I appreciate the data-supported arguments but the comment on doubling was a stated goal of the Canadian national government. The Canadian population is presently projected to double in 26 years. Geographically constrained places with high immigration like Australia and Canada are shockingly unaffordable right now. These places are the canary in the coal mine for the US, which may have plenty of usable land on paper, but has the same issues with a self perpetuating cycle of the major metro areas having all the jobs and limited room to grow. The population is up 50% in my lifetime and I think that accurately reflects real estate becoming increasingly unattainable.
Edit: I guess what I’m saying is that housing-as-investment is wrong, but the basis for housing-as-investment (and indeed all investment) is the projection of increased future demand. In developed nations, this comes from immigration. If the population were shrinking indefinitely, housing certainly wouldn’t be increasing in value
I appreciate the measured and reasonable response, in the current climate! Thank you for clarifying your point - I’m glad you brought up Australia, as well, because I used to live there and I remember how bloody unaffordable it was even back then. In Australia, “negative gearing” is a rule that allows you to write off losses from real estate on other investments (https://www.businessthink.unsw.edu.au/articles/australia-housing-affordability-crisis-negative-gearing). So, your family trust has a nice big house which could rent for reasonable amount of money, but you leave it empty and write off the “lost rent” against your stock market investments, or other properties which are doing well, etc… meanwhile, you have a fully paid-off (and depreciating!) asset on your books which you can, if you need to, use as collateral for a loan against another project, or sell off if you need a big, quick injection of cash. As a result, nobody’s got incentive to sell, which coincidentally drives the price of those held assets higher and gives property owners even less incentive to sell.
Edit: I will say that growing the population through immigration will increase the number of labourers available to build new inventory, and open and staff new factories producing building materials etc, which will increase affordability either by bringing down prices or generally stimulating and growing the economy so everyone’s richer - but there’s no need for that growth to be unsustainable in nature, or continue forever. Even if that is the historical standard we’re working from 🙄
It sounds like we generally agree that there are structural reasons quite aside from population growth, and agree that they desperately need to be addressed (i.e. regulatory). I’m arguing from the perspective that we should absolutely attempt to address these reasons, but that ANY population growth from any source is essentially adding fuel to the fire.
I think a lot of emphasis gets put on “supply-side” solutions that sound a lot like “just build more houses, NBD!”. From what I’ve observed we can’t get there with the existing land without (IMO) excessive densification and/or sprawl which has an easily-felt deleterious effect on livability. I’ve spent the last couple of decades living in very different places, and watched them change due to growth. In all cases growth has caused traffic that never existed before, MASSIVE crowding of local attractions that can’t be mitigated without timed entry and immensely restrictive permitting, and astronomical increases in the price of real estate. Without being hyperbolic at all, more population has quite literally been felt as less freedom. Some of this is due to the rise of the global middle class, but they have their hands in my home places at the expense of locals, and it’s gone from great to hellish in about 20-30 years.
The problems with new housing seem to be:
limited/no affordable land available in places where people have historically lived (and which have jobs, nice weather, natural attractions, etc)
materials are at a premium due to increased global demand (and, admittedly the pandemic)
Local first-world labor has never been more expensive - labor doesn’t scale like computing and related tech
densification in the form of attached dwellings on small land parcels, and no/fewer personal vehicles is a large decrease in QOL compared to the historic “American dream”
Like if you think you can find 10 million people to give up LA/Seattle/NY/etc and move to central Kansas, where there’s no ocean, no mountains, no lakes, no jobs, and nothing to do, more power to you. People live in interesting places for good reasons, and other places are cheap for good reasons.
An adjacent point: nature abhors a vacuum. If the QOL is better in the US and there are ~8 billion possible candidates for immigration, our population could easily double in a month. The demand is there. We could adopt a policy of open borders until QOL reaches equilibrium at some much lower level and immigration stops - we could also make immigration virtually impossible - or anything in-between. I’m of the opinion that lower influx means > QOL pretty close to 100% of the time.
You wouldn’t be wrong if it were a purely numerical game, but it’s not. You might not be wrong if I were advocating for entirely open borders with minimal to no immigration process, but I’m not. I’m saying that the US needs to stop making it so damn difficult to come here, and to offer more respect to the people that choose to come here. Immigration’s effect on the economy, throughout the history of the US, has been overall a positive one: https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2016/1/27/the-effects-of-immigration-on-the-united-states-economy
Many hands make light work. More labourers means more labour wages, means more money flying around the economy, means more available and cheaper products and services for everyone - this includes housing stock. I don’t believe that densification automatically equals lower quality of life, or that more individuals automatically equals fewer individual freedoms. Those statements seem to be the crux of your argument, but they look like flawed premises to me, so data to support them is required.
This is all quite aside from the fact that right here, right now, we’re talking about asylum seekers. This is a humanitarian issue, and the number of people actually seeking asylum is a relative drop in the bucket to the overall population. Asylum seekers alone won’t double anyone’s population; they’ll barely even move the needle, from 333 million to 334 million in the case of the US.
The population distribution is as much due to where things already are, and a lack of population, as it is to the climates we’re talking about. If it’s just about climate, why is Las Vegas the 25th largest city in the US? Why do people move there from the coasts or more temperate climates? Australia could absolutely make use of much, much more of its land mass. They just don’t have the population to support it, and they won’t in the near- to mid-term because of their incredibly restrictive immigration policies.
Canada is a much better example to support your point. Large swathes of that country’s land are absolutely inhospitable for most of a year. But that’s going to change as the temperate band moves or expands thanks to global warming. If you’re young enough, buy a cheap chunk of dirty ice next to a permafrost lake, and make bank in 25 years when it’s a tropical beachfront and everyone wants to live there :P
I know a number of Canadians who live in those less dense areas .(I grew up in MN, and sometimes went north to a chruch camp in Canada) there is a lot of room near the border for people.
There’s a lot of land in North Dakota as well. It’s super flat, boring, and winters are ultra cold and windy as hell. There are very good reasons it has a low population. It’s further south than most of the places in Canada you’re talking about.
EDIT: I’d like to add that “we’re not overpopulated, there’s plenty of land!” isn’t really the whole story, either. Occupying every square mile that can be occupied should not be a goal. Leaving more places in a natural state without human impact is highly desirable, IMO.
I appreciate the data-supported arguments but the comment on doubling was a stated goal of the Canadian national government. The Canadian population is presently projected to double in 26 years. Geographically constrained places with high immigration like Australia and Canada are shockingly unaffordable right now. These places are the canary in the coal mine for the US, which may have plenty of usable land on paper, but has the same issues with a self perpetuating cycle of the major metro areas having all the jobs and limited room to grow. The population is up 50% in my lifetime and I think that accurately reflects real estate becoming increasingly unattainable.
Edit: I guess what I’m saying is that housing-as-investment is wrong, but the basis for housing-as-investment (and indeed all investment) is the projection of increased future demand. In developed nations, this comes from immigration. If the population were shrinking indefinitely, housing certainly wouldn’t be increasing in value
I appreciate the measured and reasonable response, in the current climate! Thank you for clarifying your point - I’m glad you brought up Australia, as well, because I used to live there and I remember how bloody unaffordable it was even back then. In Australia, “negative gearing” is a rule that allows you to write off losses from real estate on other investments (https://www.businessthink.unsw.edu.au/articles/australia-housing-affordability-crisis-negative-gearing). So, your family trust has a nice big house which could rent for reasonable amount of money, but you leave it empty and write off the “lost rent” against your stock market investments, or other properties which are doing well, etc… meanwhile, you have a fully paid-off (and depreciating!) asset on your books which you can, if you need to, use as collateral for a loan against another project, or sell off if you need a big, quick injection of cash. As a result, nobody’s got incentive to sell, which coincidentally drives the price of those held assets higher and gives property owners even less incentive to sell.
Building new inventory to counter the impacts of policies like these has slowed almost everywhere thanks to manufacture and supply chain disruptions (https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2022/06/16/new-houses-longer-build-housing-labor-shortages/7572802001/ - warning, autoplaying video, but at least it’s muted I guess). In addition to that, Australia (https://www.afr.com/property/commercial/china-tops-the-list-of-foreign-buyers-of-housing-20230309-p5cqrn) and Canada (https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/01/business/canada-bans-home-purchases-foreigners/index.html) have shared a problem with foreign investors mostly from mainland China buying up property and driving up prices. There are a few reasons those investors might be motivated to purchase foreign property, but I’ve got stuff to do this evening so I’ll leave the research up to you if you’re curious :P
Edit: I will say that growing the population through immigration will increase the number of labourers available to build new inventory, and open and staff new factories producing building materials etc, which will increase affordability either by bringing down prices or generally stimulating and growing the economy so everyone’s richer - but there’s no need for that growth to be unsustainable in nature, or continue forever. Even if that is the historical standard we’re working from 🙄
It sounds like we generally agree that there are structural reasons quite aside from population growth, and agree that they desperately need to be addressed (i.e. regulatory). I’m arguing from the perspective that we should absolutely attempt to address these reasons, but that ANY population growth from any source is essentially adding fuel to the fire.
I think a lot of emphasis gets put on “supply-side” solutions that sound a lot like “just build more houses, NBD!”. From what I’ve observed we can’t get there with the existing land without (IMO) excessive densification and/or sprawl which has an easily-felt deleterious effect on livability. I’ve spent the last couple of decades living in very different places, and watched them change due to growth. In all cases growth has caused traffic that never existed before, MASSIVE crowding of local attractions that can’t be mitigated without timed entry and immensely restrictive permitting, and astronomical increases in the price of real estate. Without being hyperbolic at all, more population has quite literally been felt as less freedom. Some of this is due to the rise of the global middle class, but they have their hands in my home places at the expense of locals, and it’s gone from great to hellish in about 20-30 years.
The problems with new housing seem to be:
Like if you think you can find 10 million people to give up LA/Seattle/NY/etc and move to central Kansas, where there’s no ocean, no mountains, no lakes, no jobs, and nothing to do, more power to you. People live in interesting places for good reasons, and other places are cheap for good reasons.
An adjacent point: nature abhors a vacuum. If the QOL is better in the US and there are ~8 billion possible candidates for immigration, our population could easily double in a month. The demand is there. We could adopt a policy of open borders until QOL reaches equilibrium at some much lower level and immigration stops - we could also make immigration virtually impossible - or anything in-between. I’m of the opinion that lower influx means > QOL pretty close to 100% of the time.
You wouldn’t be wrong if it were a purely numerical game, but it’s not. You might not be wrong if I were advocating for entirely open borders with minimal to no immigration process, but I’m not. I’m saying that the US needs to stop making it so damn difficult to come here, and to offer more respect to the people that choose to come here. Immigration’s effect on the economy, throughout the history of the US, has been overall a positive one: https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2016/1/27/the-effects-of-immigration-on-the-united-states-economy
Many hands make light work. More labourers means more labour wages, means more money flying around the economy, means more available and cheaper products and services for everyone - this includes housing stock. I don’t believe that densification automatically equals lower quality of life, or that more individuals automatically equals fewer individual freedoms. Those statements seem to be the crux of your argument, but they look like flawed premises to me, so data to support them is required.
This is all quite aside from the fact that right here, right now, we’re talking about asylum seekers. This is a humanitarian issue, and the number of people actually seeking asylum is a relative drop in the bucket to the overall population. Asylum seekers alone won’t double anyone’s population; they’ll barely even move the needle, from 333 million to 334 million in the case of the US.
Canada and Australia are both very large counties with relatively small populations. They are in no way geographically constrained.
Huge areas of Canada are at high latitudes and very dark, cold, and inhospitable in the winter. Something like 50% of Canada’s population lives south of the northern extent of the US (i.e. south of Seattle, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, half of MN, and almost all of MT/ND.
https://www.secretmuseum.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/canada-population-density-map-this-is-how-empty-canada-really-is-photos-huffpost-canada-of-canada-population-density-map.gif
Huge areas of Australia are desert.
The population distribution of Canada and Australia is not an accident. The coasts and more temperate climates are much more hospitable.
The population distribution is as much due to where things already are, and a lack of population, as it is to the climates we’re talking about. If it’s just about climate, why is Las Vegas the 25th largest city in the US? Why do people move there from the coasts or more temperate climates? Australia could absolutely make use of much, much more of its land mass. They just don’t have the population to support it, and they won’t in the near- to mid-term because of their incredibly restrictive immigration policies.
Canada is a much better example to support your point. Large swathes of that country’s land are absolutely inhospitable for most of a year. But that’s going to change as the temperate band moves or expands thanks to global warming. If you’re young enough, buy a cheap chunk of dirty ice next to a permafrost lake, and make bank in 25 years when it’s a tropical beachfront and everyone wants to live there :P
I know a number of Canadians who live in those less dense areas .(I grew up in MN, and sometimes went north to a chruch camp in Canada) there is a lot of room near the border for people.
There’s a lot of land in North Dakota as well. It’s super flat, boring, and winters are ultra cold and windy as hell. There are very good reasons it has a low population. It’s further south than most of the places in Canada you’re talking about.
EDIT: I’d like to add that “we’re not overpopulated, there’s plenty of land!” isn’t really the whole story, either. Occupying every square mile that can be occupied should not be a goal. Leaving more places in a natural state without human impact is highly desirable, IMO.