How NIMBYs are helping to turn the public against immigrants

2024/02/20 Leave a comment

Overly simplistic as factors influencing housing prices not merely NIMBY-driven. But useful comparison between Canadian and American situations:

…The problem arises when governments effectively prohibit the supply of housing from rising in line with demand. Between 2012 and 2022, Americans formed 15.6 million new households but built only 11.9 million new housing units. As a result, even before the post-lockdown surge in migration, there were more aspiring households than homes in America’s thriving metro areas.

This was largely a consequence of zoning restrictions. Municipal governments have collectively made it illegal to erect an apartment building on about 75 percent of our country’s residential land. In large swaths of the country, there are households eager to rent or buy a modest apartment, and developers eager to provide them, but zoning restrictions have blocked such transactions from taking place.

This creates a housing shortage. You can house 32 families much more quickly and cheaply by building a single apartment building than by erecting 32 separate houses. To require all of your community’s housing units to be single-family homes isn’t all that different from prohibiting the manufacture of all non-luxury cars. In both cases, you end up with artificial scarcity and unaffordability.

If private builders were allowed to respond to rising demand — while the government ensured the provision of housing to those unable to pay market rents — we could have large increases in immigration without any uptick in housing insecurity. In our current reality, the rise in asylum seekers has coincided with a record spike in homelessness and persistently high housing costs. 

It is hard enough to sustain popular support for large-scale immigration when there aren’t major economic downsides to that policy. Add legitimate concerns about housing costs to perennial anxieties over cultural change, and it becomes difficult for even the most pro-immigration societies to avoid a nativist backlash. Or at least, this is what recent events in Canada suggest.

Why Canada is getting colder on immigration

Canada has long been considered an exceptionally pro-immigrant country. Yet it has struggled to sustain popular support for liberal immigration policies amid its deepening housing shortage. Canada’s experience therefore serves as a cautionary tale for American progressives: If we allow municipalities to suppress housing construction, then ridding our nation’s mainstream politics of Trumpian xenophobia and electing a vigorously pro-immigrant administration will not be enough to avert popular demands for restricting immigration. 

Until recently, Canada’s immigration politics were the envy of US cosmopolitans. In 2016, while many other nations were trying to repel Syrian refugees, the Canadian government couldn’t find enough displaced families to meet the public’s demand for sponsoring them. Since 2019, the country has welcomed more refugees than any other nation, and done so with minimal public outcry. 

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sought to capitalize on his country’s multicultural openness by putting immigration expansion at the center of his vision of economic growth. Canada welcomed 471,550 new permanent residents in 2023, up from 300,000 in 2015.

And that figure does not include foreign students, temporary workers, and refugees, who together constitute an even larger group of new arrivals. In 2025 and 2026, the government aims to admit 500,000 new permanent residents each year.

But in recent months, the political sustainability of Trudeau’s plan has come into question, in no small part because immigration’s impact on housing costs has come under scrutiny. 

Rents have soared across Canada in recent years. From 1990 to 2022, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the country increased at an average annual rate of 2.8 percent. In 2023, it rose by 8 percent. The government estimates that it will need to add 3.5 million extra housing units by 2030 to make shelter affordable. But a recent report from the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce suggests that this underestimates the housing shortage by 1.5 million units, a shortfall driven by an undercount of nonpermanent immigrants, who have been entering the country in massive numbers.

Trudeau has sought to promote housing construction in various ways. But his administration’s efforts have yet to offset the impact of years of highly restrictive zoning in many of Canada’s largest population centers.

As Canadians bid against each other for an inadequate supply of housing units, they’ve soured on immigration. 

In a 2022 poll from the Environics Institute for Survey Research, Canadians disagreed with the statement that there was too much immigration in their country by a margin of 42 points. One year later, that margin had shrunk to 7 points, the largest single-year shift in the survey’s history. Among Canadians who said immigration levels were too high, the most commonly cited reason by far was that immigrants drive up housing prices. 

In response to these changing political winds, the Trudeau government has sought to restrict admissions of international students while imploring universities to provide dedicated housing for their enrollees. But this minor concession to the nation’s restrictionist mood appears insufficient. The prime minister’s approval rating has sunk in recent months, with 64 percent of Canadians now disapproving of his performance. Meanwhile, Canada’s Conservative Party has ridden the housing and immigration issues to a strong advantage over Trudeau’s Liberals in the polls. 

Abundance is possible, but scarcity seems popular 

There are many parallels between the politics of immigration reform and those of housing policy. In both cases, countries have the power to swiftly increase their collective prosperity by tolerating some short-term disruptions. When cities let developers build more housing, they not only reduce rent inflation but also increase their tax bases, which makes it easier to fund robust social services. When rich nations let prime-age immigrants settle within their borders, they increase their productive capacity, which makes it more affordable to support retirees. 

And yet, in both of these policy areas, we routinely opt to make ourselves poorer for the sake of avoiding change. 

America does not need to choose between expanding immigration and reducing housing costs. But there is a risk that we’ll choose to do neither.

Source: How NIMBYs are helping to turn the public against immigrants

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Douglas Todd: Record population growth ‘massive problem’ for housing in B.C

2024/02/19 Leave a comment

No real surprise but nevertheless of note:

The statisticians describe the unprecedented number of people streaming into B.C., while the province’s mayors explain how difficult and costly it is to try to house everyone.

A special housing meeting of the Union of B.C. Municipalities heard this week that B.C.’s population has jumped like never before — and that more than 600,000 new dwellings are needed just to get back to supply and demand ratios similar to a couple of decades ago.

“All of our growth is international,” said Brett Wilmer, B.C.’s director of statistics. B.C.’s population would basically remain flat, Wilmer said, if it weren’t for the dramatic hikes it has experienced in permanent residents, and especially of foreign students and guest workers.

More than 80 per cent of B.C. newcomers are moving to Metro Vancouver, Victoria, the Fraser Valley and the Central Okanagan, said Wilmer.

While B.C.’s population expanded by a near-record three per cent last year, an economist for the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Braden Batch, said new housing supply is not matching outsized demand.

“Population growth has put real strain on the housing system. It’s a massive problem,” said Batch, adding new dwellings would have to be built 2.5 times faster to keep up.

The hundreds of mayors, councillors and urban planners attending the UBCM housing summit were told that B.C.’s population will grow by almost one million in the next eight years.

Batch’s charts showed that, under current scenarios, B.C. is set to have a housing shortfall of 610,000 units by 2030.

That prompted the director of Simon Fraser University’s Cities Program, Andy Yan, to say: “We’re going out to offer the Canadian dream to people around the world, but we seem to be OK throwing them into a housing nightmare.”

B.C.’s mayors described how hard it is to get developers to build affordable new housing. They also warned it is costly for taxpayers to provide the transit, sewer systems, schools and medical care to support prodigious population growth.

During a panel titled “Housing the Next Million British Columbians,” five mayors from across the province expressed decidedly mixed feelings about the way B.C. Premier David Eby and Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon last year pushed through sweeping legislation to respond to dramatic urban population growth.

While some mayors complained they weren’t consulted, the B.C. government is now requiring municipalities to allow between three and six units per lot in virtually all low-density residential neighbourhoods, plus highrises near the transit hubs of 31 towns and cities.

Despite some mayors expressing cautious support for Victoria’s plan, they nevertheless said they didn’t think it would improve affordability.

Instead, the mayors described the high cost of supporting more people in more congested neighbourhoods, and expressed dissatisfaction about overstretched staff, loss of green space, parking debacles and a dire shortage of construction workers.

Burnaby Mayor Mike Hurley said it will cost taxpayers an average of $1 million to upgrade a typical 100-metre row of detached houses to provide the infrastructure for four- and six-plexes.

“I’m also not sure we have the workforce, the tradespeople, to do it,” said Hurley, remarking that “hopefully half of the those million more people who are arriving will be in the housing construction industry.”

Both Hurley and Richmond Mayor Malcolm Brodie said the NDP’s push for multi-unit housing throughout cities is creating chaos for their long-range community plans, which have emphasized high density around SkyTrain lines and certain town centres.

“The densification we’ve done is really stark,” said Hurley, referring to massive new skyscraper clusters Burnaby has encouraged at Metrotown, Brentwood and Lougheed town centres.

Citing Richmond’s much-praised Steveston, a community with detached homes on small lots on the south arm of the Fraser River, Brodie argued the B.C. government’s mass upzoning scheme “will destroy a fine neighbourhood.”

None of the five mayors on the “Housing the Next Million British Columbians” panel believed that efforts to increase housing supply will actually lead to affordable dwellings for middle-class and other families.

In recent years, Brodie said, Richmond “has built 50 per cent more housing units than the population has grown. But prices have still gone up by 60 per cent. It simply does not follow that supply reduces prices.”

Bluntly, the mayor of Burnaby added: “The idea that supply will lead to affordability is an absolute fallacy.”

Although speakers agreed projections about the future are hard to get right, Hurley suggested it’s possible development could slow down.

That echoed Wilmer, who told delegates the huge spike in foreign students and guest workers approved by Ottawa in the past two years should “drop back to historical levels this year and next.”

Such non-permanent residents put the most pressure on rental costs, which are at record highs in Metro Vancouver.

While Victoria Mayor Marianne Alto talked about how accommodating vigorous population growth means her city “can only go up, up, and only go in-fill,” Janice Morrison, the mayor of 11,000-resident Nelson, lamented the inevitable “loss of urban green spaces, which is a big reason a lot of people move to smaller cities.”

Richmond’s mayor disagreed over parking with Nathan Pachal, the mayor of the City of Langley. Saying it costs $90,000 to create one parking space, Pachal supported the NDP’s plan to drastically reduce off-street parking for new multi-unit housing buildings. But Brodie said it will create a parking nightmare.

Meanwhile, Nanaimo Mayor Leonard Krog was among those expressing guarded support for the provincial government’s aggressive “good intention” to provide shelter to more people through blanket upzoning.

Like some others, however, Krog suggested the strongest hope for creating more units, especially of the affordable kind, lies in government-subsidized housing — especially from the national government, which he said got out of housing incentives 30 years ago.

All in all, the mayors called firmly on the federal Liberals to show more common sense. That means, they said, Ottawa must be more pragmatic in aligning its international migration targets with the ability to provide housing for all.

Source: Douglas Todd: Record population growth ‘massive problem’ for housing in B.C

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ICYMI: Douglas Todd: Why Vancouver housing prices became so out of whack

2024/02/07 Leave a comment

Not much new but neverthelesss telling:

Prices in Canada’s major cities have also been growing extremely fast compared to other countries.

The U.S. Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, which monitors global economic trends, reports that Canadian housing prices since 2015 have skyrocketed roughly twice as swiftly as prices in the U.S., United Kingdom, Germany and France.

Why? Even the stodgy Bank of Canada, which is hard to accuse of being racist, in January acknowledged that the country’s rapid population growth, 98 per cent of which comes from international migration, has led to higher costs for housing.

The National Bank of Canada’s chief economist, Stefane Marion, is also among the many voices lamenting how years of welcoming record-breaking numbers of new residents is strongly contributing to inflation, especially of shelter costs and rents.

Unfortunately, many politicians and the development industry obfuscate the issue by putting virtually all the blame for lofty prices on a lack of supply, plus mortgage rates and bureaucratic red tape.

But a host of housing analysts, such as Steve Saretsky, John Pasalis, Ron Butler, Stephen Punwasi, Ben Rabidoux, Patrick Condon, Mike Moffat and others, counter that Canadian developers, especially in Metro Vancouver, have been building new housing at a frantic rate — yet still cannot come close to keeping up with demand.

That demand has been exacerbated ever since 2015, when newly elected Prime Minister Justin Trudeau began to crank up targets for new permanent and non-permanent residents to rates far more intense than any other Western country. Last year, Canada’s population grew by a record 1.25 million people because of it.

Meanwhile, a huge cohort of people in Canada who seek a place to live at a reasonable price, including many newcomers, continue to suffer.

For Metro Vancouver, it all adds up to a double whammy: The gateway city has its own distinct house-price problems, and it’s located in a country that compounds them.

Source: Douglas Todd: Why Vancouver housing prices became so out of whack

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Moffatt: Canada is failing the grade on housing. Fixing that starts with international students, but it shouldn’t end there

2024/02/05 Leave a comment

Good overview of issues and needed steps. Perhaps overly optimistic regarding possibility of “doing it all:”

Beyond individual policies, though, what Canada needs most are co-ordination and alignment between our housing and population growth policies, as well as robust population forecasts to plan our needs not just in housing, but in schools, hospitals and other public infrastructure, too. Capping yearly non-permanent resident growth, in the same way that the country caps immigration, is essential for this planning. Canada may have been caught off-guard by how quickly our population has grown in the past two years, but this failure to forecast cannot happen again, as it doesn’t just affect our housing market – it puts Canada’s entire immigration system in disrepute with Canadians.

The good news is that we have a chance to do it all: simultaneously solve Canada’s housing crisis, grow our population, address the climate challenge and have a flourishing high-education system. We can build enough housing for existing residents and the newcomers who contribute so much to Canada’s economic and cultural vibrancy. And the vision to attract the best and brightest to the country to offset the effects of an aging population is sound, too: Integrating the higher-education system into the immigration system to give newcomers Canadian credentials and experiences is fantastic and should not be abandoned. But to achieve this, we need public policies that meet the ambition of our vision to ensure that everyone in Canada, regardless of how long they have been here, has a safe and secure place to call home. A reactionary cap from one level of government, while necessary, cannot be the limit.

Source: Canada is failing the grade on housing. Fixing that starts with international students, but it shouldn’t end there

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ICYMI: Tying immigration to homes a ‘good’ idea but not a fix-all: Housing minister – Global News

2024/01/18 Leave a comment

Apart from the irony of the former immigration minister waking up to the fact that his policies contributed to housing availability/affordability problems, it is valid to say it is not a “fix-all.” But it is an essential part of the mix, particularly in the short-to-medium term:

Fraser says temporary immigration programs are putting pressure on the housing system and creating a “serious issue we need to address.”

He pointed to the temporary foreign worker and international student programs. The federal government has said they are considering a cap on international student, but want to take a year to work with provinces first to try to find solutions.

“Enough is enough,” Immigration Minister Marc Miller said in announcing changes to the international student program last year. “If provinces and territories cannot do this, we will do it for them and they will not like the bluntness of the instruments that we use.”

Miller previously described the idea of a cap on international students as akin to “surgery with a hammer” during an interview with Global News

Fraser said the program has grown “by hundreds of thousands of people each year” in the last couple of years.

“There are some institutions in parts of this country, I have the sincerely held belief, have come to exist just to exploit the program for the personal financial gains of the people behind some of these schools, if we can call them that,” he said.

Source: Tying immigration to homes a ‘good’ idea but not a fix-all: Housing minister – Global News

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Pierre Poilievre pledges to tie immigration levels to homebuilding – Financial Post

2024/01/15 Leave a comment

Given current housing starts, less than 250,000, and for illustrative purposes, 3 persons per housing unit, this would mean a total of 750,000 permanent and temporary residents, less than half the current amount.

An easy understandable slogan but, like so many by all parties, more complex than presented given the various interested groups and the hard decisions around trade-offs:

The Conservative politician who’s trying to take down Justin Trudeau said that if he’s elected, he would link Canada’s immigration levels to the number of homes being built.

Pierre Poilievre took aim Friday at Trudeau’s housing minister, Sean Fraser, arguing that when Fraser was immigration minister, he oversaw soaring numbers of new arrivals without ensuring the country could properly accommodate them.

“We need to make a link between the number of homes built and the number of people we invite as new Canadians,” Poilievre said, speaking at a news conference in Winnipeg, Manitoba.He said his Conservative Party “will get back to an approach of immigration that invites a number of people that we can house, employ and care for in our health-care system.” He cited data showing that Canada is now completing fewer homes than it did 50 years earlier, when its population was around 22 million. It’s close to 41 million today

There were 219,942 new homes completed in Canada in 2022, the most recent year for which complete data is available, compared with 232,227 in 1972, when the country was going through a construction boom.

Poilievre did not say whether he would roll back Canada’s permanent resident target or curb the number of temporary newcomers, such as foreign students. In the past, he has declined to say that he would scale back immigration.

Canada accepted about 455,000 new permanent residents in the 12-month period to Oct. 1 while bringing in more than 800,000 non-permanent residents, a category that includes temporary workers, students and refugees. Canada’s population growth rate of 3.2 per cent means it’s growing faster than any Group of Seven nation, China or India.

Many economists have also criticized the government for failing to ensure services have kept pace with Canada’s immigration targets.

Trudeau has fallen far behind Poilievre in public polling, and the high cost of housing is likely part of the explanation. His government has unveiled several measures meant to boost home construction, and they’ve pledged to examine reforms to programs that allow temporary immigrants.

The prime minister told reporters in Guelph, Ont., on Jan. 12 that there’s no “magic solution” to the housing shortage and touted his government’s program to transfer millions of dollars to cities that speed up development approvals.

“Construction workers and availability of labour is a challenge we’re facing, which is why we continue to have ambitious immigration targets,” he said.

Source: Pierre Poilievre pledges to tie immigration levels to homebuilding – Financial Post

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Government was warned two years ago high immigration could affect housing costs

2024/01/12 Leave a comment

Public service providing “fearless advice” while government, as is its right, rejected it in favour of ongoing increases in permanent and temporary immigration. Advice to former immigration minister Fraser who now, ironically, and perhaps deservedly so, is now the housing minister who has to clean up this mess (not doable in substantive terms before the election).

Eerily similar to some of my earlier opinion pieces, Increasing immigration to boost population? Not so fast.:

Federal public servants warned the government two years ago that large increases to immigration could affect housing affordability and services, internal documents show.

Documents obtained by The Canadian Press through an access-to-information request show Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada analyzed the potential effects immigration would have on the economy, housing and services, as it prepared its immigration targets for 2023 to 2025.

The deputy minister, among others, was warned in 2022 that housing construction had not kept up with the pace of population growth.

“In Canada, population growth has exceeded the growth in available housing units,” one slide deck reads.

“As the federal authority charged with managing immigration, IRCC policy-makers must understand the misalignment between population growth and housing supply, and how permanent and temporary immigration shapes population growth.”

Immigration accounts for nearly all population growth in Canada, given the country’s aging demographics.

The federal government ultimately decided to increase the number of permanent residents Canada welcomes each year to 500,000 in 2025, a decision that drew considerable attention and scrutiny. It means in 2025, Canada will welcome nearly twice as many permanent residents as it did in 2015.

The document reveals federal public servants were well aware of the pressures high population growth would have on housing and services.

“Rapid increases put pressure on health care and affordable housing,” public servants warned. “Settlement and resettlement service providers are expressing short-term strain due to labour market conditions, increased levels and the Afghanistan and Ukraine initiatives.”

Housing affordability has now become a political liability for the Liberal government. The Conservatives have gained considerable momentum over the last year as the party pounces on affordability issues, while avoiding the issue of immigration in particular. These pressures have forced the Liberal government to refocus its efforts on housing policy and begin to address the spike in international students with new rules.

Recent data shows Canada’s pace of population growth continues to set records as the country brings in a historic number of temporary residents as well, largely through international student and temporary foreign worker programs.

The country’s population grew by more than 430,000 during the third quarter of 2023, marking the fastest pace of population growth in any quarter since 1957.

Experts spanning from Bay Street to academic institutions have warned that Canada’s strong population growth is eroding housing affordability, as demand outpaces supply.

The Bank of Canada has offered similar analysis. Deputy governor Toni Gravelle delivered a speech in December warning that strong population growth is pushing rents and home prices upward.

Public opinion polls also show Canadians are increasingly concerned about the pressure immigration is putting on services, infrastructure and housing, leading to waning support for high immigration.

The Liberal government has defended its immigration policy decisions, arguing that immigrants help bring about economic prosperity and help with the country’s demographics as the population ages.

However, amid the heightened scrutiny of the Liberal government’s immigration policy, Immigration Minister Marc Miller levelled out the annual target at 500,000 permanent residents for 2026.

The documents from 2022 note that Canada’s immigration targets have exceeded the recommendations of some experts, including the Century Initiative, an organization that advocates for growing the country’s population to 100 million by the end of the century.

However, attention is now shifting from these targets to the steep rise in non-permanent residents. Between July and October, about three-quarters of Canada’s population growth came from temporary residents, including international students and temporary foreign workers.

That trend is raising alarms about the increase in businesses’ reliance on low-wage migrant workers and the luring of international student byshady post-secondary institutions.

Mikal Skuterud, an economics professor at the University of Waterloo who specializes in immigration policy, says the federal government appears to have “lost control” of temporary migration flows.

Unlike the annual targets for permanent residents, the number of temporary residents is dictated by demand for migrant workers and international students.

He also notes there is a link between the targets for permanent residents and the flow of temporary residents.

“To the extent that you increase permanent numbers, and migrants realize the way you get a PR is to come here as a temporary resident … then migrants are incentivized to kind of come and try their luck,” he said.

Skuterud, who has been a vocal critic of the federal government’s immigration policy, says the benefits of high immigration have been exaggerated by the Liberals.

He said that starting around 2015, when the Liberal government was first elected, a narrative developed in Canada that “immigration was kind of a solution to Canada’s economic growth problems.”

And while the professor says that narrative is one that people like to believe, he notes higher immigration does little when it comes to increasing living standards, as measured by real GDP per capita.

Public servants at IRCC are in agreement, the released documents suggest.

“Increasing the working age population can have a positive impact on gross domestic product, but little effect on GDP per capita,” public servants noted.

Source: Government was warned two years ago high immigration could affect housing costs – Moose Jaw Today

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What’s behind the dramatic shift in Canadian public opinion about immigration levels?

2024/01/09 Leave a comment

One thing to note multiple factors involved in housing availability/affordability, another to largely dismiss the impact of immigration-driven population growth. Still in the denial stage…:

In June 2023, Canada’s population reached 40 million. For the first time in history, the population grew by more than a million (2.7 per cent) in a single year. Temporary and permanent migration accounted for 96 per cent of this population growth. 

Over the past few decades, Canadians have been more positive than negative in their attitudes toward immigrants and immigration. In 2019, Canada was ranked the most accepting country for immigrants (in a survey of 145 countries) on Gallup’s Migrant Acceptance Index. 

Over the last few years, Environics public opinion data also indicated Canadians felt very positively about immigrants and immigration levels. 

Something changed in 2023.

A million newcomers in two years

A few months after reaching this population milestone, the federal government released its new Immigration Levels Plan to welcome 485,000 permanent residents in 2024 and 500,000 in 2025 and 2026. 

This announcement came on the heels of an Environics public opinion survey revealing a significant increase in the number of Canadians who believe the country accepts too many immigrants. That marks a dramatic reversal from a year ago, when support for immigration levels stood at an all-time high. 

Canadians are still more likely to disagree (51 per cent) than agree (44 per cent) that immigration levels are too high, but the gap between these views has shrunk over the past year, from 42 percentage points to just seven. That’s the biggest one-year change in opinion on this question since it was first asked by Environics in 1977. 

Rising concerns about the number of arrivals are evident across Canada, but are most widely expressed in Ontario and British Columbia

Environics has been surveying Canadians about immigration on a regular basis since 1977. The latest survey of more than 2,000 Canadians was conducted in September 2023 in partnership with the Century Initiative, a non-profit lobbying and charity group.

The survey was conducted to ensure representation by region, age, gender and educational attainment.

Apart from rising public concerns about immigration levels, there has been no corresponding change in how Canadians feel about immigrants themselves in terms of how they’re integrating and what they contribute to Canadian society. 

The public is much more likely to say that newcomers make their own communities a better place than a worse one.

Housing crisis concerns

Importantly, the belief that immigration levels are too high is largely driven by perceptions that newcomers may be contributing to the housing crisis in terms of availability and affordability. 

As researchers who study attitudes toward immigrants and immigration, we believe it is critical to pay attention to this shift.

There is a large body of research examining how perceived threat/competition predicts attitudes toward immigrants and immigration. 

This research shows that negative attitudes toward immigrants can develop when situational factors — for example, housing shortages, inflationary pressures and a rise in anti-immigration ideologies — combine to create perceptions of group competition.

Perceived competition may be rooted in real or imagined national economic challenges, as well as beliefs about access to housing, employment and other resources.

In September 2023, when Environics conducted its latest survey, there was a lot of media coverage about the housing crisis, including the scapegoating of international students. It’s possible such coverage may have hardened some Canadians’ attitudes toward immigration levels.

In reality, Canada’s housing shortage was fuelled for decades by myriad factors, including municipal zoning laws, developers’ special interests and public policy on housing. As other scholars have argued, curbing migration is not a solution to this complex issue, nor is it moral. 

Attitudes towards immigrants may change

Policymakers and community leaders should pay close attention to public attitudes toward immigration levels as they strive to build a diversified and robust immigration system and create welcoming communities for immigrants. 

The latest research demonstrates the public still feels positively toward immigrants and their many contributions to communities and Canadian society. However, there seems to be growing concerns about Canada’s capacity to effectively resettle immigrants, in part due to concerns that newcomers may be contributing to the housing crisis. 

If Canadians continue to blame immigrants for the housing crisis, their attitudes toward immigrants themselves — as opposed to immigration levels — may harden. How Canadians feel about immigration levels may also impact the type and level of supports immigrants can access as they resettle, whether they experience discrimination in the housing and labour marketsand whether they’re warmly welcomed by their communities. 

Leah Hamilton, Vice Dean, Research & Community Relations, & Professor of Organizational Behaviour, Faculty of Business & Communication Studies, Mount Royal University

Source: What’s behind the dramatic shift in Canadian public opinion about immigration levels?

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How mass immigration is worsening the housing crisis – The Spectator

2023/12/11 Leave a comment

Similar but harsher debate to that in Canada with of course UK particularities, particularly with respect to social housing:

…In England, to put this in context, it means that last year we only built around one-third of the homes that we now need to build because of immigration. We should be able to talk about this openly. We should be able to talk about how immigration is fuelling the housing crisis, driving up house prices and making many homes unaffordable for British families and British workers.

Don’t believe me? Here’s what researchers at the University of Oxford recently said:

‘ … there is some evidence that migration is likely to have increased house prices in the UK. For example, the Migration Advisory Committee (2018) found that a 1-percentage point increase in the UK’s population due to migration increased house prices by 1% … Their finding was broadly consistent with other modelling by the former MHCLG (2018) and the Office for Budget Responsibility (Auterson, 2014).’

In fact, there’s more evidence than people like to think. In Spain, for example, a recent study found that a 1-point increase in the rate of immigration increases average house sale prices by 3.3 per cent (as did this one). And, while in Britain, one (older) study suggested immigration lowers house prices, this was only because more affluent locals ended up selling their homes and leaving their communities altogether, no doubt alarmed at what was unfolding.

Record immigration has not only been driving up house prices; it’s also been pushing up rents in the private rental market, something that becomes immediately obvious to anybody who has had to attend a viewing with some two dozen other applicants.

The fact that, in 2022, net migration is estimated to have added at least half a million people to England’s already absurd rental market is something most pro-immigration lobbyists, MPs, academics, and columnists, who usually live in their own homes, made possible by privileged parents, are unlikely to ever encounter.

…Mass immigration is also piling enormous pressure on Britain’s social housing sector, which used to be reserved for impoverished British nationals who had been paying into the collective pot for years and who had long roots in their local communities.

Today, however, things are very different. Nationally, as the Migration Observatory points out, between 2019 and 2021, 16 per cent of UK-born people were living in social housing compared to 17 per cent of the foreign-born. That figure then climbs to 19 per cent among people born in Pakistan or elsewhere in South Asia, and then to a striking 30 per cent among the rising number of typically low-skilled migrants who were born in sub-Saharan Africa, many of whom have also been shown to be a net fiscal cost, rather than benefit, to the British economy.

In London, almost half (48 per cent) of all social housing is now occupied by households that are headed by somebody who was not born in Britain. The most common households are headed by somebody who was born in Africa (18.4 per cent), the Middle East and Asia (11.7 per cent), or elsewhere in Europe (8.7 per cent).

…All of which raises a number of important questions that you would ordinarily expect to be addressed and answered by our political leaders: Why are so many young British people, workers, and their families forced to pay half their monthly income if not more to live out in the periphery, in places like London’s Zone 4 or beyond, sitting on expensive, packed and dirty commuter trains while wondering why they and other Brits are having to subsidise newcomers, who are frequently economically inactive?

Source: How mass immigration is worsening the housing crisis – The Spectator

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Keller: Pierre Poilievre’s housing movie: What it gets right and wrong, and what was left unsaid

2023/12/09 Leave a comment

Indeed. While I understand his fear of being labelled xenophobic by the Liberals and others, this may be less of an issue that immigrants are also suffering from high housing costs and availability issues and Focus Canada indicated that immigrants have higher levels of cancer over immigration levels than non-immigrants:

Which brings me back to the elephant in the room, which Housing hell never mentions: immigration.

In the long run, over decades and centuries, Canada can match housing supply to housing demand, regardless of whether the national population is 40 million or 400 million. But in the here and now, a surge in new arrivals, particularly since the pandemic – with one million new residents in 2022, and likely more this year – has introduced housing demand at a far faster pace than supply can be built.

It’s simple math. There’s no getting around it. And both the Prime Minister and the man after his job would rather not talk about it.

Source: Pierre Poilievre’s housing movie: What it gets right and wrong, and what was left unsaid

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

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