Some folks on here have been repeating this garbage as well
I’m half joking, half serious: has anyone looked at a job site lately? Who’s doing a lot of the physically demanding work? If anything, it’s immigrants who are helping solve the housing crisis. The old boy’s network, which makes the laws and controls the money, is where the problems actually come from.
Housing has skyrocketed due to governments allowing essentially unrestricted purchases by foreign entities and investment groups for the use of investment properties. Not even accounting for money laundering issues, we are watching the rich gobble up all the assets and forcing individuals into situations where they have to rent
That doesn’t explain why prices have held stable outside of agricultural areas. Why would foreigners care that someone happens to produce food next door?
The answer is far more obvious: Dairy and poultry producers are using their government-granted money printers to buy up all the land around urban centres at inflated prices, which has largely forced urban dwellers to compete for what land is already established as being urban, or to go toe to toe with the farmer to try and buy vacant land (which means only the rich can try).
Historically, farmers were poor and couldn’t afford to buy land for more than pennies. Urban areas thereby were able to buy up cheap farmland to sprawl into in order to keep costs affordable, but that has become exceptionally more expensive amid the farmland boom. With the US backing away from farm subsidies since 2007, with a greater focus on market farm stability, farm profitability in Canada has gone up, most notably in the two farm sectors which were given special government assistance to help with those olden days – which have turned into money printers in this new landscape.
You can even map home prices to the desirability of the farmland. Of course, not all farmland is equal. The more attractive the farmland surrounding a given urban area is, the higher the prices homes will be in that urban area.
I think this is a symptom and not the problem itself.
The issue is that residential zoning only allows for single family homes to be built. No mixed use, no apartments/condos. Just a house for one family with a front and back yard. I mean, who even uses their front yard? I used to live in a house like that and I’ve never seen anybody actually use their front yard aside from mowing it. It’s a chore to keep people busy designed during the cold war to prevent people from noticing any commie propaganda or thinking that the establishment as it is might not be the best thing for them. A surprisingly useful HAI video You can build an entire house in the space of a front lawn.
If the zoning restriction didn’t exist, you could build two or three townhouses on a single plot of land, or even an apartment building by combining two plots. We would litterally have more than a million new homes if we simply replaced all the single family houses with low-rise apartments. Make that a mix of mid and high-rises and we can house the entire Canadian population in Toronto or Vancouver.
Despite how dense Toronto seems, there are huge tracks of land that are completely underutilized, and I’m not talking about parks. Leaside Business Park alone is a good hectare and there is almost nothing but one-story buildings, most of which have empty yards not doing anything. This isn’t the only place Toronto (and near the middle of the city at that) has.
Despite how dense Toronto seems
In what way does Toronto seem dense? It is laughably sparse. It struggles to fill 4,000 people per square kilometre. If we look at an actual city, there are over one million people per square kilometre. Even the wannabe cities of the world have 40,000 people per square kilometre. Toronto is a wannabe farmer’s field. Which is no doubt why its people are always calling for the TTC to deploy more tractors.
Which, all of that, is to say that you’re right, but prior to 2007 it didn’t matter because you could just keep sprawling for basically no cost. Until the people of Toronto get past wishing they were farmers, which is unlikely to happen… ever, they will be at the mercy of those who are actually (dairy, poultry) farmers with a government granting them free money. Good luck.
The public perception of Toronto is that it is a top tier and dense urban city. The truth is far from that, even just outside the downtown core the density drops sharply.
That’s what I’m saying. I agree completely that Toronto is stupidly spread out, but most people think Toronto isn’t like that, especially hearing what people who haven’t really seen Toronto thinks. This is why I’m saying that it’s easy to fix Toronto’s housing problems. We have the space for it. More than enough space within the GTA to house the entire Canadian population.
Not only is this cheaper and more efficient use of space, but it’ll even bring in the city more money, rather than costing the province loads of money and only making the rich even richer.
Of course, at the same time, it is completely understandable why the average Joe doesn’t want such density. Illustratively, density means you only need one bakery instead of hundreds of bakeries spread across the city in a sparsely populated city, or thousands of bakeries spread across the rural countryside. This means wealth inequality. Instead of hundreds or thousands of people owning bakeries, one person owns the one bakery.
Which, of course, is also the draw of the city. Owning the one bakery enables you to become mega rich! But it is a double-edged sword, as if you fail to become the owner of the one bakery then you are left in a precarious spot of owning nothing productive. Whereas in a sparsely populated area, more people can own bakeries. But the pool of customers shrinks in kind, so wealth inequality shrinks, thus you cannot become nearly as rich.
Rural areas provide the greatest wealth equality (at least when the government isn’t handing special interests money printers) and therefore the least wealth capacity, and actual cities provide the greatest wealth inequality and therefore the greatest wealth capacity. The people of Toronto seek something somewhere in the middle to allow some wealth inequality for a small handful to become still quite staggeringly, but perhaps not mega, rich. They do not want to go all the way to full bore wealth inequality, however. They want the average Joe to still have some kind of chance.
Toronto already has one of the lowest median incomes in the country. It has some people doing really well, but a lot doing very, very poorly. Densification will only widen that gap. Housing may become cheaper, but if you lose even more access to capital, what’s the point? Living in a tent and owning capital is clearly better than having a nice house, but having no capital.
While I presume that it’s an extreme example, I’d rather have a nice home but no capital than a tent with plenty. After all, that home itself is a form of capital in the first place, but a tent is a pretty low standard of living, especially being a person who values owning some nice electronics and a good internet connection.
That said, while I do get your idea of equality, this is entirely localized equality, and has nothing to do with the greater level of wealth inequality. Suburbia only exists due to rich downtowns subsidizing them. This isn’t the 18th century where you could get away with having a public well and firewood as the only government resources provided to support your businesses. You need proper sewage, electricity, roads, and a wide variety of other government services just for a suburb to exist, including that small-time bakery that probably only barely makes enough money to keep three types of bread on the shelves. Compared to the single bakery that has four dozen loafs, buns, and cakes that pays six figures in rent a year.
And that doesn’t take into consideration that I personally believe that mixed use buildings are the best as well. Rather than dedicated buildings for commercial and housing, you make the first floor of every building commercial, and the upper floors for homes. This way, you can even have small little bakeries every few blocks thanks to the abundance of commercial space, yet have them be both highly profitable and taxable due to the high density of local housing. People don’t have to drive 10 minutes just to get some bread (in which case they won’t bother and just go to the local super store once a week, killing the local bakeries anyways). It’s always in the suburbs that local businesses die and are replaced by megamalls and other super-sized stores. Because if it’s not in walking distance, it’s not worth going to unless if you can do all your weekly shopping there at once.
Where’s the equality when one Wallmart took over two dozen family businesses?
I understand the appeal of having a nice house with a yard, but I think that the option for just a decent home at a decent price should also be available to those who want them. Suburbia isn’t going away as we’re not turning them back into farmland, and Toronto’s low density districts (especially the commercial parts) can easily be transformed into high density mixed use housing that’ll make the city far more livable, and give far more opportunities.
It’s not even a little equal when the only homes that are made are all starting at a price point that requires six figure salaries, especially if they’re being subsidized by those who are already paying a higher percentage of their wages in taxes.
that home itself is a form of capital in the first place
Technically true, but of no greater capital utility than the tent. The home carries some capital premium as it should have a longer lifetime, but what’s that? Even if you bought a new tent every week, that’s, what, maybe $200,000 over the course of your adult life? So if you accept paying much more than $200,000 for a home you’re being economically foolish.
And, to be fair, I suppose an economy should allow people to be foolish. You have to have some fun sometimes. But is a house really where you want sink your fun? I can think of a long list of things that are more fun that erecting a structure that then becomes a job to maintain forevermore.
Where’s the equality when one Wallmart took over two dozen family businesses?
Exactly. Walmart could not exist without some level of urban density. There is good reason you don’t see them setting up in the middle of the Boreal forest. We are sparse enough that there is some, albeit limited, room for others to sell similar goods, but if you crank up the density there will be no need and all you will have is Walmart.
As before, we’ve chosen to walk the middle road by being sparse, but not extreme countryside sparse. We want some wealth inequality. We don’t want total wealth inequality. We like to have the Walmarts of the world. But we also want to give some opportunity to others.
I mean it shouldn’t be that hard to understand. Housing prices skyrocketed when interest rates dropped during the pandemic. Add the effects of inflation, increases municipal evaluations leading to higher taxes, and you get more costs passed on to renters. This started before all the news of “HuGe SuRgE ImMiGrAnTs”.
That being said there is still plenty of truth to the argument that if we do indeed want to welcome more people here, we better make sure there are affordable places to live. So the article addresses that better regulations are needed to ensure an adequate supply of affordable housing. BUT, if people already in Canada are really struggling to get affordable housing, and the number of people who need affordable housing is increasing, you can see why this might be a problem.
struggling to get affordable housing, and the number of people who need affordable housing is increasing
The human brain is bad at noticing the fact that one of those numbers is really huge and the other comparatively very small, and tends to equate the two or put them at the same order of magnitude.
It’s like the distance to the moon vs mars. Given we need foreign workers to shore up the shortfall we’re expecting to see, as our own population declines below what’s needed to support an ageing and increasingly long-lived population, all calculations need to take into account that expected increase. At least until we tax the rich like we used to.
Given we need foreign workers to shore up the shortfall we’re expecting to see
No we don’t. You’re buying the capitalist dogma that says infinite growth at any cost. Canada could shrink to 8 million people, like Austria. There would be no problem with that whatsoever.
The issue is that shrinking the population over a short period of time (and I mean more than 10% a generation) means that you have a lack of young people to take care of older people. And that’s ignoring all the capitalism issues that come with all this.
Not every young person is willing to spend the majority of their free time taking care of their parents. Hell, most people aren’t willing to do that more than once or twice a week, yet once you get past 70, a lot people need constant care. That’s the original point of elderly homes. Of course, those homes are just plain shit and closer to cruel and unusual torture than actually a form of care (especially here in Ontario). And that’s not to mention that occupancy is so tight that there’s a wait list on them.
Then there’s the fact that if our population drops too quickly, we’ll have massive holes in essential services as well. There’s already a massive hole in all blue-collar work as it stands as people would rather go into the service industry than skilled labour. And while pay is an issue, this is a problem in the States as well, where pay is far better. It’s to the point that they’ve legalized child labour in several places just to make up for the shortfall.
Population decline is an easy way to destroy society, even ignoring capitalist needs.
But it’s paradoxical. You need population increase to support increasing costs, yet increasing population creates a strain on the finite resources of the planet.
I acknowledge you said this ignoring the capitalism issues, but if you didn’t ignore it then it wouldn’t really be an issue. We have the wealth to handle this if we had the political courage to force an equitable society.
Believe it or not, Canada was once a population much lower than 40 million people and we managed just fine. The idea that populations cannot contract is a harmful concept because it forces acceptance of the paradox that we can infinitely grow in a finite world. And this always relies on the use of technology to overcome this. So, instead of reducing the population to the point where automobiles wouldn’t need to be electric, we increase the population and try and find green solutions.
I feel that it’s more complex than just the interest rates… That only explains part of the demand.
Then there’s the supply. New housing construction in the US bottomed out after the 2008 recession and has never returned to where it needed to be since. At least here in the PNW we have a major shortage of housing (both affordable housing, and just new home/unit construction in general) that has been more than a decade in the making and is not trivial to overcome. It would likely take a huge investment in new/affordable housing construction incentives to get us anywhere close to where we need to be.
On top of that, immigrants are not a problem, but institutional investors (both foreign and domestic) are. There are many American homes being bought by people and firms merely as investments, which means they wind up expensive and empty. I’ve seen this happen in Vancouver BC, Seattle and Portland, and I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if it’s happening elsewhere. We really need laws and tax benefits that help put regular people in homes that they will actually live in. Homes are one of the few kinds of assets that have really appreciated in value over the last couple of years, and because of that regular people who simply want a place to live or raise a family are being priced out of the market by rent-seekers or investors would would be perfectly happy to leave a house empty.
Housing prices skyrocketed here in Ontario when people escaped the big cities, and rushed to buy houses in smaller cities and towns. This caused a huge supply problem, as there weren’t enough houses for sale to meet demand, so bidding wars erupted.
It was a period of utter lunacy and mania for both buyers and sellers. I think we reached almost 100% price increase over pre Covid.
Once everyone had bought that wanted to buy, the market slowed down and houses went for under asking or sat on the market unsold. I don’t think anyone cared about the interest rate.
It has always been a zoning issue. Japan solved its housing crisis by putting the federal government in charge of zoning.
If apple pie is American. Real estate investment is Canadian. I mean mom and pop Canadians. It’s an elephant in the room. Immigrants who are wealthy enough to invest such way are merely doing as Canadians do.
It’s literally the most traditional Vancouver business. When the city was incorporated and built around the region today known as Gastown, as early as 1870 everyone was encouraged to go in debt to buy two pieces of land, then next year sell the second to finish paying for the first one. BC’s economy has been sustained by sky high returns on real state for more than 100 years at this point.
The US had their real estate investing moment in the 2000s.
We’re behind only because we, the most educated nation on earth, are much, much, much more likely to attend a post-secondary school, and, as you recall, we went on a dorm building frenzy in the late 90s/early 2000s to accommodate the influx of millennials who make up the echo baby boom. That buffered us for a while.
But the buffer was only so good for so long. Eventually post-secondary schooling comes to an end and people set out to find a place to call their own. As such, we eventually caught up with the US in not having enough homes to handle the millennial baby boom, and as such there was more competition for homes, price went up in response, and soon it started to look like a good place to park money for mom and pop.
Are we though? From what I can find we are only about 20% more likely than Americans, and I’m reasonably sure trade schools (like a mechanics Red Seal) counts as post secondary, which the US doesn’t have Journeymens programs like we do.
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Ordinary people buy one house to live in. Corporations by dozens or hundreds of homes at a time and then charge rent. It’s easy to see who’s buying up most of the housing supply.
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Iiterally blackrock
Who would have thought investment groups backing SFR aggregators could have ever lead to this?? They all buy more homes than they can manage. Let them age neglected for months to a year at a time until they can come in and replace the floors with lvp, the cabs with builders grade trash and splash agreeable grey over all the walls and then value the home 100k higher. They don’t sell, cause they want to own it all forcing you to have to rent from them
We’ve had a housing crisis for a decade or more. But yes, it’s the immigrant’s fault. Not the greedy developers who are only making half as many houses as they could.
Immigrants are at least partly to blame for the pressures. I mean, it’s impossible they’re NOT impacting the cost of housing. If you add 400,000 people to a country and do not add 400,000 units of new housing that year, you’re in a deficit. It’s Grade 1 math.
But what is genuinely to blame is a cogent political strategy to house Canadians. We can’t just leave it to the private sector to maximize profits. We can’t expect homeowners to make secondary suites. We can’t do nothing.
Cutting immigration is a sure-fire way to prevent over-demand for a scarce resource. It may sound right-wing but that’s the way it goes.
Cutting immigration is a sure-fire way to prevent over-demand for a scarce resource.
Sure! At the cost of no longer having skilled immigrants advancing Canadaian industry and economy. We’d also go into a population decline which, while great for housing, would cause lots of problems with job shortages and government benefits paying out way more than they collect.
Immigration is far too much of a benefit to Canada to stop it instead of just building more places to live. We are one of the largest land masses on the entire planet. I think we can fit a few more houses in.
There’s no point in making houses out in the middle of nowhere. Not only does it cost a massive amount of money to build the infrastructure just to support it, but who the hell wants to live several hours away from where anything exists? No stores, no jobs, no schools less than 3 hours away? No thank you.
That said, all they have to do is change the zoning laws to convert residential into mixed use housing plus actually build high density housing. We don’t need skyscrapers everywhere. That’s only happening because it takes 3 years to get anything bigger than a single family home approved. Remove the approval process and we can get tons of low and mid rises that would be extremely cheap and quick to build.
At the cost of no longer having skilled immigrants advancing Canadaian industry and economy.
Meanwhile skilled Canadians are moving to the US en masse.
The nothing-doing will continue until policy improves.
Well, if you bring in 400k immigrants and build 400k housing units You’re probably not that much in a deficit since a lot of those immigrants will be families living together.
But as I understand it last year we brought in 1,000,000 immigrants and only built 250k housing units so every one of those immigrants would need to be a family of four just to fill those, let alone any increase in natural reproduction within Canada, so we very likely did have quite a deficit.
You got a source for that 1,000,000? Pretty sure it was quite literally the first number you put in the comment.
Your correct, I mistook the total growth of the country instead.. It was 440k immigrants contributing to the total growth of 1,000,000 people in Canada for 2022.
And it averages out to approximately 200k - 250k housing units per year.
I apportion the blame 5% to the Martin Liberals ending rental construction subsidies, 5% to the Trudeau and Harper governments for ignoring the writing on the wall pre-pandemic, 5% to the BC Liberals/United party for deliberately celebrating their province’s housing market as a casino, 5% to the Ontario PC government for exploiting the problem to hand out goodies to donors instead of solutions, another 5% to the Federals again for their lackluster post-pandemic response, and 99% to the various Municipalities across Canada that actually caused and continue to cause this massive problem and if every planner and councilman was fired tomorrow and we shifted to Kowloon Walled City anarchy it would be a net positive for Canada.
Edit: yes I know the math doesn’t add up there but it’s real-estate that’s a given.
Who is blaming immigrants? Seriously, I haven’t seen that take.
You could put part of the blame on immigration targets/the system though. It’s not “RaCiSt” to know that if you don’t have enough housing as it is, that adding more people who needs homes won’t help the issue (unless they are all here to build homes?).
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I need to explain to adults how addition and subtraction works.
I see that take every week on this instance. Used to be everyday on Reddit, but still.
I mean they aren’t wrong (assuming the link is working)? Immigration should be slowed down drastically not sped up to record levels so we can at the very minimum ensure these people have an actual place to live? Hell I would argue THAT is the pro-immigration take. It’s not fair to these people to move there without an actual place to live. There’s plenty of recent immigrants on YouTube voicing their frustration of being sold a false promise when coming here. Seriously, just look at the average rents vs incomes. I have no idea how these people are getting by at all.
I don’t disagree that high immigration introduces more demand pressure, but you do need some mental gymnastics to argue that decreasing immigration is the pro-immigration take. People are generally not allowed residence in Canada if they don’t some means anyway. Instead of YouTubers, do have any trustworthy statistics on number of immigrants that end up becoming homeless? I never heard of this being a problem, it sounds a bit farfetched.
Oh given the high-ish standards we place on immigrant I doubt they are the ones becoming homeless. It’s more likely to be the displaced Canadians who can no longer afford rent.
And I think the mental gymnastics required to think bringing record levels of people into a country who can’t house those already here is insane. You want to breed actual anti-immigration sentiment? That’s a great way to do it. I don’t think ensuring the people entering Canada have an even somewhat affordable place to live is “anti-immigration”. Again, just look at average incomes vs rents. I think a lot (most) of people with your view simply aren’t aware of the current rental (let alone sale) market situation.
a lot (most) of people with your view simply aren’t aware of the current rental (let alone sale) market situation
What is my view, again? I think I am pretty aware of the rental market situation as I’m a renter myself, with a very recent contract.
I don’t think ensuring the people entering Canada have an even somewhat affordable place to live is “anti-immigration”.
If the path to ensure that is not allowing them to immigrate, it really is impossible to spin this as anything else than anti-immigration…
By that logic why not raise the immigration targets to 10 million a year? 20? 50?
By which logic? What specific sentence gave you the impression that I think we should increase immigration targets?
They don’t end up homeless, they end up packed into houses at densities that Canadian-born people are unwilling to accept. I used to do service/maintenance work as an electrician and you would walk into a 2 bedroom apartment to see 10-15 people from 3 generations living there.
They say we need to increase density but this is actually just decreasing the standard of living. The way economics works, if people are willing to live like sardines to pay the rent, soon people will be required to live like sardines to pay the rent.
I’m not anti-immigration myself and where I live (SK) actually does need more population, but the immigration rate has to be decreased as Canada’s public services and housing stock are being pushed to the limits. And something needs to be done about all immigrants ending up in the big 3 cities. Back when Canada was built, they mandated that people move out to the Prairies or other underpopulated areas if they wanted to come at all. That’s why we have such a volume of German, Ukrainian, Scandinavian people here in SK - they were sent here and they stayed here, and built our rural communities.
They say we need to increase density but this is actually just decreasing the standard of living.
The most enjoyable places I’ve ever lived and visited were by far the densest ones. To each their own, I guess. And Vancouver which is supposedly the densest city is still at 1/3 of the density of a city like Barcelona (which is an amazing place). That’s why I love downtown Vancouver, because it’s the densest region of the densest city.
Sorry maybe I wasn’t clear, I didn’t mean that increasing density decreases standard of living, I meant over-occupying spaces that aren’t built for the purpose decreases standard of living. In many parts of the world a family lives in a single room, but that doesn’t mean Canada has to do it too.
High density requires planned infrastructure to support it, and suddenly having houses in the suburbs with 20 people living in them is not a healthy form of density.
Ah sorry, the “this” in “this is just decreasing standard of living” was meant to refer to people cramming up, not to “increase density”. Thanks for clarifying.
Well, we agree on that. Cheers to planned infrastructure instead of rooming in the suburbs.
From Wikipedia:
The Breach is an online, Canadian news outlet launched on 10 March 2021 to provide reader- and viewer-supported reporting, analysis, and videos on issues such as racism, economic inequality, colonialism, and climate change. Its contributors include the Indigenous writer, lawyer, and professor Pamela Palmater, journalists El Jones and Linda McQuaig, legal scholar Azeezah Kanji, and documentary filmmaker Avi Lewis.[1]
So it’s basically their thing. Like any other news media, they’re just trying to attract clicks by saying people are blaming immigrants for the housing crisis. The reality is that we need immigration to keep our economy afloat. However, like you said, the immigration system is not working in our favor because it set the limits too high and everyone and their grandmother are moving to the only couple of large urban centers where every other immigrant decided to live: Toronto and Vancouver.
It’s not the immigrants’ fault. It’s the immigration system and the government who can’t manage their shit well.
If you go on Canada Reddit it’s every other comment on housing
I imagine Facebook and Twitter are the same
I’m getting the sense that people are mixing up blaming the individuals coming here for a better life, vs blaming the systems that brought them here knowing full well we simply don’t have a place for them until we actually get around to building it…
I’m all for immigration. So let’s fucking build some places for these people to live, and then bring them over. Why is this so hard for people to understand?
Well… well… well… MP Daniel Blakie clearly explains the Canada housing problem. They will blame anything but their policy for the rich.
It’s not necessarily a “garbage” argument. When 100% of your population growth is immigrants, it does not feel right. My point is that when your local population does not feel like they can create families in their community, replacing that with immigrants is probably not a good way to patch the problem. I mean, our environment is so shit that less and less people feel comfortable creating families.
Another question I never had a response to is the difference between a population that its growth is majority immigrants versus locals. How different the city will evolve in either case ? Immigrants are usually coming from an economic, capitalist need. What does this say on our communities ? Our places are so crappy that you can’t even have your own children ? What’s the point of a community ?
I would avoid using terms like “replacing” when it comes to humans. You may not mean it, but people may read what you wrote as supporting the “Le Grand Remplacement”
My family mostly came over prior to the 1800’s, and they changed their last name to appear less Scottish when they did so. I believe that we should continue to welcome new immigrants to Canada.
How different the city will evolve in either case ?
Well, I lived in one prairie town of less than 20k people on the prairies that basically only encouraged temporary farm labour as opposed to immigration. It’s dying a slow death and losing population. The town looks shabby, and when you leave high school, you leave town. There isn’t a reason to stay unless you got someone pregnant, or you work at one of the 2 factories.
I now live in another prairie town that actively reaches out to new Canadians, having a welcome centre, and includes non-religious holiday celebrations. It’s growing, it’s vibrant, it’s safe, and it’s clean. People with different experiences come up with different solutions to problems, so as long as everyone is reasonable, it leads to better outcomes.
What does this say on our communities ?
It means that (white) Canadians don’t have a long history of being as exploited and that Canada is a nation with general political stability, allowing for the development of a more robust economy.
Our places are so crappy that you can’t even have your own children ?
I see people with kids here every day. Some people, including myself, have chosen to not have kids. It’s considered common knowledge that the richer a nation is, the lower the birth rate. I see less accidental children now than I did 20 years ago, which may be linked to the availability of birth control options.
What’s the point of a community ?
Humans are social creatures. Communities give a place of belonging, as well a group of people who generally help each other.
I don’t really get why you’re asking this question.It’s cool that you have great anecdotes about how great it is for you. I am an immigrant myself so I’m absolutely not against immigration, far from it. I’m not saying ImMiGrAnTs ArE rUiNiNg OuT NaTiOn. I’m saying that our communities are not for community anymore but more an organisation that is for profit.
I know that it’s common knowledge that the richer you get, the less children you want but why is that the case? I feel like there’s something wrong when your cities is less and less welcoming of families that you have to patch it with immigrants. It’s not about having immigrants or not. It’s how the cities are organizing themseves and that somehow prevents people from having families. Or maybe everyone just chooses to not have children which I would love to see a paper about it.
I know that it’s common knowledge that the richer you get, the less children you want but why is that the case?
Is it actually the richer you get, or the further away from an agrarian lifestyle you get? Societies become richer when they industrialize, so there is no doubt a correlation to be seen.
If we look to the provinces, there appears to be some link between agricultural’s share of the GDP and fertility rate. In other words, this suggests the more agrarian a province is, the more likely it is to have a high (relatively speaking) fertility rate. Zooming out to look at nations which are poorly industrialized, and much more agrarian focused, then the fertility rate runs much higher. This would indicate that more children are had to lend a hand. Something that doesn’t help where industry sees little hands being of no use.
The question, it seems, is: What would the rich need them for?
It’s how the cities are organizing themseves and that somehow prevents people from having families.
The province with the lowest fertility rate is Nova Scotia. Nearly half of its population lives rurally, and 70% of its population live outside of cities. What makes you think it is a city problem?
What makes you think it is a city problem?
It feels like a city problem but really, it’s the way we drive our community. We live with each other and yet, we don’t really. There is no opportunity to know our neighbors unless we do the weird knock on their door and just talk. No one is doing that.
It feels that in rural area, this opportunity is more present because there is less people and therefore, you will meet them. In my city, I have never saw my neighbors in a grocery store in many years. From my point of view, that is one element that drive the fertility rate down. Feeling alone and not supported won’t make you feel safe to bring a child.
But I may be completely “out there” because this is just what I feel. I don’t have data about it and I wouldn’t know how to begin.
Maybe I’m just ranting about how we are so close together and yet, so far apart. Is this the real reason why fertility is down ? I don’t know and I wonder.
Canada’s fertility rate started falling sharply 60 years ago when the birth control pill became available. It bottomed out over the next following years as more and more adopted improved contraception and the fertility rate has now held stagnant for the past 50 years.
It does not seem that there is any real societal magic going on, simply that newer technology allowed people to take control of how many kids they want to have. Which, it appears, is not many unless there is a utilitarian benefit to having many helpful hands (such as on farms).
The question, it seems, is: What would the rich need them for?
I don’t know ?
What do you think of this:
In Canada, unlike many other countries, fertility rates and desires rise with income: richer Canadians have more children. Children increasingly come as a capstone to material and relational success, and thus later in life, rather than as a building block for family life.
https://www.cardus.ca/research/family/reports/she-s-not-having-a-baby/
I have no idea how trustworthy this is but so far, it feels ok.
I think that aligns. The average dairy farmer in Canada, for example, makes $230,000 per year. The average worker clocking in at a job that forbids children lending a hand makes $50,000 per year.
In many countries the agrarian life is where the poor are found. Lacking the modern technology we have, they are toiling in the fields, which is something the rich want no part of. But in Canada, with our advanced farming practices, the high capital costs of those advanced practices means only the wealthy get to try to farm. As such, the rich are most likely to be involved in the agrarian life we have.
In recent years Canada has experienced absurdly rapid growth in total population by any standard. It doesn’t matter that much of it is from immigration, that’s beside the point. Even without any immigrants the population would’ve been growing still. It’s already grown to levels that stretch our natural resources per capita much thinner than they used to be. I remember even in my youth, in the 1980s, my father pointing at the vast new suburbs surrounding his hometown and lamenting how much of the best farmland had already been paved over. Growth like this cannot continue, it’s got to stop at some point. Slowing it down a little would be nice, if we have that power. It wouldn’t magically fix all our problems with housing and everything else, but it sure wouldn’t hurt. It would at least buy us time to learn how to do development in less environmentally destructive ways.
On the other hand, borders suck and I’d prefer to live in a world without any. It’s a dilemma keenly felt and little understood even in Canada where it’s endlessly discussed.
The issue isn’t growth. The issue is that we’re deliberately choosing to grow in inefficient ways.
We wouldn’t have ever had to pave over any of that greenspace if we simply gave up single family homes and build decent apartments and condos in their place. Especially if they’re mixed use so businesses can occupy the first floor. An entire hectare of farmland converted to housing could be saved by a single low-rise apartment that takes up the space of a single city block. Make that a high-rise and you saved a dozen hacares. That’s an entire farm, and not a minor family one, but a decent corporate one.
In addition, you’re saving on electricity, water, and tons of other resources by not having to build infrastructure that goes out kilometers on end, and instead just extend it a dozen meters for a single large building. Heating and cooling gets easier and cheaper as it’s far more efficient to heat/cool one building than it is to do the same to hundreds that are all separated and spewing hot air at each other.
Most of the modern problems are caused by choosing to be wasteful. We waste half of our produce because it’s not pretty enough to be sold in grocery shelves. 80% of crops goes to feeding livestock. We bulldoze entire neighbourhoods just so we can make a six lane highway go through the middle of a city. Amazon owns a private garbage pit it just throws stuff into because they make more shit than they sell. And I’m talking about tens of millions of dollars worth of products a year.
We’re insanely wasteful, and that’s the real reason why things are so shit. It’s not because there’s too many people. It’s because those in power would rather keep the status quo than actually make a positive difference. And any change they do make always has to be the quick and easy one, not something that actually fixes the problem.
I thought of your comment when I saw this story: Every developer has opted to pay Montreal instead of building affordable housing, under new bylaw
A radical redesign of our urban landscape along the lines of what you suggest would be a good start, but even that is not going to happen quickly or any time soon in most of the country. There are any number of things we could do, any number of things we definitely should do, and many of the ones you list are certainly among them even if they are not in themselves sufficient. But it’s not happening, not just now. Canada remains stubbornly set on an unsustainable path. We are oil dependent to a horrifying degree. Without petroleum exports our balance of trade would be a disaster. It’s looking quite bad even while the country still is a major oil exporter. Agriculture is about to take a hit from climate change. Things will continue getting worse before they get better even if our politicians do suddenly come to their senses and start getting serious about redesigning the way our cities and economy function.
Meanwhile we will continue to have the worst of both worlds: Rapid population growth driven by net migration, as well as tightly-controlled borders to keep out the officially undesirable people.
We’re actually not that bad when it comes to fossil fuels. Yes, petroleum exports are pretty bad (14% of all exports by value), but from an energy generation standpoint, oil only comes in after both wind and nuclear. Most of our electricity actually comes from hydro, despite the prairies having zero waterfalls. Our carbon emissions are actually mostly coming from home heating, which is pretty bad admittedly, but we’re finally starting to do something about it by subsidizing heat pumps, at least on the east coast.
As for the housing bit, yea. For-profit organizations are always going to do whatever is the combination of easiest and most profitable. Things won’t change unless if you make things either horribly unprofitable, or the government steps in and does it themselves. And of the two, I think the latter is the only way to make worthwhile change quickly. The government can quickly change the laws and nullify things like housing associations so that proper mixed use housing can be legalized in most places, then actually contract companies to make them, and make them quickly. It only takes two years to turn a plot of land into a fully functional mid-rise building, and that’s taking into consideration Toronto’s bad soil qualities for construction. One year for places with stable soil.
And if the government owns the buildings, it easily has the resources to actually have these buildings built, and could start raking in the profits as they’ll be filled out with pre-purchases immediately.
We’re actually not that bad when it comes to fossil fuels.
Where did you get that idea? Not that it’s the only problem, but fossil fuel use in Canada is currently bouncing back towards its pre-pandemic all-time highs.
canada energy consumption by source
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-based-energy-per-capita
I was talking about how our electricity generation isn’t that bad: https://www.statista.com/statistics/248155/electricity-generation-in-canada-by-type/ Admittedly I was wrong about how high wind was, but for this one metric, the numbers aren’t that bad. The issue is that most of the fossil fuel is used in heating, which is different from electricity generation, and is difficult to deal with because it’s completely decentralized. On the other hand, it’s not nearly as bad as other places, as proper subsidies on heat pumps nation wide.
Canada is definitely at the top of energy usage per capita, but that’s not a problem as long as that energy source is from somewhere that isn’t polluting. We’re not there yet, but the solution isn’t difficult. Hell, there isn’t even any sort of public pushback against the sort of change that is needed, unlike in Germany or something.
The “media” or propaganda machine as they are otherwise known have an agenda.
Thanks for contributing nothing intelligent
These damn immigrants, they’re going to ruin the entire planet.
