Housing starts fall short of immigrant demand

October 20, 2022





Canada’s drive for higher immigration has collided with the reality that the country does not have the existing housing stock or the infrastructure necessary to deliver the hundreds of thousands of homes needed.
And the Washington Post has taken notice.
Immigration into Canada is on pace to hit a record high in 2022 of 431,000, following the entry of about 405,000 the previous year, and the country is targeting entry of another 900,000 newcomers in 2023 and 2024 combined, the U.S. newspaper reported this month.
Because of immigration, Canada’s population over the past five years grew at almost twice the pace of its Group of Seven peers, Statistics Canada noted.
“We can’t keep up with the amount of immigration coming to the country," said Christopher Alexander, president of the Canadian unit of Re/Max Holdings Inc., the global real-estate listing company with 140,000 agents worldwide.
A rush is now under way among Canadian officials to build housing units and ease supply constraints. “There was a lack of forward thinking, lack of planning on the housing side, on what the actual [housing] need was going to be," said Abe Oudshoorn, a professor at Western University’s nursing school in London, Ontario, and leader of a research group that since 2016 tracked the arrival of immigrant families into Canada and their path to acquiring housing.
He said many families remain stuck in housing that is either too costly or too small for their growing families.
Mike Moffatt, senior policy director at the University of Ottawa’s Smart Prosperity Institute, a think tank, said one reason housing starts lagged is because regional and local officials underestimated population growth and overestimated the amount of housing stock. “Our zoning laws were set for a slow-population-growth country. When our population started growing, our regulatory environment didn’t adapt to that reality," he told the Washington Post.
Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation recently said the country will require 3.5 million additional homes above current home-building projections by 2030 to restore housing affordability.