Quote:
Originally Posted by opendoor
I don't know, when you look at housing starts over the last decade compared to the US, I'm not sure supply really looks like the biggest issue for price disparity:
US: Average of 1.2M/year (about 3.7K per million population)
Canada: Average of 215K/year (about 5.7K per million population)
So per capita, Canada has had about 55% more housing starts than the US over the last decade, yet prices have increased much faster here. Or look at a place like Germany; they've averaged only slightly more housing starts than Canada over the last decade, despite having double the population.
So I don't think the idea that we're going to build our way into affordability is really backed by the evidence. Canada is already well above the OECD average for housing completions relative to existing supply, and the highest countries by that metric are some of the most unaffordable in the world (Australia, New Zealand, etc.) while countries at the bottom of the scale (Italy, Portugal, Spain, Germany, etc.) are generally pretty affordable. Which makes sense, as high prices encourages more construction and more property speculation. But that doesn't really help affordability.
Yeah, people point to the housing units per 1000 people stat where Canada is relatively low, but that has far more to do with demographics than anything else. Older countries with higher amounts of single-person households and higher rural populations will tend to have smaller household sizes than younger countries that have more families and more people living in cities.
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Housing doesn't correlate 100% with new supply.
Total population isn't really relevant to shortages, as the key factor is population growth. Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal's population is not growing. US population growth is slowing. Canada's population growth is ramping up to over 2.5%/year, which is massive for a modern industrialized country. You can go on about housing starts, but it's simply not enough and hasn't been enough for years. Canada needs to not only ramp up their housing starts for people coming in this year but deal with the lack of supply for the last decade plus.