In a functioning economy, more immigration will just result in more housing being built, as long as the immigrants are working. Especially since the cost of housing construction is largely the cost of labor. Immigration is a distraction from the core inability to build more housing.
I say that as a member of both groups.
It's not. If you have a narrative for how immigration could explain why there's record-high home prices and yet there isn't a corresponding spike in construction, then please post it. Because this is pretty obviously a problem of suppressed supply.
However, simple supply/demand would suggest that immigration AND 0% interest rates both affect demand quickly while supply requires securing land, building homes and getting approval to build homes takes significant time. Migrations are happening at a faster rate than housing can be built so it definitely has an impact on prices.
But I don’t think that’s really true, I think that’s very simplistic. The missing observation is that housing has become an asset class in a way it wasn’t in the past. Large numbers of people purchase houses to rent seek as landlords, and the only limit to the demand for rent seeking is the ability of those landlords to borrow money. So a major determinant of rent is now the ability to borrow money, the interest rate, and the number of people wanting to be rent seeking landlords.
Increasing the housing supply by the amount physically practical in say the course of a decade is probably unlikely to make much difference to rents if the primary driver of rent prices is the ability of rent seekers to borrow to buy the new properties. First time buyers can’t compete on borrowing because they have smaller deposits or less access to capital, so they are forced to rent, which means the rent seekers can continue to buy up properties.
In the UK, buy to let mortgages have become a substitute for pensions for the baby boomer generation. Encouraged by the government, housing as a yielding asset has essentially taxed the young to pay for the boomers retirement.
Whilst housing can be used as a rent seeking asset, it is very unlikely building new houses is going to lower rents. Landlords will simply always be able to outbid renters, so rent will remain at the height of whatever the renters can afford, I.e. extract the maximum rent possible. There is an endless demand for housing from rent seekers, provided they can rent out that property.
Couple this with the fact that the government in the UK at least has used the property market to hide the reality of the economy - that the economy is basically collapsing - there is so much vested interest in maintaining the status quo that no regulation will be introduced that will cause rents to drop, such as limiting the access of rent seekers to capital, or preserving properties for owner buyers etc.
Tl;dr - rents are expensive not because there is too little housing, but because we need them to be expensive.
From the houseowners' perspective, if they can only own one that they stay in, what alternatives the government needs to structure to balance the restriction, assuming the restriction is put in place? Should everyone put their savings in stock market etc and be subject to losses due to it? Because they too need a stable and inflation pegged income for their retirement.
Well, mainly the answer to this in public discourse is the same reason people say "we just need to build more flats" --- because people believe in the magical powers of "markets", like there's some natural law that leaving things to the market will lead to desirable outcomes.
But the actual politics of it is that if you did this, then where are you going to get the boomers pensions from? And where is the economic "growth" going to come from? See my other comment.
We're all in a big ponzi scheme because we exported most of our real welath-generating activity.
I would guess Austin might be seeing a drop because it was "the big thing" for a while but now the consensus is it is not going to rival San Francisco. The rent seekers are moving elsewhere because there are bigger capital gains to be made? Just a guess, but you can probably verify it by checking house prices in Austin vs San Francisco.
Like yeah, it probably is less profitable to speculate on housing in Austin, where pricing is improving because of increased supply, you need to do a little more than hand wave of your argument is that the causation goes in the other direction.
The reason it's the same everywhere is that this model magically creates "growth" and "wealth". My house is worth £100K. House prices increase. So now there is more wealth in the economy (there isn't, but economists think there is). Now it is worth £120K.
I remortgage and - voila! I have £20K to spend. Now I can spend that extending or upgrading my house, now the plumber and decorator have jobs, and Amazon or whoever sell new curtains, and everyone is happy.
This is a particularly useful model to follow if you don't actually produce any real wealth, because you exported all your manufacturing jobs abroad and whilst we like to pretend an economy can run on services, in reality we run a massive trade deficit and are selling off assets to pay for it (guess which assets we sell --- we export house ownership to rent seekers from abroad! My last landlords were based in China and I live in the UK! The system works)
Why were you allowed to / it was a good idea to remortgage under ~20% inflation ?
If we reduce the minimum lot size, then we reduce the minimum land purchase required in order to construct housing. And of course, lower upfront investment means lower risk and more newcomers are financially capable of buying in in the first place.
Lowering turnaround times for approval would also lower costs, and broadening the range of housing that gets by-right approval is a common way of doing that. Another is to just set a cap on the approval period, e.g. after 100 days, if you haven't received a response rejecting your application, then it's approved by default, and any rejection must be accompanied by a specific stated reason for rejection.
The overarching problem, though, is that there needs to be a political will to reduce housing costs (as you implied). But even that is partially missing the point, IMO - plenty of NIMBYs are acting for rational non-financial reasons - they're afraid that higher local density will increase local traffic and take up the finite local free parking spaces. Free parking is especially problematic, because paid parking will never satisfy people who see other people getting free parking in the same area. And of course the whole car-traffic problem is driven by cities being especially car-centric, with car traffic fundamentally not scaling up well compared to public transport.
Can I create a small company of a half a dozen new immigrant trades, buy single family homes, tear them down and build new fourplexes? Nope this is largely banned (though ever so slowly changing in some areas).
The severe regulation has distorted the market and created a housing shortage that is legally prevented from being addressed no matter what available new immigrant talent is at hand.
Growing up in a prairie city I heard this sentiment from people who simply don't like other people constantly, and I'm like "When did you try growing, you stagnant deteriorated shithole!?", and sprawl doesn't count. They hate ambition, they hate people, they hate taxes, and have no interesting ideas. They hate traffic, but refuse to do anything but drive. Their healthcare system and infrastructure is failing, there is no new economic activity happening; get busy growing or get busy dying. It doesn't work though if you stop for 70 years and then try to catch up.
Where I am we are trashing the waterways and the land in pursuit of money. You can't swim in most our rivers anymore - the recent numbers look good though, as the government redefined 'swimmable' and now it's 'safe', despite the contaminants. https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/explainer-new-swimmable-water-...
Housing the people is great, but encouraging immigration while being unable to house the current population is not.
For immigrants themselves, it is usually an issue of self-determination and freedom.
I can't say I'm fully privy to the immigration debate in Canada, but framing it as an issue of "growth" could not be a complete view of the advocates of immigration. Especially with the level of acceptance of refugees in Canada.
The not enough housing aspect is completely incidental to immigration. In my city, the overriding reason that we have not built enough housing for even our own children is that people show up to block any environmentally friendly housing proposal, largely arguing against growth. In other words, using the framework you are right now! And it's a rather twisted version of the "we can't have growth" framework because it ignores the underlying reason for not allowing growth: environmental sustainability. So instead, the only housing that gets built is the most environmentally disastrous type of housing: sprawl far away from the locations where people need to be for their jobs and everyday life, causing massive environmental destruction.
I would argue that there are few more counterproductive ways to talk about the environment than to bring up a "need for growth." First of all almost nobody actually cares that much about growth in 2025 and secondly it has disastrous consequences when the rubber meets the road.
Yes we are.
1) standard sigmoids, which never stop growing yet are also finite
2) standard ecological growth, where growth is never ending but so is death. This is much more typical of systems like capitalism than sigmoids growth. New upstarts experience exponential growth for a whole, then peak, and then die.
Of course be careful of mentioning these standard scientific observations around those in the degrowth cult, as the cognitive dissonance may cause an unpleasant explosion.
I guess it depends on your precise definition of "growth" but I am having trouble finding one that can fit with your assertions.
Land/space, while not an infinite resource, is hardly limited on the scale necessary to house people outside of extremely small niches. Views of central park are always going to be expensive, but there are a lot of square miles <45minutes to times square where someone would very profitably build and run (e.g.) an SRO if they were allowed to.
Canada has PLENTY of free space for construction, and modern construction is pretty cheap and efficient. But economic forces are concentrating the growth in a few areas. Well-intentioned efforts to force "affordable housing" and "walkable neighborhoods" make these forces even worse.
The root cause fix is to stop the economic forces that pack people into ever smaller areas.
And their family members, and the money they work for stays in-country and is not sent overseas.
Not commenting on your stance of the costs of construction, that's ridiculous to be left there on its own.
Get more out, to get a reality check.
Over-supply is even harder to reduce because housing is amortized over 20 or more years.
Developers are well aware of the cyclic nature of the housing market and thus reluctant to invest in many cases.
That's not a result of new construction. It's a result of the Austin population declining in absolute numbers: 978,763 in 2019, 975,418 in 2022. It bounced back a bit to 979,882 in 2023.
Travis County grew a little bit, but all the growth is in the suburban areas.
That 2023 number is roughly a thousand larger than that 2019 number. The changes to all of the numbers you're quoting are in the noise as far as considering changes to the cost of housing.
Austin population started to recover only a year ago, and prices are a trailing indicator. So the reason for the lower rent prices is not the new construction, but actual population decrease.
The same happened in San Francisco with almost no new construction, rent prices dropped by 30% following the the pandemic-caused outmigration.
Prediction for the future: the prices will catch up if/when the population starts recovering.
Relatedly, post-amalgamation Ottawa is very big:
https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/fb3tzy/the_size_of...
This is also an interesting Ottawa size comparison:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Suburbanhell/comments/ov59fv/round_...
I have the sense that if these suburbs had to figure out they're own shorter term scaling strategy, especially without being able to infinitely kick the infrastructure can down the road, things would be required to change a bit more rapidly. What they have instead are these miserable little cabin-esque bungalows with deer running about, concrete that is literally crumbling to gravel, and a very weird thread of prejudice against apartments of any kind.
The housing situation has clearly severely declined post pandemic at the same time that immigration was restarted and increased, but I gotta point out that Vancouver has had a severe homeless crisis my entire life, long, long before this recent government changed immigration rates or even came to power.
As far back as 2007 I was reading articles about how Vancouver was net losing the sort of affordable housing that those most at risk of homelessness depended on. Unsurprisingly the amount of homeless in Vancouver has continued to increase.
https://thetyee.ca/News/2007/07/10/SRO-Losses/print.html
But you're absolutely correct that the core of this problem is a severe lack of building. Both a lack of construction of market product and below market publicly owned housing. Building more homes is the solution to get our way out of this crisis and end homelessness.
If there is any real villain here to blame IMO it is Jean Chretien, who with the severe austerity budget of 1993 completely got the Federal government out of all social housing development and building of housing plunged to near nil for decades.
The chart from this article is remarkable. https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2022/04/22/Why-Cant-We-Build-Lik...
Minneapolis abolished the single-family zoning and parking requirements in 2018. And it worked, developers swarmed the city like vultures attracted to carrion.
Madison did no such nonsense.
Can you guess the impact of these policies on housing costs?
The house price growth in Minneapolis _accelerated_, just like in the nearby Madison. Here are the price growth charts: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1COwL
There is too much complexity in that single example and the law of supply/demand has been proven too frequently for it to not make sense that increasing demand to meet supply would reduce cost.
1. For clarity, this phrasing is from here https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vrHRcEDMjZcx5Yfru/i-defy-the...
Sorry. The reality doesn't care about your defiance.
Upzoning does not lead to lower housing prices. Even the most extreme urbanists admit that: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/4/26/upzoning-might...
> and the law of supply/demand has been proven too frequently
Ah, here it is. Have you considered that there, you know, might be "too much complexity" for "Economy 101" to fully explain the situation?
The _only_ way to decrease the housing prices is to BUILD MORE SUBURBS. Or even new cities entirely.
You don't have any other options. Sorry again.
Well, maybe one more: the Detroit route. Reduce the city population and the prices will go down.
From your linked blog post:
> Freemark finds extremely mixed and uncertain evidence for the effects of upzoning, and one of several reasons he identifies is that the link between upzoning and actual housing production is tenuous. In other words, “Are they allowed to build it?” is a different question from, “Are they building it?”
Secondly, building more suburbs and more cities increases the supply… which indicates agreement that the price problem is one of insufficient supply.
EDIT: To be perfectly clear, the data I disagree with is that increasing supply in Minneapolis failed to impact price. This is the contention of the comment I responded to, and it is fundamentally different from the claim that zoning changes fail to increase supply.
Yeah. The misery pushers (urbanists) can't admit outright that their ideology is leading to disaster, can they? So they now need not only zoning restrictions lifted, but the state must also build housing and give it out to "deserving" people for cheap.
> Secondly, building more suburbs and more cities increases the supply… which indicates agreement that the price problem is one of insufficient supply.
I'm not arguing against supply-and-demand in general (I'm not a communist idiot). I'm arguing against the _density_ increases.
> EDIT: To be perfectly clear, the data I disagree with is that increasing supply in Minneapolis failed to impact price.
But it did. The real estate transaction index clearly shows that there were no positive effects from the new construction.
Moreover, I analyzed all the real estate sales in the US, Canada, and parts of Europe since 1995. I have not found a single example of a large (>100k population) city that decreased the housing sale prices by increasing density.
Even during the crash of 2007, the dense housing crashed less than comparative nearby sparse housing.
The scholarly literature is also unambiguous. The best effects of density increases are either mild (transient effects on rent), or indirect (migration chains).
Your chart shows two lines that seem to represent sales of something over time in nearby cities, which may or may not be relevant, but are at most a narrow slice of what one would need to look at in order to understand what's going on over in Minneapolis if anything.
You then create a strawman who thinks the removal of zoning restrictions will automatically lead to a utopia in which we have no other human problems or economic systems to contend with, even going so far as to dismiss someone on the basis of a lacking argument against a claim that nobody made.
That's an apt description.
> in the same breath doing as much as you can to create an association between increased density and all these hypothetical negative possibilities.
Why are they hypothetical? Density has long been associated with worse outcomes (higher crime, etc.). I can provide plenty of citations to scholarly literature.
> Like how does it happen that you lived in no specific place in Europe for example, then to where you are now
I grew up in Russia (Izhevsk), moved to Germany (Karlsruhe), then to Ukraine (Kyiv), and (briefly) to the Netherlands before coming to the US. I did not have a car in any of these places.
> and one thing gets built which convinces you that actually every city in Europe is and has always been wrong.
Yes. I'm able to compare the life in the US and in Europe first-hand. And Europe has plenty of dark secrets of its own. For example, Copenhagen in Denmark became the world's most liveable city by ruthlessly controlling its population. It still has not reached its peak number in 1970-s. Bet you didn't know that?
> Your chart shows two lines that seem to represent sales of something over time in nearby cities, which may or may not be relevant, but are at most a narrow slice of what one would need to look at in order to understand what's going on over in Minneapolis if anything.
I have real estate data with street-level information. It's not a public dataset, so I'm replicating my results using public datasets.
> You then create a strawman who thinks the removal of zoning restrictions will automatically lead to a utopia
No. I'm saying that removal of zoning limits to allow increased density does NOT lead to lower prices. It leads to increased density and increased misery as a result.
Minneapolis is simply a good example of this. There is another very good one: Seattle (where I live now). It increased its density by 25% over the last 12 years, many times leading the nation in the number of active construction cranes. The result? Faster price growth than even in SF.
I never made that claim.
> It's not a public dataset, so I'm replicating my results using public datasets.
You'll need to do better than just comparing real estate sales. If you're going to make a coherent argument based on data, it should at least attempt to show the relationship between more datapoints than just arbitrary sales and time, especially with only a 6 year timespan. Whether there's something there or not, you're not providing a substantial enough analysis to be compelling here.
It's fine if you don't like denser areas. Plenty of people who grow up in denser cities move out because they feel like they're sick of people, but cities wouldn't be cities if they're wasn't a reason to be there, and many people prefer it. There's not a chance in hell I'd move back to a car dependent hellscape, because I grew up in one, and that's true misery to me.
> It increased its density by 25% over the last 12 years, many times leading the nation in the number of active construction cranes. The result? Faster price growth than even in SF.
Again, weird cherry-picked comparison that wouldn't surprise anyone who's aware of the two tech hubs.
Preach brother. Might I also add the possibility of encouraging migration from Metropolises to regional 100k - 200kish cities?
I think that 300k is the threshold for a good city size.
But it turned out that my prediction was correct because the Austin population went _down_ during the pandemic.
Population:
2019 - 978,763
2022 - 975,418
2023 - 979,882
The overall Travis County population went up a bit. And the prices, in the places other than Austin, are also up.
I can also give a prediction, if Austin population growth recovers (not a given), the price growth rate will quickly outpace the surrounding Travis County.
In every comparable city in the country, housing prices are up. In Austin, they are down.
Now compare the population. Travis County population (sans Austin) went up, so the prices are also up. And Travis County actually has _more_ new units than Austin proper.
The driver for the price decreases in Austin is the population drop, not the new construction.
If your point is, "construction has to outstrip population increase in order to decrease prices", then well, yeah, we agree fully.
If your point is that huge amounts of new units going on the market in Austin does not have a significant impact on prices, I don't think that's supported by any evidence or makes any sense.
https://streets.mn/2023/10/24/mapping-minneapolis-duplexes-a...
Most of the new units are in massive multi-apartment buildings. And these buildings have a huge disproportionate impact on the quality of life.
It's now going to be sliding into shittier and shittier conditions. More crime, more congestion, higher housing prices.
The street parking is now oversubscribed, so my friends often have to circle around the area for quite a while to find a spot when they visit me.
These changes actually made me look into the question of density. Before that first-hand experience, I used to be a pro-urbanist victim of propaganda. And yes, I lived in Europe and I got my driving license when I was about 30.
> higher housing prices
Have you ever heard of a market?
The usual misery pushers are already celebrating the win.
I'd be pretty annoyed about only being able to own something that had to have a dedicated parking space. What a waste.
You are missing the point. Its not how much land there is, or there isn't. Its what regulations will prevent you from building anything.
Contrast what's happened in the last 2 decades in Austin, TX vs Boise, ID for example. Both cities with huge amounts of land available. Both cities attracted major migration. Yet, only one of the 2 has very little building code preventing things from being built. Boise rents for a single family house (2 bed 2 bath) went from $500 per month in 1995 to ~$3100 in 2022, for example.
The market is correcting from that thing that was in full swing three years ago (the pandemic) and drove prices way up for a number of factors, basically none having to do with construction:
https://www.reddit.com/r/texas/comments/1grxqur/the_austin_t...
The same thing is happening in many cities that do not have the same policies as Travis County.
Does it really? In a about a week of searching, I was able to find a number of rooms in downtown Toronto for less than 1500 including utilities.
I know this is just my experience, so I could be way off, or not filling a criteria you expect. (I'm a student, so my standards are low.)
Can you say more about these 1200 $/month rooms in rural Canada?
I always find it hard
I went to college in Ottawa, and now I live in Austin Texas. It's similar in size, although Austin has been growing more lately. Curiously, they are also both capitols, college towns and they have a river flowing through them.
A major difference is that Austin has a new development with 200-400 unites on every block it seems. Cranes are everywhere downtown, and even in random neighborhoods they have huge new developments. Ottawa has no shortage of land, there's a huge amount of available land to develop in either direction, but they evidently aren't building nearly as much.
The result? I'm looking at 2 bedroom apartments, and they are 1000$ cheaper than they were 3 years ago when I first moved here. Rent has gone down and continues to go down. I'm seeing studio apartments in the middle of the city renting out for 800$ now!