this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2025
23 points (96.0% liked)

Canada

9561 readers
1218 users here now

What's going on Canada?

Related Communities

🍁 Meta

🗺️ Provinces / Territories

🏙️ Cities / Local Communities

Sorted alphabetically by city name.

🏒 SportsHockey

Football (NFL): incomplete

Football (CFL): incomplete

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer

💻 Schools / Universities

Sorted by province, then by total full-time enrolment.

💵 Finance, Shopping, Sales

🗣️ Politics

🍁 Social / Culture

Rules

  1. Keep the original title when submitting an article. You can put your own commentary in the body of the post or in the comment section.

  2. Election Interference / Misinformation

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage: lemmy.ca

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
otter@lemmy.ca
mp3@lemmy.ca
otters_raft@lemmy.ca
23
Which Party Has the Best Blueprint for Fixing the Housing Crisis? (thewalrus.ca)
submitted 3 days ago by Sunshine@lemmy.ca to c/canada@lemmy.ca
23 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] dwazou@jlai.lu 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

The Canadian Housing crisis has two sources.

1. Extreme population growth

In 2024, the Canadian population increased by 3%.

This population growth rate means the population of Canada is growing 2 to 3 times faster than the United States, Britain, France, Spain, Colombia, Turkey, Vietnam, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Mexico or Brazil. In fact, Canada is now growing faster than many countries in Africa.

2. Terrible zoning rules.

Several Canadian cities have rules banning multi-storey housing from being built. Multi-storey housing is significantly more affordable than individual homes. But cities ban it. They simply don't want it. When they do accept multi-storey housing, most Canadian cities often require developers to build parking spots. "You want to build a condo tower without parking spots ? Sorry, we can not accept that". By forcing developers to build parking spots for each condo unit, they artificially drive up the cost of each unit. And they force buyers to subsidize car ownership.

The Federal Government needs to reduce the immigration rate. Look, Justin Trudeau did a lot of good things, but his immigration policy was one of his biggest failures. The current immigration rate is simply unsustainable. Canada needs to aim for 1.5% population growth instead of 3%.

But cities shouldn't be left of the hook. They are responsible for half the problem.

I mean, just look at the zoning fight happening at the Ottawa City Council :

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/councillors-spar-over-parking-and-density-as-zoning-debate-flares-up-1.7512045

[–] Routhinator@startrek.website 1 points 1 day ago

I agree with most of this but as someone who has to deal with streets filled with cars from small buildings with no dedicated parking, the parking spots makes absolute sense. You cannot just stick a dozen units on a single property and just expect people to find places to park. Parking must be provided.

[–] sbv@sh.itjust.works 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'm ambivalent about population growth. It undoubtedly contributed to the housing crisis, but there's a lot of other stuff going on: speculation by Canadians, a bit of foreign money, a bit of money laundering, and poorly designed tax law. I've been watching housing prices slowly taking off since the early 2010s. That's long before Trudeau was elected, and before the massive bump in population.

[–] JC1@lemmy.ca 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Immigration makes the housing demand worse, but most anti-immigration arguments completely forget that they help with the supply by bringing manpower to build the homes. So in a healthy market, it would balance it out. Unfortunately, both of you touch on a few points that makes this market unhealthy, so supply is restricted way too much. Bringing more manpower doesn't help since it's not the bottleneck.

The anti-immigration arguments are mainly from the racist right that looks for a boogyman while ignoring the real causes of our issues.

[–] sbv@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 days ago

most anti-immigration arguments completely forget that they help with the supply by bringing manpower to build the homes.

To a degree. Canada's point system for immigration selects white collar workers, while most students coming in on education visas are aiming for office or healthcare jobs. The last time I looked, the trades had the same proportion of new Canadians as the rest of the population - so yeah, some immigrants are in the trades, but they aren't overrepresented.

The federal government should be selecting for more construction workers. IIRC there are a couple of programs that encourage tradespeople to immigrate, but they don't bring in a significant number of people.

Bringing more manpower doesn’t help since it’s not the bottleneck.

Lack of construction workers is a bottleneck. It's just one of many, including: increased construction costs, developer incentives, zoning, lack of government construction, etc. Like you say, we need to solve all of those at once.

The anti-immigration arguments are mainly from the racist right that looks for a boogyman while ignoring the real causes of our issues.

I don't think that's fair to say. Immigration exacerbates the housing/healthcare crises, even if it isn't the sole cause. Lining it up on political lines turns immigration into a wedge issue, which doesn't help anyone.

It's much faster for the federal government to reduce the number of newcomers than it is to build houses, train healthcare/construction workers, etc. A reduction would reduce strain on our society while we fix the many problems we're facing. Once housing is again affordable, and every Canadian has access to appropriate healthcare, then we can see about increasing admission if appropriate. In the meantime, we really need to increase the number of tradespeople (and healthcare workers) we're bringing in (and certifying) even as overall numbers fall.