I live in Victoria, and while our situation is special (we’re on the tip of an island and can’t build in many directions because it’s ocean), a few developers I’ve spoken to are very confident that the housing issue’s greatest barrier is labour.
I asked if immigration could address this, and they each pointed out that a. Immigrants can’t afford to work in this industry in places where we need housing the most, b. While building requires unskilled labour, it also requires highly skilled labour that is at an unprecedented shortage which isn’t easily or rapidly corrected with immigration, c. Cities and neighborhoods are deeply attached to their reasons for resisting various densification projects, and breaking through arbitrary red tape here is an immense and intractably expensive undertaking.
They painted a very bleak picture of the housing situation, making it seem as though huge changes need to occur in order for meaningful progress to be made.
This might be less of an issue in other cities. I’m not sure.
"Cities and neighborhoods are deeply attached to their reasons for resisting various densification projects, and breaking through arbitrary red tape here is an immense and intractably expensive undertaking."
The large-scale tolerance of this is basically permanently resigning Canada to degrowth. So no, lets not accept this. It is what most cities are facing and the provincial governments need to put an end to it.
What we need is massive training/re-training + labor importation program for the construction industry (and probably also healthcare, but I digress), and WW2 level mobilization in construction, anything short of that and I'm betting the economic and entrepreneurial problems get entrenched for a century.
I agree with this notion politically, it would be a huge benefit if the federal government:
#1 - took in a bigger slice of taxes
#2 - redistributed them to municipalities
#3 - made this redistribution contingent on densification.
What we have now is some tragedy of the commons crap where everybody wants to address the housing prices, but if you call to densify any neighbourhood the local busybodies will cry bloody murder. Yet everybody wants the government to do something about housing, just not in their backyard. The only way for densification to be fair, and not result in one municipality seeing a sharper decline in housing prices than another, is for EVERYBODY to be compelled to change and have each municipality work out the finer details.
Alas, I am deeply pessimistic about change, in no small part because elected politicians are far more likely to be landlords than the general population putting them in a huge conflict of interest.
The WW2 level mobilization idea seems on point to me, but most Canadians I know seem totally oblivious to the fundamental decline of our economic and infrastructural capacities. I think we’ve lived too long in easy mode, benefitted a lot in many ways from our neighbour to the south, and let things slide too much for a generation or two.
I hesitate to say that in a sense because frankly, I don’t fully understand it. I do however understand that we’re languishing in many ways, and we don’t appear prepared to address this in a meaningful way.
It feels a bit like watching someone play a real time strategy game and noticing things are easy for them because external elements are removing difficulty from the game, so they focus their resources on a lot of the wrong stuff. Then when hard times come, they’re brutally unprepared and get wrecked while they try to ramp up to deal with whatever came for them. It feels like Canada is at the stage where the first taste of bad stuff has arrived, and we’re still fumbling with deciding what/if/how to address this bad thing. And we’d really like to continue playing the game as we were up until that point.
Maybe a terrible analogy. I’m the epitome of a layperson. All of this is opinion that should be taken with teaspoons of salt.
This is my own opinion too: I feel that as Canadians we are generally coasting on our past accomplishments/echoes of past economic activity. This blinds is to upcoming challenges and existing problems.
For example: we're ignoring the fact that our economy is heavily skewed towards "fake productive" activities like selling the same house back-and-forth to each other, and the Finance industry (an accountant friend tells me that even in Oil & Gas a lot of the "growth" happens through trading unproductive land stakes). The other heavyweight driver of activity is Government, but that can't be sustained if you're not generating value through other industries...
I also think that Canadians have a complacent attitude to daily corruption ("it couldn't happen here - that only happens in those funny tropical countries!"). This means that corruption flourishes just under the surface in many places.
I think the shortage of skilled construction labor is a huge problem in the US too. I have heard from general contractors and tradespeople that the trades have a big shortfall in the talent pipeline that is getting worse.
I can only imagine the situation is worse in Canada since the immigration system favors people with tertiary degrees.
We need to figure out how to incentivize people to choose skilled manual labor as a career. As it is the rewards don't compare with a career spent in an office even if the pay in the office is lower. That's because the office work is more pleasant and the career likely longer due to less wear and tear on the body.
Public safety employees (police and firefighters) have early retirements because their jobs are physically demanding. If we don't figure out a way to guarantee early retirements for people with physically demanding jobs in the private sector, young workers with options will continue to avoid them. And the houses that everyone knows we need most of all won't get built.
The apprenticeship model I'm the US is especially difficult. Why pay for electrician schooling, then struggle for three to five years earning $30k at best per year, when you can get more straight out of school in any white collar job?
I don't know what a better option would look like, but it is a deal breaker that some people I know personally had to wrestle with.
> We need to figure out how to incentivize people to choose skilled manual labor as a career.
You just did with the rest of your comment.
>As it is the rewards don't compare with a career spent in an office even if the pay in the office is lower. That's because the office work is more pleasant and the career likely longer due to less wear and tear on the body.
> can’t build in many directions because it’s ocean
UP! Why does everyone forget UP?! I’ve followed some of the projects proposed for development in Victoria (I am in the industry and lived on Salt Spring Island for a while), and the city has been as backward as any other city in the nation by making developers jump through hoops to get even a tiny modicum of density. The NIMBY population in Victoria is also among the most aggressive in the country.
I asked if immigration could address this, and they each pointed out that a. Immigrants can’t afford to work in this industry in places where we need housing the most, b. While building requires unskilled labour, it also requires highly skilled labour that is at an unprecedented shortage which isn’t easily or rapidly corrected with immigration, c. Cities and neighborhoods are deeply attached to their reasons for resisting various densification projects, and breaking through arbitrary red tape here is an immense and intractably expensive undertaking.
They painted a very bleak picture of the housing situation, making it seem as though huge changes need to occur in order for meaningful progress to be made.
This might be less of an issue in other cities. I’m not sure.