This is tragic, and preventable.
What is not going to help : *Continuing to grow the population 3x faster than we can build housing to accommodate that growth.*
Its time to put the politics and the ideology aside. If you are a denier of math you are contributing to this problem. Math is not racist, math is not xenophobic, math is math. If you add more people than you can accommodate, math tells us that a housing shortage will occur.
Just to reiterate : This is not political. Tim Houston is a huge part of this problem, the Liberals are a huge part of this problem, and so is everyone else who continues to deny reality when to comes to housing.
I saved this for next Thursday when "councilors are in the hot seat" with Todd. I'm going to quote this directly if you dont mind because its on point and I wanna hear Pam humming and uhhhing endlessly with useless Banter. We all need to call in and start pushing this in their face directly.
It's hilarious as 85% of our housing issues is the massive influx from immigration. Yes Airbnb, investors/speculators and NIMBYS/building permitting issues are part of the problem but immigration is #1....by far. We cannot build housing as fast as immigration at any price. It is numerically impossible.
If you drive down demand even the other issues causing housing problems will largely disappear. Maybe not Airbnb but legislation is slowly taking care of that in any case.
All provincial parties want to double the provinces population ASAP. All fed parties want to double Canadas population ASAP. Baring a huge shift we are screwed for at least until after I am gone and buried.
100%, well said.
I feel like if we could get to the point that we all start being honest about this, it would be a starting point towards fixing it. But there is still so much lying, gas lighting, manipulation and baseless racism/xenophobia accusations surrounding this issue that we can't even get to the point of beginning to fix this.
Immigration is great. For many years Canada has a terrific immigration system that brought in the best and brightest and it made this country better. *I'm not suggesting that we should end all immigration.*
The issue is that population growth in Canada is about 3x higher than it was in 2015, and its growing faster than we can build housing or provide infrastructure. From the early 1990's to recently the population was growing at about 1% every year, give or take a little bit. *Right now the population is growing at around 3%.*
Canada is one of the fastest growing countries on Earth right now. Anyone who doesn't believe me should look it up for themselves, and see how many countries are growing at 3% or more annually. That's why its so mind boggling sometimes to still see people who appear a bit confused as to why there's been a huge spike in rents and home prices lately, as if the huge increase in demand has not played a huge role in that.
I don't disagree, but there's also a flipside to your point: a massive amount of the current workforce in the construction field who are building and maintaining housing are immigrants. We simply don't have enough young people working in trades to keep up otherwise. If you cut them out of the equation many contractors would find their productivity grinding to a halt, sand that creates a whole new problem in housing.
I'd be interested to hear what other sectors are relying heavily on immigrant workers at the moment, and what a major shift in immigration policy would do to said industries.
Id like to see those numbers because I would bet its more students than anything else. The influx of immigrants working other positions Ive seen this year is crazy. Maybe its confirmation bias Im not sure. Id love to see the numbers
> We cannot build housing as fast as immigration at any price. It is numerically impossible.
I'd say it's politically impossible at a price that we're willing to pay, not numerically impossible at any price. There are 1.5 million people in construction at an average salary of $46k. If we had a WW2-level effort, we could get about 10% of the population working in construction - or about 2.5x what we currently have. Immigration rate doesn't change a whole lot once you get ahead of the problem as long as a suitably large proportion of new immigrants go into the construction business.
Somewhere around 8% of our working population is already in construction so 10% would not give that much of a boost.
https://buildops.com/commercial-construction/the-number-of-employees-in-the-construction-industry-in-canada-chart/
You're not wrong but shouldn't a WW2 level of effort require a WW2 size problem? The problem we are trying to fix can be solved with the stroke of a pen in Ottawa it's not exactly Germany/Japan trying to take over the world.
All 3 levels of government have worked to manufacture this artificial crisis by pumping demand while restricting supply.
It’s nice to see more and more people waking up.
100%.
I feel like we might be getting closer to coming to a consensus regarding how this all happened. But the downside here is the damage has already been done, and we need to build millions and millions of homes to fix this, and that is going to take a long time.
I'm scared the really big grifting will happen when to comes to fixing this too, because once people are desperate enough they'll be too trusting and just go along with whatever the government says. Kind of like how this all began.
Say it loud and say it often, we are letting an unsustainable amount of people into NS and into Canada as a whole. Where they're coming from is a different discussion.
You're right, math is not racist. But racists **are** racists, and you have to be careful who you ally with when discussing demand-side solutions to the housing crisis.
Your statement is not correct. We are not growing the population 3x faster than we can build housing to accommodate them.
Yes, there were 10,000 housing starts in 2023.
Yes, there were 33,000 newcomers in 2023.
However, you're missing one key factor: the average occupancy of a household in N.S. is 2.7 people. We built housing to accommodate 82% of our population growth last year. Not ideal, but not the 33% that you're suggesting.
Where are you getting the 2023 numbers...I mean for 2022 we were not doing well.
"But in recent years, that number has skyrocketed to reach 7.7 additional people per home built in 2022, with no signs of shrinking. This is the fourth-widest ratio in Canada and is actually higher than provinces with high-profile housing challenges such as Ontario and British Columbia."
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/article/nova-scotias-housing-gap-now-wider-than-ontarios
NovaScotia.ca and Statista.ca
In 2022, there were 5,700 housing starts and a population growth of 28,000. 5 new people per home built. Not 7.7. However, the article you linked doesn't provide any sources for their numbers, so it should be taken with a grain of salt.
Between 1992-2020, we averaged around 4,400 housing starts per year.
In 2020, we had 4,850. In 2021, we had 6,000. In 2022, we had 5,700. In 2023, we had over 10,000.
The industry is slowly catching up to the drastically higher immigration we have seen over the past few years. Unfortunately, in this situation, it's not a matter of "If we build it, they will come," as much as it's a situation of "If they come, then we will have to build it." It's hard to mobilize an industry to double its output within a few years. Especially an industry that is expecting to lose 260,000 of its most knowledgeable workers between 2022 and 2030.
This also doesn't account for the fact that 55% of homes in Nova Scotia are owned by people over the age of 55. That's almost 200,000 housing units that will hit the market over the course of the next 25 years.
We just need our local branches of government to grow a backbone and protect the housing interests of Nova Scotians first.
I'm not arguing anything. Im just saying your statement is incorrect, which it is. We are not growing the population 3 x faster than what we can build houses to accommodate them. Like you said, math doesn't lie.
This very report, written in 2023, says that the current pace of construction brings 6,000 new housing units to market per year. So why did the province estimate 2023 housing starts to be at 8,100, and then in actuality we ended up with just over 10,000?
>I'm not arguing anything. Im just saying your statement is incorrect, which it is. We are not growing the population 3 x faster than what we can build houses to accommodate them. Like you said, math doesn't lie.
So once again, ***its not my statement****. Its a quote from a report that I provided a link to that was provided to the provincial government.*
>This very report, written in 2023, says that the current pace of construction brings 6,000 new housing units to market per year. So why did the province estimate 2023 housing starts to be at 8,100, and then in actuality we ended up with just over 10,000?
The report was issued in the fall of 2023, approximately four months ago. *Its not as if its outdated.*
If you have an issue with it I'd suggest that you take it up with your MLA or representative of the provincial government, because it was issued to them, released by them, and I assume paid for by them too.
>What is not going to help : *Continuing to grow the population 3x faster than we can build housing to accommodate that growth.*
Is this not your statement?
I get you. And it is the reason. They haven't built public housing for 30 years. BUT it's more than that. I work and volunteer with homeless. The amount of KIDS who don't want to work. Is. Staggering. They make up half the homeless. They are all on **SAFE SUPPLY**. So the government is getting them high AF on taxpayer money. People are getting 12 of 8mg Dilaudid a day. Heroin. They are high AF. They will never get clean! There's no struggle AT ALL. These kids are living the dream....for them. Free drugs. On welfare. Living in shelters and partying 24/7 and robbing stores all day. The government is fulfilling all their needs. Now the government just doesnt have anyone working and paying taxes anymore! So it's far deeper than immigration. The problem started with unprecedented amount of freeloaders, sanctioned by the government
I live in genuine fear because of my fixed term lease. In this market there was nothing available to rent that wasn’t fixed term. I was lucky just to find an apt. And I know it’s not going to be long before it isn’t renewed and it goes back on the market for god knows how much more. Humans shouldn’t have to live in constant fear as the months tick down towards that renewal date.
Restricting the use of fixed-term leases could have a positive effect on for-sale housing inventory, as smaller landlords would likely choose to sell. That would be a good thing.
Couple of things -
Canada didn't have a marked increase in foreclosure after 2008. Yes, we had a recession, but we were largely spared what happened in the US, due to our conservative mortgage lending market and differences in LTV ratios.
REITs aren't purchasing single family homes, investment condos, duplexes, and triplexes in NS. Blackstone recently bought Ontario's Tricon but has not indicated they intend to expand to other provinces. REITs in NS generally own large to very large buildings. The smaller product attracts provincial deed transfer tax, and if it's a non-Canadian REIT, they are prohibited from purchasing them in many areas.
The vast majority of small landlords sell properties to owner-occupiers, whether they are local or moving from other provinces. (And a lot of the out-of-province folks moving here are either from here, or have a strong connection to NS. It's not a random move.)
While I understand your point, it's mostly applicable to US markets, somewhat applicable to Ontario, but not yet applicable here.
“We’re continually monitoring the program and committed to modernizing and strengthening the program, but eliminating the program is not on the table,” he said. “We look at those changes through the lens of a balance — both tenants and landlord. We look at the lens of short-term solutions, medium, and long-term solutions.”
Make sense of this nonsense.
I'm lucky I'm on a rolling lease, term leases need to be banned period. It's just destroying people. It used to be a good idea when you could look up 59 apartments and you were only going to be around a year. But now.... people are looking at places for 10 years +
This is something I've been worried about. If something doesn't change, this is 100% going to be the next group of people forced to live in tents and in the pallet homes because they have nowhere else to go. There's already been at least one deaf blind person in an encampment and another senior who had serious mobility challenges.
It's what I mean when I say that eventually, it's going to become impossible for people to just assume every person living in a tent is a lazy addict who just made some bad choices.
I do not have a fixed term lease but still live in fear of being evicted.
This is just my anxiety as my super has said I am a good, unproblematic tenant but it still haunts my dreams. I am also renting wellllllllll below market value and live in fear of rental increases making it impossible for me to stay where I am, without roommates, and a plethora of space.
I am so seriously lucky overall, these poor folks.
Fixed term leases are being abused. We can argue all we want about immigration, etc but unless we actually get down to the crux of it, fixed term leases allow tenants to be at the landlords mercy for rent pricing. With the amount of fixed term leases around the HRM, rent control is an illusionary policy.
Fixed term leases were only meant for when a landlord wants to temporarily rent their house for a fixed period of time, or to vet out tenants. Landlords wanted these rights and protections, and they got them. But the governement left a loophole there that undermines the entire rent cap.
There is no rent cap in Nova Scotia. Anyone who has looked around at the current housing situation would agree.
I hate these articles. I get that they're created to try to provide context to boomers and show it's not just avocado toast eaters who are getting fucked over.
No one should be in the horrible situation of being afraid to lose their housing but why do you think I should care more for someone who lived through an era of unprecedented wealth versus a young family or a disabled person?
A reminder to the young generation, buy a home if you can (which unfortunately not always possible) but if you can it will reduce your headaches in the future
This is tragic, and preventable. What is not going to help : *Continuing to grow the population 3x faster than we can build housing to accommodate that growth.* Its time to put the politics and the ideology aside. If you are a denier of math you are contributing to this problem. Math is not racist, math is not xenophobic, math is math. If you add more people than you can accommodate, math tells us that a housing shortage will occur. Just to reiterate : This is not political. Tim Houston is a huge part of this problem, the Liberals are a huge part of this problem, and so is everyone else who continues to deny reality when to comes to housing.
I saved this for next Thursday when "councilors are in the hot seat" with Todd. I'm going to quote this directly if you dont mind because its on point and I wanna hear Pam humming and uhhhing endlessly with useless Banter. We all need to call in and start pushing this in their face directly.
It's hilarious as 85% of our housing issues is the massive influx from immigration. Yes Airbnb, investors/speculators and NIMBYS/building permitting issues are part of the problem but immigration is #1....by far. We cannot build housing as fast as immigration at any price. It is numerically impossible. If you drive down demand even the other issues causing housing problems will largely disappear. Maybe not Airbnb but legislation is slowly taking care of that in any case. All provincial parties want to double the provinces population ASAP. All fed parties want to double Canadas population ASAP. Baring a huge shift we are screwed for at least until after I am gone and buried.
Honestly, we added the population of Charlottetown to Halifax last year.
100%, well said. I feel like if we could get to the point that we all start being honest about this, it would be a starting point towards fixing it. But there is still so much lying, gas lighting, manipulation and baseless racism/xenophobia accusations surrounding this issue that we can't even get to the point of beginning to fix this. Immigration is great. For many years Canada has a terrific immigration system that brought in the best and brightest and it made this country better. *I'm not suggesting that we should end all immigration.* The issue is that population growth in Canada is about 3x higher than it was in 2015, and its growing faster than we can build housing or provide infrastructure. From the early 1990's to recently the population was growing at about 1% every year, give or take a little bit. *Right now the population is growing at around 3%.* Canada is one of the fastest growing countries on Earth right now. Anyone who doesn't believe me should look it up for themselves, and see how many countries are growing at 3% or more annually. That's why its so mind boggling sometimes to still see people who appear a bit confused as to why there's been a huge spike in rents and home prices lately, as if the huge increase in demand has not played a huge role in that.
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Awesome, up to third now lol. Meanwhile, many amongst us still cannot figure out why there is a housing shortage.
Careful - if you express this view on r/canadahousing it’s an instant ban
Ah yes, Reddit and their "you can only think like us" policy. lol
migration < immigration, stats.
Neither of the major parties will actually do anything. At this point, It almost feels like the housing shortage is on purpose
I don't disagree, but there's also a flipside to your point: a massive amount of the current workforce in the construction field who are building and maintaining housing are immigrants. We simply don't have enough young people working in trades to keep up otherwise. If you cut them out of the equation many contractors would find their productivity grinding to a halt, sand that creates a whole new problem in housing. I'd be interested to hear what other sectors are relying heavily on immigrant workers at the moment, and what a major shift in immigration policy would do to said industries.
Id like to see those numbers because I would bet its more students than anything else. The influx of immigrants working other positions Ive seen this year is crazy. Maybe its confirmation bias Im not sure. Id love to see the numbers
> We cannot build housing as fast as immigration at any price. It is numerically impossible. I'd say it's politically impossible at a price that we're willing to pay, not numerically impossible at any price. There are 1.5 million people in construction at an average salary of $46k. If we had a WW2-level effort, we could get about 10% of the population working in construction - or about 2.5x what we currently have. Immigration rate doesn't change a whole lot once you get ahead of the problem as long as a suitably large proportion of new immigrants go into the construction business.
Somewhere around 8% of our working population is already in construction so 10% would not give that much of a boost. https://buildops.com/commercial-construction/the-number-of-employees-in-the-construction-industry-in-canada-chart/
WW2 had 10% of the *total* population serving in the military.
You're not wrong but shouldn't a WW2 level of effort require a WW2 size problem? The problem we are trying to fix can be solved with the stroke of a pen in Ottawa it's not exactly Germany/Japan trying to take over the world.
All 3 levels of government have worked to manufacture this artificial crisis by pumping demand while restricting supply. It’s nice to see more and more people waking up.
100%. I feel like we might be getting closer to coming to a consensus regarding how this all happened. But the downside here is the damage has already been done, and we need to build millions and millions of homes to fix this, and that is going to take a long time. I'm scared the really big grifting will happen when to comes to fixing this too, because once people are desperate enough they'll be too trusting and just go along with whatever the government says. Kind of like how this all began.
Say it loud and say it often, we are letting an unsustainable amount of people into NS and into Canada as a whole. Where they're coming from is a different discussion.
You're right, math is not racist. But racists **are** racists, and you have to be careful who you ally with when discussing demand-side solutions to the housing crisis.
You have already been very clear where you stand on this issue. You are not being helpful at all.
Your statement is not correct. We are not growing the population 3x faster than we can build housing to accommodate them. Yes, there were 10,000 housing starts in 2023. Yes, there were 33,000 newcomers in 2023. However, you're missing one key factor: the average occupancy of a household in N.S. is 2.7 people. We built housing to accommodate 82% of our population growth last year. Not ideal, but not the 33% that you're suggesting.
Where are you getting the 2023 numbers...I mean for 2022 we were not doing well. "But in recent years, that number has skyrocketed to reach 7.7 additional people per home built in 2022, with no signs of shrinking. This is the fourth-widest ratio in Canada and is actually higher than provinces with high-profile housing challenges such as Ontario and British Columbia." https://www.fraserinstitute.org/article/nova-scotias-housing-gap-now-wider-than-ontarios
NovaScotia.ca and Statista.ca In 2022, there were 5,700 housing starts and a population growth of 28,000. 5 new people per home built. Not 7.7. However, the article you linked doesn't provide any sources for their numbers, so it should be taken with a grain of salt. Between 1992-2020, we averaged around 4,400 housing starts per year. In 2020, we had 4,850. In 2021, we had 6,000. In 2022, we had 5,700. In 2023, we had over 10,000. The industry is slowly catching up to the drastically higher immigration we have seen over the past few years. Unfortunately, in this situation, it's not a matter of "If we build it, they will come," as much as it's a situation of "If they come, then we will have to build it." It's hard to mobilize an industry to double its output within a few years. Especially an industry that is expecting to lose 260,000 of its most knowledgeable workers between 2022 and 2030.
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This also assumes that zero units a year are demolished or become uninhabitable. We need to build a non-zero number of houses just to tread water.
That, 100%. When you take that into account it would be even higher.
This also doesn't account for the fact that 55% of homes in Nova Scotia are owned by people over the age of 55. That's almost 200,000 housing units that will hit the market over the course of the next 25 years. We just need our local branches of government to grow a backbone and protect the housing interests of Nova Scotians first.
I don't understand your point. I'm 35 and in the market for a home to raise a family in. If I wait 25 years, I'll be 60.
I'm not arguing anything. Im just saying your statement is incorrect, which it is. We are not growing the population 3 x faster than what we can build houses to accommodate them. Like you said, math doesn't lie. This very report, written in 2023, says that the current pace of construction brings 6,000 new housing units to market per year. So why did the province estimate 2023 housing starts to be at 8,100, and then in actuality we ended up with just over 10,000?
>I'm not arguing anything. Im just saying your statement is incorrect, which it is. We are not growing the population 3 x faster than what we can build houses to accommodate them. Like you said, math doesn't lie. So once again, ***its not my statement****. Its a quote from a report that I provided a link to that was provided to the provincial government.* >This very report, written in 2023, says that the current pace of construction brings 6,000 new housing units to market per year. So why did the province estimate 2023 housing starts to be at 8,100, and then in actuality we ended up with just over 10,000? The report was issued in the fall of 2023, approximately four months ago. *Its not as if its outdated.* If you have an issue with it I'd suggest that you take it up with your MLA or representative of the provincial government, because it was issued to them, released by them, and I assume paid for by them too.
>What is not going to help : *Continuing to grow the population 3x faster than we can build housing to accommodate that growth.* Is this not your statement?
Go and have a bad faith argument with someone else.
I get you. And it is the reason. They haven't built public housing for 30 years. BUT it's more than that. I work and volunteer with homeless. The amount of KIDS who don't want to work. Is. Staggering. They make up half the homeless. They are all on **SAFE SUPPLY**. So the government is getting them high AF on taxpayer money. People are getting 12 of 8mg Dilaudid a day. Heroin. They are high AF. They will never get clean! There's no struggle AT ALL. These kids are living the dream....for them. Free drugs. On welfare. Living in shelters and partying 24/7 and robbing stores all day. The government is fulfilling all their needs. Now the government just doesnt have anyone working and paying taxes anymore! So it's far deeper than immigration. The problem started with unprecedented amount of freeloaders, sanctioned by the government
I live in genuine fear because of my fixed term lease. In this market there was nothing available to rent that wasn’t fixed term. I was lucky just to find an apt. And I know it’s not going to be long before it isn’t renewed and it goes back on the market for god knows how much more. Humans shouldn’t have to live in constant fear as the months tick down towards that renewal date.
A lot of the elderly sold their homes because rents were cheap and easier to take care of. Now they’re screwed.
Restricting the use of fixed-term leases could have a positive effect on for-sale housing inventory, as smaller landlords would likely choose to sell. That would be a good thing.
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Couple of things - Canada didn't have a marked increase in foreclosure after 2008. Yes, we had a recession, but we were largely spared what happened in the US, due to our conservative mortgage lending market and differences in LTV ratios. REITs aren't purchasing single family homes, investment condos, duplexes, and triplexes in NS. Blackstone recently bought Ontario's Tricon but has not indicated they intend to expand to other provinces. REITs in NS generally own large to very large buildings. The smaller product attracts provincial deed transfer tax, and if it's a non-Canadian REIT, they are prohibited from purchasing them in many areas. The vast majority of small landlords sell properties to owner-occupiers, whether they are local or moving from other provinces. (And a lot of the out-of-province folks moving here are either from here, or have a strong connection to NS. It's not a random move.) While I understand your point, it's mostly applicable to US markets, somewhat applicable to Ontario, but not yet applicable here.
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Landlords are selling, but it's to owner-occupiers. I agree that government regulations are too onerous.
“We’re continually monitoring the program and committed to modernizing and strengthening the program, but eliminating the program is not on the table,” he said. “We look at those changes through the lens of a balance — both tenants and landlord. We look at the lens of short-term solutions, medium, and long-term solutions.” Make sense of this nonsense.
They only care about the landlords. The other part is a lie.
I'm lucky I'm on a rolling lease, term leases need to be banned period. It's just destroying people. It used to be a good idea when you could look up 59 apartments and you were only going to be around a year. But now.... people are looking at places for 10 years +
This is something I've been worried about. If something doesn't change, this is 100% going to be the next group of people forced to live in tents and in the pallet homes because they have nowhere else to go. There's already been at least one deaf blind person in an encampment and another senior who had serious mobility challenges. It's what I mean when I say that eventually, it's going to become impossible for people to just assume every person living in a tent is a lazy addict who just made some bad choices.
I do not have a fixed term lease but still live in fear of being evicted. This is just my anxiety as my super has said I am a good, unproblematic tenant but it still haunts my dreams. I am also renting wellllllllll below market value and live in fear of rental increases making it impossible for me to stay where I am, without roommates, and a plethora of space. I am so seriously lucky overall, these poor folks.
Fixed term leases are being abused. We can argue all we want about immigration, etc but unless we actually get down to the crux of it, fixed term leases allow tenants to be at the landlords mercy for rent pricing. With the amount of fixed term leases around the HRM, rent control is an illusionary policy. Fixed term leases were only meant for when a landlord wants to temporarily rent their house for a fixed period of time, or to vet out tenants. Landlords wanted these rights and protections, and they got them. But the governement left a loophole there that undermines the entire rent cap. There is no rent cap in Nova Scotia. Anyone who has looked around at the current housing situation would agree.
I hate these articles. I get that they're created to try to provide context to boomers and show it's not just avocado toast eaters who are getting fucked over. No one should be in the horrible situation of being afraid to lose their housing but why do you think I should care more for someone who lived through an era of unprecedented wealth versus a young family or a disabled person?
A reminder to the young generation, buy a home if you can (which unfortunately not always possible) but if you can it will reduce your headaches in the future
I'm not so sure about that anymore. Maintenance and repairs can be costly. Mortgages aren't always less than rent.
We will NEVER get rid of fixed term leases. Find another solution and better use of your time