There is also a need for expectation management by buyers. Everyone wants a house with a bedroom for every kid, an ensuite for the master, and a room for guests and inlaws. They want marble countertops and inground pools. And these are starter home desires.
We seems to pick on immigration as one of the issues driving up housing, but is it really? Maybe this is a stereotype, but many of those coming here better use whatever space they can afford, understanding that future generations may be able to have it better.
When a crappy 700sq ft home is hundreds of thousands of dollars it isn’t just ‘people want more than they can afford’.
The average home cost is 731k, thats a mix of everything.
We tear down the ‘starter homes’ to build bigger homes, thereby not alleviating any housing shortages. It also costs 400$ a sq ft to build now so even a average home of say 1200 sq ft will cost almost 500k and thats without any special land costs (such as being in Toronto, etc.).
Its not immigration which is causing these issues, the main cause is lack of effective housebuilding (due to increase in housing standards, cost of materials, lack of skilled tradespeople, and redevelopment of perfectly fine homes to build a bigger one). When you add immigration into a area with a lack of housing it make it worse.
Much like how the Phoenix pay system was such a dumpster fire because they kept adding departments without resolving the issues first.
The more I think about it the more I am realizing our built housing numbers are even more flawed than before.
Historically there wasn’t much tearing down and rebuilding homes on the same land because there was more land to develop on, therefore much less need to remove existing homes. Now with the land shortage many cities are facing and the tearing down/rebuilding it is skewing the numbers making it seem like we are providing more living space than we actually are.
We have less homes per capita than any other nation in the G7 and would have to build 1.8 million just to reach the average for the G7. And thats just to play catch up. Currently we are doing approximately 286k a year. With a vastly expanding population (1.08 million last year with 500k each year expected).