Half of all Canadians say there are too many immigrants: poll
Half of all Canadians say there are too many immigrants: poll
Concerns over immigration are mostly about the economy rather than fears about immigrants changing Canada's social fabric, the poll suggests
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From a housing perspective, yeah, there are currently too many. That's a policy failure not related to immigration itself though. The housing problem could be easily solved and then this level of immigration would make sense.
I mean depends on how you define easily.
Even assuming infinite money, Canada has built roughly the same number of houses per year since the 90s. This means we have roughly the same number of skilled and experienced carpenters, roofers, plumbers, etc that work in new builds.
This means that if tomorrow we passed legislation eliminating every single bureaucratic red tape AND convinced developers to build everywhere they have land to do so, we would take years to catch up with the point where our houses:population ratio is back among the rest of the western world.
Just limiting how many properties a person/corporation can own would solve the problem alone. Tax should exponentially increase after 2+ properties.
Make coop housing viable, currently it's almost impossible to start one.
Gov should be building housing too, just like the ww2 houses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawberry_box_houses
In addition, feds should be building housing to house every single person, unconditionally. On the topic of homelessness it's the only way to reintegrate folks into society. Even if, say, 80% do nothing but shoot up in their free housing, it's still cheaper for taxpayers when you consider the cost of taking care of folks on the street and the problems that causes. And just by building housing stock you're making good entry level jobs that don't require university education.
And this may be controversial, but non-Canadians should pay a higher mortgage rate. Finland does this and they have probably the best housing situation on the planet. They are actually the ones who pioneered the idea of unconditionally housing everyone, IIRC.
Canada has built roughly the same number of houses per year since the 90s.
Yes but we also weren't taking 1 million newcomers per year in the 90s. If you want these immigration numbers you need to have a plan to make it work.
I can agree it would help, but we're at an all time low for housing to population. A Fraser institute study, so there's a definite conservative bias to their presentation and info, but it shows how long this has been coming.
In theory, we should be okay - Fraser report shows were at 424 housing units per capita, and most households are an average of 2.4 people, which means in theory wevs got enough housing.
But comparison to other countries show that, in general, we need about 10% more houses (closer to the 471 G7 average) in order to feel more balanced. Most other European countries have more
I agree with all your proposals, but they all require land/housing already built OR the people available to build them, and THAT would be the real bottleneck
Near me there are TONS of empty places, the developing is not the issue. Nobody can afford them. Hell I don't even own and the place next to me sat empty for 3 months because it was going at an absurd rent for the size.
Why would I build affordable housing? That just invites the poor. /s
There are a bunch of new apartments in my city's downtown (USA). They're all premium spaces. I can afford a spot, but I doubt most can.
I agree that's part of the problem, but see my comment below. Stats show we have an all time low for housing:people compared to our past and compared to most other western countries.
To fix it, for sure we need scaling property tax rates and higher empty/vacant housing taxes, but my point is that even if we forcibly removed 2nd or 3rd houses from every single person/corporation, as well as taking any empty/vacant housing, and distributed it, we still wouldn't have enough to be on par with our historical rates OR other western nations
It's worth noting that government housing programs started scaling back in the 80s. Funny how that works, isn't it?