this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
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Futurology
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For everyone planning on fleeing to Canada: we have a massive housing shortage already. You're probably going to end up in tents. Igloos, maybe, which would be ironic since a lot of you think we live in them.
Edit: For the record, I welcome all non-MAGA Americans. This is just facts, though; if housing prices were allowed to spike up even further there might be legit rioting. It's already the top political issue.
And dont come to New Zealand. We’re closed.
Fun fact, housing prices are actually higher in Canada.
I'm guessing you "win" on other expenses, though. And generally are a smaller country with a smaller capacity for loud-talking refugees.
We have hobbits. So there's that.
Are there more people than houses, or are there a bunch of expensive empty houses which people can't afford?
The former. We measurably just have less housing stock per capita than other developed Western nations. Maybe the latter happens too, but I'm skeptical, because rent money is as (non-)green as the rest, and it's not required to explain the situation.
Why we haven't built more houses is less clear. In the absence of hard data or guesses from more educated people, I'll speculate a bit:
One tradesman I know is billing high enough to feel personally guilty about it, and is still swamped with work. From what I hear this is typical. The US and Canada officially have the same rate of construction work employment. We don't have undocumented immigrants working construction really, while it sounds very common in the US. Put together, my guess is there's a sizable labour shortage, but it's masked by data collection issues in the main other jurisdiction that builds largely with wood framing.