[CliffFletcher]

Demographics and immigration both play a part in home prices. The median age of buying a first home in Canada today is 34, and we just saw the largest cohort (in raw numbers) of 34 year olds in Canadian history this year as the peak of the Millennial population bulge enters their prime home-buying years. Meanwhile, Canadians are living longer than ever and Boomers are staying in their 3-4 bedroom detached houses instead of downsizing.

Immigration increases demand for housing, so clearly it has an impact on prices. Especially when the overwhelming majority of immigrants buy homes in a handful of already house-scarce cities. It’s no coincidence that housing prices have climbed steepest in immigrant-rich cities like Toronto, Vancouver, London, and Sydney.

As opendoor points out, our public services and finances need immigration to remain viable as our population ages. But we can recognize that immigration is a net benefit while also acknowledging that it has negative impacts on particular sectors - in this case housing prices in major cities.

And immigration is not a discrete problem from investors buying up real estate, as many of those investors are using Canadian real estate as a safe place to store their wealth from undemocratic regimes. Canadian planners are happy to promote Canada as a safe haven for the affluent, their children, and their money, and we don’t ask questions about where that money came from. Vancouver has a lot of parallels to Londongrad - with too many people making too much money from the arrangement to rock the boat. As government policy, it’s quite an attractive way to juice the economy, like a kind of super-tourism. Certainly easier than increasing domestic productivity. But again, those injections of capital have a knock-on effect of contributing to rising housing costs.