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Originally Posted by opendoor
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.
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.
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.
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In your first paragraph you're looking at immigration to the country, yet in your second to last you note that houses even an hour outside a city don't help. Housing affordability is not generally a Canada wide problem, it's a "few big cities" problem. And those big cities have had more than 100% of the external immigration, because they get most of it plus they attract significant internal migrants. And the land available for housing starts is generally limited in most of them as you note. When you combine that with agriculture reserve and green belt policies outside of Vancouver and Toronto, the supply and demand imbalance is significant. Then you add speculators and momentum followers drawn to an asset with good supply-demand fundamentals and the potential for high leverage.
You can try and restrict speculation if you want, but that's like cutting off the top of a dandelion - it will just grow back. If you want to actually fix housing affordability in Canada you need to fix the root of the problem, which is a supply/demand imbalance in the largest cities. And that problem needs to be fixed municipally (upzoning) and provincially (land use at urban fringe policies).