National Bank economist considers ‘housing affordability Armageddon’
National Bank economist considers ‘housing affordability Armageddon’
Daily roundup of research and analysis from The Globe and Mail’s market strategist Scott Barlow
The Globe is going with a pretty click-bait-y title. But, I've seen others call for coordinating federal immigration numbers with infrastructure planning by municipalities and provinces. It looks like National Bank is on the same wavelength.
“The federal government’s decision to open the immigration floodgates during the most aggressive monetary tightening cycle in a generation has created a record imbalance between housing supply and demand. According to Statistics Canada, the working-age population surged 238,000 in Q2. That was the largest quarterly increase on record and 6.8 standard deviations from the historical norm of 82,000 per quarter. Unfortunately, Canadian homebuilders can’t keep up with this influx. Housing starts for Q2 2023 stood at 62,000 units (or 247,000 annualized). At just 0.26, the ratio of housing starts to working-age population growth fell to a new and stands at less than half its historical average of 0.61 (the ratio is normally below 1 to account for the fact that there is more than one person per household). To meet demand, builders would need to break ground on 144,000 units per quarter (or 576K annualized), double the best performance ever!
At an absolute bare minimum, post-secondary institutions should show students have decent housing before visas are granted.
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Housing alone is essential just as a place to live. But then there would also be need for more roads, better public transport, more schools, more hospitals. Population congestion is going to increase and quality of life is going to decrease over the next decade even if all this were to start now.
My municipality: There's been a large increase in the local population? Better spend millions to subsidize a luxury condominium and make school and hospital cuts.
Convert churches and empty office buildings into affordable housing. Break up the REIT monopoly in the rental market. Make it really difficult to own more than one home. Crack down on foreign investment until the market stabilizes.
Or we can blame immigrants.
Or we can blame immigrants.
Nobody's blaming immigrants.
There have been a fair number of people and institutions (e.g. National Bank) saying that our infrastructure isn't keeping up with population growth.
Until we get our health system, housing, and schools sorted out, we should limit immigration to people who can solve those problems.
I disagree, our problems are mostly because of gross governmental mismanagement, that is unlikely to change whether we bring in more immigrants or not.
We need a way to hold government leaders in critical sectors accountable for their failings
Government doesn't need to fix the problem though. They just need to do enough to get reelected.
Which you can do by attacking transgendered students in 2023 because of this one crazy trick people are calling fascism
Gotcha, we're going to punish undesirable immigrants.
We will need to drastically change our zoning rules very soon to keep up. Most sane countries allow all land use other than industrial and agricultural inside cities, and they’re better for it.
You mean going to continue to decline...