We airdrop a population the size of Waterloo region (500-600k) of people into the country every year. They need somewhere to live. I don't think I need to say much more. I am aware that there can be other factors, but this is the (as I said) elephant no one wants to discuss publicly.
The 2020 stats say it's 250k, so not quite 500k/600k. But that's only the nominator, the population is aging and dying, and the birth rate is low, so the fact that 250k immigrants come in per year doesn't actually mean there is a need for more housing.
So we have 300k deaths each year, 350k population growth of which 250k is immigrants, for a 1% YoY population increase.
So you'd expect a need to grow housing by 1% and that would flatten prices, but it doesn't, so I feel there's more to it.
> but this is the (as I said) elephant no one wants to discuss publicly
I just did like 30min of googling, and almost all articles discussed immigration as a factor for Toronto high prices. So I'm not sure it's an elephant, it just doesn't seem like the simple explanation people want it to be. It isn't obvious at all that just lowering the number of immigrants the country accepts per year would have a drastic impact on Toronto prices. It seems there's many other factors at play. And you also need to consider all the other impact to the overall economy that lowering the number of migrants would have as well.
I think people just don't really know, it's a hard problem, there's no clear solution, and so no one can come up with actionable remediations.
One thing that I saw which might be a bigger elephant is the fact that old people don't downgrade, they stay occupying the single family residence they've owned for their entire retirement and end of life. Making no room for others. When they most likely no longer take advantage of the city or the extra space afforded by their home, and that limits the pool of homes dramatically. Especially considering Toronto has issues building more since land is scarce, and taxes are high for construction + zoning. I feel the thought was always that when you retire, you cash out your Toronto home, and downsize somewhere else cheaper, making room for others in Toronto, but this doesn't seem to be happening. And this is compounded with life expectancy growing year over year.
Keep in mind that your numbers do not include international students as an immigration pathway and the number of people here on 10 year residency which can include "temporary" foreign workers. For example in 2019 there were 640k international students in the country, a significant percentage of them will also choose to stay here or are here on 10 year visas and they are not counted in the stats you gathered. There are an additional 550,000 TFWs here, many on long term visas. Again, not counted in your stats, nor are illegals.
The government also obfuscates the number of foreign buyers of housing because it only takes 6 months to gain permanent residency, and those with permanent residency are not counted as foreign buyers.
Saying "we just don't really know", and "its a hard problem" is troubling to me, its basically saying that we shouldn't bother getting to the root of the issue because you'd rather we didn't. So far with your stats that you googled, the one possible cause you offer is that elderly people might be holding onto their homes. Really?? Not, for example, speculators who can capitalize on the fact that we have guaranteed, consistent, artificial, foreign population growth since the 1980's? And why was this done? The conservative party ramped up immigration to gain favor of the immigrant voting block, and all other parties adopted the same approach.
I'm interested in real facts, thesis, explanations with substance.
There seem to be many variables whose correlations and effects are not well understood. You claim you've figured it out, that the only effect of increased housing price in the Toronto metro is simply due to migrants, foreign students and foreign investors. Okay, well I'm not against that explanation, but you got to back it up with something. Otherwise it's as good as any other, such as what I pointed too, the large number of single family unit being held by the retired or soon to be retired boomer generation.
My personal opinion, neither are the whole equation, the market of housing is complex, and I think we're far from understanding it, which is why there are simply no cities with landlocked and high populations that have figured out how to slow prices and make housing affordable yet.
But I'm totally willing to hear out anyone whose done some deep analysis and got some good thesis around it.
Personally, I wish politics allowed for testing policies and let people experiment with them a little more loosely without worry of saying ok this failed we're rolling it back and trying something else. If that was the case, I think it be curious to try something like stop taking migrants for a year and measure impact. Honestly the migrant argument is always being brought up, so if anything, it would confirm or deny more clearly that variable, and we could hopefully move on.
Also, you did get me curious into the data, but to be honest, the stats are hard to fully get clarity on what they include and do not. Like there are 600k foreign students, but that's the absolute total it seems, not a year over year increase. And students stay for a while, so it's not like each year there are 600k new students, it's often the same returning students. So we'd need to look at the year over year increase.
Finally, with these type of things, the flip side must also be considered. Based here: https://www.international.gc.ca/education/report-rapport/imp.... foreign students create 80k jobs in Ontario and provide substantial income to the local government. So that would need to be accounted as well if say we decided to restrict their numbers further.
The solution is so simple, our population growth rate is too high relative to housing production, so the quickest, most immediate and obvious solution is to reduce immigration significantly. Within a couple years you will see housing demand fall and with it, prices! This isn't rocket science. And our economy must be able to sustain itself on a steady state population or we have a serious structural problem. You can still have immigration, but it must not be detrimental to the people living here.
> The solution is so simple, our population growth rate is too high relative to housing production, so the quickest, most immediate and obvious solution is to reduce immigration significantly. Within a couple years you will see housing demand fall and with it, prices
From my perspective, your rationale is a logical fallacy of the single cause.
If you're not familiar with it, I recommend reading:
Now what happens with this fallacy isn't that you're for sure wrong, but that you have determined for sure that you are right, yet there are multiple probable cause at play here, but you single one out and attribute that one as a sufficient cause without justification.
And personally, even if it was the single simple cause of high house prices in the Toronto metro, you still haven't addressed the opportunity cost. We don't have immigration out of generosity, most migrants are selected through a thorough application process, and we pull in people with labor skill that we need, or with wealth that we want them to bring over. This is true of foreign investors and students as well. There are reasons why we do so, because most analyst see it as a net positive for our economy. I'm with you where I would like our economy to sustain itself without any external investment, but what I would like and reality are two different things. Right now it doesn't seem like it would. So what are we going to do about that? If you cut out foreign investment, immigration and students you need a strategy for that or we'll just take a huge hit financially.
Also, keep in mind we have a decreasing workforce. Based on this article https://thoughtleadership.rbc.com/from-a-baby-boom-to-a-reti... the foreign workforce we're taking in isn't enough to fill the workforce gap we have due to an aging population. We're losing workers, this isn't steady state. That's why we ramped up immigration:
> For Canada as a whole, the challenge is to become more competitive even as we lose these established workers. Immigration is helping to grow our talent pool. We welcomed more than 300,000 new immigrants last year, about 60% of whom are skilled workers. The immigration minister has described this as “the new normal.” Yet it still doesn’t cover the annual retirement rate, so we’re going to have to get more creative.
It's going to be hard to manage without immigration, we just didn't have enough kids, and we didn't educate, teach and train our kids properly to be able to replace our workforce in a steady state. That's the other side of the problem. We take a few refugees as a feel good pat on the back, but the truth is, most immigration we take in is so that we can sustain our workforce, keep our businesses competitive and prevent our economy from crashing down. At least, that's the reason why we do so. Now maybe that's also a wrong conclusion, maybe there is another way, maybe people overblow the impact of not taking immigrants would have to our economy, but economics is hard, figuring out what is best for the economy isn't simple, in my opinion at least.
