[opendoor]

Originally Posted by blankall

All of these factors play a role, but to say more people moving onto the same amount of land hasn't is absurd.

Population growth from immigration has been relatively static for 30 years. If adding ~0.8% to the population for the last 5-10 years is primarily responsible for housing prices skyrocketing, then why didn't that happen in the years and decades before that with the same (or higher) immigration?

If you look at a chart of Canada's immigration rate and a chart with housing prices, there's essentially no correlation. The highest rate of increase in prices in the last 40 years was in the '80s which corresponded to the lowest immigration rate we've had since the '60s. Conversely, the period of highest immigration in recent history (early-to-mid '90s) coincided with a crash in housing prices and a decade of zero growth in house prices.

Sure lots of closing starts, but what's the quality of these starts? Detached houses? Or small condos? Housing starts is a totally meaningless figure. Canada's population has grown by 23% over the last twenty years. Has the amount of land we can build residential buildings on also increased in proportion?

Housing starts aren't meaningless. That's the number of units that are available, and like anything bought and sold on an open market, the amount of supply is vitally important to the price. Unfortunately the supply of housing units that can be purchased by individuals to live in is being artificially squeezed by speculators and investors buying up at an increasing rate.

In terms of types of houses, there are definitely more condos now (about 54% of housing starts vs 45% 10 years ago), but condo prices have gone up basically as much as detached prices have. If no one wanted the condos that were built and only wanted detached houses, then there would be much more of a discrepancy in price increases than there is.

The fact is that because of zoning restrictions and restrictions on expanding cities, we've been cramming more and more people into the same space. The answer is simple, if you want more people to live here, you need to open up more land. And yes of course everything else, like interest rates, transfer of generational wealth, investors, foreign cash, etc all contribute. It's not a one or the other thing. They all have a cumulative effect.

Open up more land where? Canada already has relatively low density cities. Building more houses an hour or two from a city where few people want to live isn't going to alleviate anything.

Ultimately, the number of housing starts in the last decade has grown faster than the population has, and significantly faster than the rate of immigration has. So simple math would suggest that the reason that housing prices went up so fast in the last decade has far more to do with all those other factors than it does population or immigration numbers.