Quote:
Originally Posted by Harry Lime
Age demographics in Canada have the five year span of 20-24 at around 2.4 million and 25-29 around 2.6 million. It's safe to say that this is the time that people branch out from their parents abode. To err on the side of caution, lets say that they immediately triple up in the household of 2.9 people. So, broken down to yearly migration from a family home for two groups of 5 year age demos, that's about 200+K per year.
So taking the 200K or so with the 300K we are starting to look at a tight crunch for housing starts to keep up, considering that the rest of the 33 million people in Canada have moves of their own up and down the housing scale.
|
That's kind of a weird way to look at it for a lot of reasons:
-you're completely ignoring deaths in that math. ~300K people die a year, and they tend to be people living in 1 or 2 person households. So that would free up 150-200K units just there.
-The 20-29 population is relatively smaller than in the past (it has only grown by about 6% in the last decade, whereas the overall population has grown by 13%), so it's actually having a smaller effect compared to prior years.
-the rate of 20-29 year olds living with their parents has gone up significantly, which also reduces the effect that that age group has on housing supply.
Quote:
We don't have much control over people aging, but both investors and immigration are under our control and there is no reason that there can't be restrictions on immigration based on housing starts (or something similar) and investors on citizenship and PR status. Most countries already do something similar.
Saw a beautiful house advertised in South Carolina online today. 5000 square feet, Victorian architecture, under 300K.
|
Immigration has significant benefits to society, as it's basically the only way we can keep our demographics at an age breakdown that will allow us to maintain our healthcare system and tax base.
On the other hand, allowing investors (including institutional ones) to buy up new housing stock has little widespread benefit to society. Really, its only positive function is that it plays a role in encouraging housing starts, but the government can do that in other ways that don't result in people having to outbid REITs, professional landlords, and foreign buyers purchasing a 2nd home when buying a house.