[ThisIsNotNew]

What stops house building given Canada is so big? In the UK, its all green "farmland" (mostly sheep) that prevents land being used for housing.

Anyway UK population will overtake Germany in the next decade or two if immigration to UK continues like it has past 12 months and Germany doesn't open for mass immigration.

[hluska]

The answer will vary depending on what part of Canada you’re looking at. In my city, it’s remarkably hard to get approval to build new rental housing. While most of the population agrees that we need more rental units, nobody wants to live near rental housing.

We also face a big infrastructure problem which is exacerbated by some odd urban planning decisions. As small as my city is, it’s still possible to get caught in a logjam of traffic. Add in subpar transit and the city is extremely car centric, but despite all the wide open space around us it is still relatively hard to get from point A to B at certain times of day. (Not hard compared to cities like Toronto or Vancouver but harder than people are used to).

Canada also suffers from some very difficult social issues that should be part of a grand housing solution. Unfortunately, in practice there just isn’t much political will to truly solve these issues.

[ricardobayes]

Would you mind elaborating what those social issues are? If that's a taboo topic, feel free not to answer. I'm just curious.

[hluska]

It's a good question but has a very long answer.

First off, Canadian colonialism was a complete disaster. Between the Indian Act and its manifestations (ie - residential schools), a portion of our population has been really kicked down. In my province, for example, the last time they did a decent statistical analysis, an Indigenous man was statistically more likely to have served time in a Federal prison than to have completed an undergraduate degree. As part of treaties, Canada is responsible to provide housing on reservations. Unfortunately, the housing is so substandard that people often move to cities and then fall through various cracks in our system.

Drug abuse is a major issue in Canada. I'm not from Vancouver but spend quite a bit of time there for work/family reasons. Entire neighbourhoods are very good anti-drug commercials.

My province has been underfunding education for a very long time. That has created some really interesting side effects. For example, many professionals have chosen to leave the province behind. It's hard to get a family doctor and many people are stuck using emergency rooms for primary care. Add in covid and our once vaunted health system has become a real shit show.

Canada also has a really interesting issue with welcoming newcomers. It's odd how a country that's mostly composed of immigrants can do such a shit job of welcoming immigrants. The best way I've ever heard of to describe immigration to this country is that you'll take the absolute best and brightest, give them points for amazing professional degrees and long careers....then make them drive cabs because we don't recognize any of their experience or education. This has created a really difficult world where on one hand, people who are from here blame the immigrants for driving up the price of house. While on the other hand, many of the people who chose to come here really aren't thriving - they're barely surviving on a hodge podge of minimum wage positions.

I'm sure that you'll find a number of other people with many different views on this. But I hope that I helped a little bit!

[perardi]

So, so many reasons that it can’t simply be summed up, as there is no simple answer, though “big cities have network effects” is close enough. Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal, those are the tech and oil and finance centers, and people want to be near there.

But also: yes, Canada is big. Canada will also kill you real good and hard in most places. There’s a tremendous amount of land, and a lot of it is very very cold, and you really, really don’t want to live there.

[dangitdangitdan]

Most of inland Canada is not too cold, accessibility is the problem.

Yakutsk pop. 311,760

Omsk pop. 1,172,070

Harbin pop. 6,976,136

The maritimes are sparsely populated and have even milder weather.

If the will were there to build the necessary road and rail infrastructure, Canada could support a much, much larger population.

[red-iron-pine]

> not too cold

bollocks, it's plenty cold

> accessibility

...is a function of, among other things, weather. much of geography is also very problematic; huge portions of the country are marshes that are dicey to build on, while other parts are mountains, and often in rain-shadows

> maritimes

...don't have any jobs. the fisheries are dying and climate change is driving that, on top of excess demand collapsing fish populations. the offshore oil platforms are dead too; those guys became Alberta roughnecks.

What service companies there are in CAN have followed suit with the US and demanded all of their workers go back to the office.

Yeah it's sparse but there are no jobs and no ability to move there -- non-starter of an idea. And "milder" weather is still quite cold by most of the world standards.

[nvy]

It's a huge country so it's difficult to generalize, but in Vancouver/Victoria we're constrained by the ocean and the mountains, and by farmland.

There's a strong but slowly diminishing opposition to medium-/high-density housing because neighborhoods of detached single family homes have defined the character of these cities for decades.

It's been years since I lived near Toronto but the city is ringed in on all sides by the lake and what's called the Green Belt, which is a protected swathe of farmland and nature preserves. Toronto's doing a better job than Vancouver in terms of managing the density and growth, but every city has problems growing and we Canadians lack the culture of collectivism that makes Tokyo work.

[jejeyyy77]

The truth is Canada is actually not very big when you consider only a tiny strip above the US border is livable, and over 50% of the population live below this line: https://blogs.sas.com/content/graphicallyspeaking/files/2021...

[theironhammer]

Yes, this. Canada is not a big country at all when it comes to inhabitable land. The climate makes it so.

[notatoad]

same as the main thing that stops housing everywhere: the people who already own homes want the value of their own investments to continue rising uncontrollably, and building more houses has the potential to threaten that.

the stated reasons are usually that building more housing outside of existing urban areas is bad for the environment, and building more housing within existing urban areas is bad for the "neighbourhood character". but the reality is just that a housing shortage is good for a lot of people's bank accounts.

[soupbowl]

Strange comment, in my area nobody is against more housing, if you don't plan to MOVE out of the city, your house keeps doubling in price and your taxes go up, you make no money. If you want to buy up into a larger house because you had a kid? The gap between a 2 bed 1 bath house and a 3 bed, 2 bath is too much to justify.

Locals that have been here 20-30 years are selling and moving into remote areas because the only way to use your home equity is to abandon the area. More houses are not built here because our infrastructure has been poorly planned for 40 years. We are also surrounded tightly by mountains and water, every new build is condos to jam in as many people as possible.

[imbiased]

It’s actually possible it’s all those reasons, with some contributing more than others

[ackfoobar]

Toronto is already so big that "Toronto is an hour away from Toronto." I prefer more density than the sprawl, but I don't think most voters think likewise.

[michaelmior]

Most people want to live in or close to bigger cities. Canada is big, but ~85% of the population lives within 100 miles of the border. Once you get far enough north, which is not that far, there's much more limited infrastructure (and everything else).

[notatoad]

even within 100mi of the border, there's not even close to a shortage of space to build housing. land is not scarce. Even in the GTA or Vancouver metros there's plenty of buildable land.

[michaelmior]

There is a lot of land, but I think not enough to keep up with the demand. Not that this is the primary driver of the housing crisis, but I think it's a contributing factor.

[jejeyyy77]

there really isn't - what makes you think that?

[bryanlarsen]

Canada is much better at building housing than the US is. For example, Toronto typically is #1 in North America in counts of construction cranes.

The problem is that being better is not good enough since our immigration and growth rate is so much higher than the US. IIRC the Vancouver metro area builds about 50,000 housing units per year which is way more than a typical American metro. But that's about half of demand, so the demand/supply imbalance grows faster in Vancouver that it does in an American city.

[theironhammer]

Also foreign buyers can buy up whatever gets built. The Anglo-Saxon disease.

[red-iron-pine]

Soon they'll be calling that the Chinese New Money disease

[fidotron]

An incredible proportion of the Canadian population live basically on the US border. This means people are more familiar with nearby parts of the US and that internal Canadian logistics are distinctly barebones.

The absolutely insane part is how local the recent growth has become to essentially one subregion of Ontario.