{"id":590697,"date":"2023-09-08T19:23:57","date_gmt":"2023-09-08T16:23:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/stopping-immigration-wont-fix-canadas-housing-crisis\/"},"modified":"2023-09-08T19:23:57","modified_gmt":"2023-09-08T16:23:57","slug":"stopping-immigration-wont-fix-canadas-housing-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/stopping-immigration-wont-fix-canadas-housing-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"#Stopping immigration won\u2019t fix Canada\u2019s housing crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"
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(Photograph by iStock)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

As the country\u2019s housing crisis intensifies, there\u2019s been a lot of finger-pointing: at foreign investors snapp<\/a>ing up residential real estate, at municipal governments and prohibitive zoning by-laws, and now, at immigrants and international students, the latest group thrust into the spotlight for exacerbating the crunch.<\/p>\n

Canada is, by far, the fastest-growing country in the G7. We passed the 40 million mark in June, after the population surged by over a million in 2022. Nearly all of those new Canadians were temporary and permanent immigrants. The international student population has also skyrocketed\u2014we\u2019re on track to welcome 900,000 international students this year, three times as many as in 2013.<\/p>\n

Although Canada\u2019s major political parties have been careful not to blame newcomers for housing challenges, Immigration Minister Marc Miller said that \u201cvolume is volume, and it does have an impact,\u201d in reference to the influx of immigrants.\u00a0The federal government, which is not backing down from its recently increased annual target of 500,000 new permanent residents by 2025, is also considering a cap on international students as a way to ease the pressure.<\/p>\n

But limiting immigration isn\u2019t the solution, says Carolyn Whitzman, housing policy researcher at the University of Ottawa and expert adviser to the University of British Columbia\u2019s Housing Assessment Resource Tools project. In fact, since current estimates of housing need don\u2019t take into account millions of Canadian residents, as well as projected newcomers, we have a woefully uninformed picture of the situation. \u201cImmigrants are an easy target,\u201d says Whitzman.\u00a0We spoke to her about why we\u2019re so eager to shift the focus to immigration, the dearth of data on who actually requires housing, and the urgent need for a national social<\/a> housing program.<\/p>\n\n

A growing chorus of people are openly blaming immigration for the housing crunch. What\u2019s your take?<\/strong>
Even if Canada stopped immigration tomorrow, we still couldn\u2019t serve the population who live here. Nearly 1.5 million Canadian households are in what\u2019s called \u201ccore housing need,\u201d which refers to households that are living in unaffordable, overcrowded or otherwise uninhabitable homes, where an affordable and adequate home is not available in their area. Millions of other Canadians\u2014homeless people, students, people in congregate housing like long-term care and group homes\u2014aren\u2019t even factored into core housing need. How will their need for low-cost homes be helped by restricting immigration or foreign students? Where\u2019s the evidence? Immigrants and international students are an easy target.<\/p>\n

An easy target, sure, but won\u2019t ever-increasing numbers of permanent residents and international students put additional strain on the housing market?<\/strong>
Yes. So will the formation of new households, including young adults moving away from home or couples divorcing.<\/p>\n

Why has the focus of the housing crisis conversation shifted so abruptly to immigration?<\/strong>
It appears to me to be a sign of desperation. Immigrants have always been blamed for the housing crisis. Look back 100 years and people were against building boarding houses because they were scared of foreigners moving in and endangering their families. Nowadays, politicians are blaming foreign investors for housing shortages, too. I\u2019m very impatient about people pointing fingers at immigrants for the housing crisis, because it has very little to do with immigration and a lot to do with government policy.<\/p>\n

Which government policy?<\/strong>
That\u2019s the problem\u2014there hasn\u2019t been a national housing policy since the early 1990s. That\u2019s when the federal government decided it was a provincial or territorial responsibility, and in the case of Ontario, the province punted it to municipalities. There are more and more international students each year who need places to live, but colleges and universities are provincially regulated. Immigration, on the other hand, is a federal responsibility. There needs to be coordination between federal, provincial and municipal governments. And that needs to start with an accurate sense of who needs housing, where, and at what price.<\/p>\n

Do we have that information?<\/strong>
Partially. We know that new migrants are among the groups most likely to be in core housing need. Our data from UBC\u2019s Housing Assessment Resource Tools project shows that in 2021, 16 per cent of new migrant households\u2014those who moved to Canada since the last census in 2016\u2014were in core housing need. That\u2019s higher than the Canadian average of 10 per cent. Refugee claimants were the most likely households to be in core housing need, almost one in five. But the census only tracks housing need in private, non-farm and non-student households.<\/p>\n

So we don\u2019t have data on students?<\/strong>
No. The federal government has zero information on student housing needs, international or otherwise. In 1991, when the measure for core housing need was created by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) and Statistics Canada, the decision was made to leave out students because it was considered a \u201ctemporary situation of voluntary poverty.\u201d As a result, we don\u2019t have any information on what students can afford to pay, whether they\u2019re overcrowded or living in mouldy basement apartments. That\u2019s unusual for a developed economy like Canada. France, Finland, the Netherlands, Germany\u2014every country I know of with strong non-market housing programs builds student housing into it.<\/p>\n

Why the lack of data?<\/strong>
I think it goes back to the \u201990s, again, when the federal government backed out of housing policy. It\u2019s been three decades of people passing the buck.<\/p>\n

A classic tale of Canadian federalism.<\/strong>
I won\u2019t disagree with you there.<\/p>\n

And yet the federal government is looking into a possible cap on the number of permits issued to international students.<\/strong>
I believe we need evidence-driven policy instead. A good example is the Rapid Housing Initiation, which was first proposed as a COVID-19 relief measure in 2020. The initial target was 3,000 very affordable, rapidly constructed (or renovated) homes for the homeless. About 4,700 homes were constructed or under construction within 18 months. It was renewed in 2021 and 2022\u2014the total number of units created is expected to be over 15,500 units. It needs to be an ongoing program.<\/p>\n

The Liberals did introduce a national housing strategy in 2017, which promised to restore Ottawa\u2019s involvement in building social housing. And legislation was passed in 2019 designating housing a human right.<\/strong>
Sure, but look at the national housing strategy. It literally has nothing to say about students. Do they not exist? Are they not part of the housing market?<\/p>\n

You mentioned the fact that new migrants are more likely to be in core housing need. How else are they impacted by the housing crisis?<\/strong>
Asylum-seeking families, for instance, tend to be larger households, and there\u2019s a critical shortage of rental housing that has three bedrooms or more. Also, new migrants traditionally moved to the inner city, where there are social services and other resources. But there\u2019s no affordable housing there anymore, so migrants are moving to areas that aren\u2019t near services or jobs or public transit, and most don\u2019t have Canadian driver\u2019s licences on arrival. All that exacerbates settlement issues, like isolation and unemployment. The federal government needs to think about an integrated policy between immigration and housing.<\/p>\n

It sounds like you\u2019re on the same page as Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc, who said that the government should \u201ctailor its policies on immigration and housing to acknowledge the link between the two.\u201d What would that look like?<\/strong>
For one thing, we\u2019d be able to project population increases over the next 10 years. Remarkably, the 2017 national housing strategy we\u2019ve referred to has targets that don\u2019t include the impact of population growth through immigration.<\/p>\n

The CMHC projected that we\u2019ll need 5.8 million homes by 2030 to reach affordability. Do figures like that take immigration into account?<\/strong>
They don\u2019t, though I do know that the author of that report is planning to publish a follow-up to revise that figure in light of current immigration projections. We can\u2019t plan for housing if we don\u2019t know how many people are coming in. Canada is a rich country and a smart country\u2014we have the highest rate of individuals with higher education in the world. So if we\u2019re a rich, smart country, and we can\u2019t solve the housing crisis, what are we even doing?<\/p>\n

Speaking of solving it, you\u2019ve got a new book coming out next year, How to Home: Fixing Canada\u2019s Housing Crisi<\/em>s. Spoiler alert, but how do<\/em> we fix it?<\/strong>
We need a calculation of supply shortage that doesn\u2019t just tell us we need X million units, but actually gets into what kind of housing and where. We have one of the lowest rates of social housing in the world. And we\u2019re going to have to scale up purpose-built rentals, rather than condos, again. That kind of fell off the cliff in the \u201970s. Back then, during another period of high immigration, we were literally building more housing than we are today because we had a national housing social housing program and purpose-built rentals.<\/p>\n

What is one pragmatic step the government could take?<\/strong>
Enable purpose-built rentals again, with some conditionality. In other words, you can\u2019t have a 30-storey building in the middle of the Greenbelt, for instance. There needs to be some conditions around location, price point and environmental sustainability. There were measures in place in the \u201960s and \u201970s that led to the construction of most of our current purpose-built rental stock\u2014meaning most apartment buildings are 40 to 60 years old, which is a whole other problem. But we need a social housing program. We haven\u2019t had one for three decades, and we\u2019re seeing the impact of that.<\/p>\n

Is a federal social housing program in our future, realistically?<\/strong>
Absolutely. The federal government promised a new co-op housing strategy in the 2022 budget. Sources tell me it\u2019s ready to roll. I\u2019m not sure why it hasn\u2019t yet, but every single major federal evaluation of the national housing strategy has asked why a non-market, social housing program isn\u2019t part of the plan. Everyone from Scotiabank on down is saying you need to start by doubling social housing. It\u2019s the most direct way to start building the housing that people need most.<\/p>\n

How do we quickly build a lot of homes?<\/strong>
In the post-war period in Canada, housing patterns were used\u2014the CMHC literally had Type A, Type B, Type C stamped on the front of their \u201cvictory houses.\u201d That happened in Sweden, too, with the Million Homes Program in the 1960s and \u201970s. Kitchens and bathrooms of a predetermined size were built off-site. That helped streamline construction\u2014and led to the pre-eminence of Ikea, by the way. There are currently a whole bunch of modular housing providers who have expanded with the new rapid housing initiative, and that\u2019s a positive thing Canada could export. There\u2019s a big advantage to going modular and building off-site, particularly in northern climates where the construction season is shorter. It\u2019s really problematic if construction workers can\u2019t afford to live in the cities they\u2019re building.<\/p>\n

Last year, Canada\u2019s purpose-built rental apartment vacancy rate hit 1.9 per cent, its lowest level since 2001.<\/strong>
The best metaphor I can think of is the credits from The Simpsons<\/em>, where everyone\u2019s running for a seat on the same sofa. We have students running toward the sofa, seniors looking to downsize running toward the sofa. People who would have been able to buy homes in a previous generation are also in the race. So if we want everybody to have a seat, we need to build more sofas and make sure that they\u2019re the right kind.<\/p>\n\n

This interview was edited for length and clarity.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n