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.
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.