A segment of the population who are hostile to immigration reduce the housing crisis in B.C. – which is the same crisis occurring in every major and most minor cities across Canada, the U.S., as well as in Western Europe – to immigration.
Two facts: Immigration is necessary to compensate for a workforce whose numbers are declining relative to the populations of Canada, B.C., and many other locations as Baby Boomers age out and retire. Not enough housing has been built in the last 30 years in these locations because housing has been captured and co-opted by the FIRE (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate) sector to benefit a minority of extremely wealthy people at the expense of everybody else.
Housing has been financialized.
Its purpose is not and has not been for decades to house people but to maximize economic rents extracted by finance capital. This is why not enough housing has been built or planned for in advance to accommodate the number of immigrants needed to replenish Western countries’ workforces or organic population growth as young people marry and have children.
The lion’s share of whatever housing has been built since 1993 is upscale condominiums, not purpose-built affordable workforce housing, which, in numerous places and on many occasions, for-profit real estate developers have admitted they cannot build.
Solutions at this stage, particularly ones that contort themselves to preserve the FIRE sector’s profits, homeowners’ inflated house values, and for-profit developers’ profits, will inevitably inflict pain, assuming any of them are implemented.
This entire problem could have been avoided if Ottawa had not in 1993 written out of its budget, but rather greatly increased, financing for a massive build-out of social housing. (Social housing is not housing for poor people. It is affordable housing for everyone, priced on the basis of what it costs to build it, not the maximum profit for which financial predators can gouge the public to dwell in it.)
This problem has a long and sordid history. Reducing its cause to and demonizing immigrants lets an entire class of rentiers off the hook for the disaster they have inflicted on our country.
Bill Appledorf
Victoria
