> Since you asked for someone to steelman, I’ll chime in to say this graph looks great to me. As Canada has grown rich, our fertility rate has gone down. I have no moral problem with that, but it does cause a problem: as the population ages, the ratio of workers (who pay tax) to retired people (who carry a tax burden) shrinks.

This is not even close to the only problem. Our housing stock has not kept up with population growth, which is a big reason why housing prices have been so out of control here. It's not due to a lack of competition so much as regulation and population growth that has outpaced building capacity.

So I'm not sure I can agree that that graph looks fine. It's true that we need immigration to balance falling fertility rates, but this needs to be balanced by the available resources so the cost of living doesn't spiral out of control. Labour shortages can often be addressed in others ways, like automation.

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Yeah, there are clearly other problems with the Canadian market. Didn’t mean to imply there weren’t!

Housing stock I really do think is down to regulation - it’s crazy hard to build here in Vancouver, even right near mass transit stations.

Should we have increased the ability to compete in housing and groceries before the influx of immigrants? Maybe. But I don’t think having them here makes these issues harder to address, and it might increase the pressure to actually take action. Every party is talking about cost of living now.

Regulation cannot be completely discounted, but the bigger issue is labour. If you can even find someone willing to build you a home, they won't even entertain doing it until years into the future. There is no capacity to build more homes.

At least not without paying construction workers a whole lot more in order to compel the software developers away from developing software and into building houses, but then that only drives the cost of housing even higher!

More labour is one way, but there are also orthogonal ways of retargeting the existing building capacity more effectively. For instance, financial discincentives against building low-density luxury housing and more incentives towards building higher density housing would alleviate demand pressure over the span of a few years. We also used to know how to build affordable housing.

Why is that disincentive not already present? Multiple people building a town home should be able to outbid one person building a single family home every single time, and the sky is the limit for a large condo building. Their combined capacity to pay more than outstrips the additional cost to build the structure. It is clear what is a better deal for the construction crew.

I expect the answer is because nobody actually wants to live in such dwellings. They might accept rent in a place like that if they see it as a stop-gap until they can move into their "dream home", but it is not the home they are willing to commit to and build (obviously there are exceptions).

Zoning regulations limits what you can construct in any given location, so it's not even about who has more financial capital, but political capital in many cases.

Not so much an issue anymore, though. Want to build a tiny house? No problem. Multiple houses on a single lot? Go for it! These would have been unthinkable 10-20 years ago, but have been given the green light in more recent times. Council knows that they can't get away with ignoring housing any longer. Of course, it's easy to accept because they also know almost nobody is going to do it.

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