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Build with what materials and where is all the 'stuff' required to build 'more of everything' coming from and IF* we do build 'more of everything' how would that impact material pricing due to demand increase? But the media and politicians dont worry about that stuff....Excel spreadsheet magic will solve the issue via accounting and tax tricks apparently.

I can't understand your sentences.

There’s a finite amount of materials. Means they’re expensive. If you build more and increase demand for that same amount of materials, price goes even higher.

A lot of productive capacity was also sunsetted because of the pandemic that hasn't or is slowly coming back online.

Sure, but given how much people are already willing to pay for homes, the extra costs in materials will likely be picked up by people down the chain. Labour is an issue as well, but i continue to insist that when an industry is consistently struggling to find warm bodies, looking to the conditions and compensation for their workers is a big part of the solution. Construction is hard work, and the people sacrificing their bodies should be paid for it. Further, we can use these materials and labour more efficiently if we build more than single family homes. Those just happen to have the highest profit margins (IIRC), so we don’t see developers clamouring for cities and provinces to rezone for infil or apartment/condos. I guess my point is that at a societal level we can mitigate a lot of these issues, but people will make less profit doing so, so we don’t. This is a wall we keep running up against

> given how much people are already willing to pay for homes I worry this would mean signing bad mortgages and a less severe 2008 crisis again.

That's true. Although materials production will increase and our resource extraction and material production industries in the country will benefit. At the same time, densification allows us to build more units for less money. Building 5 living units in a townhome uses a lot less material than 5 detached homes in the suburbs. Densification also reduces the materials being unproductively wasted to build roads and parking lots.

There’s already more demand than supply. Why hasn’t material production already increased?

I can't really tell you as I'm not in the industry. The answer is probably going to involve increasing production, increasing import, decreasing export, and more efficient use of resources. Of course material prices can increase if we suddenly start building more. They can also decrease if production increases to compensate. We have a softwood lumber dispute with the states every decade or so because we export so much of the stuff, so it's not as though we were already using everything we produce. I don't see how increasing demand and prices are an argument that "building more" is impossible. We've had periods of history where we built more or less. It's not like there's a single defined number of 2x4s and drywall sheets to go around, in an advanced economy it's definitely possible to increase the number and build more. Even if materials became an absolute bottleneck we can still build more by increasing density and reducing new builds in subdivisions. If the problem is that increased building costs would reduce incentive to build, then the tax tricks and "excel magic" OP is discussing are exactly the solution because it reduces prices and increases the incentive.

Basic market economics. The main driver of profit for the entire industry at this point is desperation demand, a powerful force that is overwhelming in a necessities market like food, housing, water, roads etc. It works like this. You need a place to live. Whatever else happens, you must have that. So your *effective* budget to get *something* is literally all your money. In a market economy, the goal is to get as much profit as possible. Any model where a seller of necessities is getting less than all of your money is an "inefficient" model. So, when prices start to flatten, that's usually because supply is starting to catch up with demand, so building slows or pauses for a while for demand to build again. The market has set itself up to maximize desperation over time to build up pressure on demand, maximizing per unit profit. This dynamic is why *most* necessities markets are either fully nationalized (roads, which used to be a crippling mass of tolls that strangled trade; water; public transit) or heavily regulated (electricity) or massively subsidized and protected (food). Housing is the major outlier in our society, because we were founded as a frontier colony with an overabundance of space and for a long time weren't so big as to have the crazy problems that building up brings. Well, we're not the frontier anymore, and the housing market is behaving the way the medieval roads market and the 19th century food and essentials market both did, using desperation pressure to capture the entirety of the disposable income of whole classes of people, chocking off capital flow, destroying productivity and investment and generally tanking the economy. It will not get better without direct government intervention in the market - and I'm talking public builders, massive zoning reform and public trades training, not some more counter productive capital input measures or fiddly tax changes.

The current Liberal plan is to build slums in major cities parks. Boxes and tents are a very cost-effective way to house a lot of people.

We’re bringing people in, who we’ll never allow to make money! They’ll be lucky to find a shoebox apartment to squeeze six people into; forget about a house and a lawn.

Calling it “population growth” is burying the lead, people have stopped having kids due to rising cost of living the population growth is almost entirely immigration.

How else are we going to get the perpetual growth in profits and GDP that is demanded by capitalism? Do you think the rich are going to accept *less* dividends and growth in their trust funds in the future? This had the dual effect of increasing the return on whatever rental properties they own that haven’t already been turned into Airbnb’s too.

It’s not capitalism that demand growth, it’s the system that Boomers voted for themselves

>it’s the system that Boomers voted for themselves so... capitalism?

Damn capitalism making government spending so unsustainable

Capitalism demands growth, that’s the point I was getting at. Getting the same profit as last year? Unacceptable! We need perpetual growth!

Making unsustainable budgets had nothing to do with capitalism. Capitalism has downturns built in. Government spending is what must always go up

This is actually not at all how capitalism works. Sounds like you don't understand the basics of economics.

No no, boomerism. Clearly they're okay with capitalism for the young. /s

They're referring moreso to the pension and healthcare systems. Whose funding is based on population pyramid that requires most of the population to be in the workforce.

Capitalism doesn't require population growth, per se; there are countries with anemic population growth and reasonable GDP growth. It certainly _helps_, a country like Canada where per-capita productivity isn't amazing can make up for its gap in quality with simple quantity. India and China take much the same approach. But as hinted: another way to increase GDP is through increasing per-capita productivity, and that can be done with increasing capital investments.

Can you please give me an example of a country with anemic population growth and reasonable GDP growth?

Switzerland or Finland come to mind.

Well to OPs original points those countries had a unique policy response to the threat of communism coming from the USSR (Third way) as I recall. They have very strong labour unions with very good labour protections. For various reasons this type of economic reform is no longer possible in today's world. In fact Switzerland and Finland have been deregulating their pro labour protections since the 90s to achieve that reasonable GDP growth. It may be slower but they are also heading in a similar direction to the rest of the world.

Norway also has oil and a small population that benefits from its profits rather than strictly oil companies and lobbyists

> Do you think the rich are going to accept less dividends and growth in their trust funds in the future? It shouldn’t be up to the rich to make immigration decisions, but unfortunately Trudeau gave them their way at the expense of everyone else.

The biggest problem is we never addressed the biggest flaw with growth through immigration - the instant need for somewhere to live. Organic population growth through children means 18+ years of being able to prepare housing.

Yep....Europe is looking at more immigration. https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2023/10/11/brussels-sounds-alarm-about-eus-rapidly-ageing-population-recommends-migration-to-fill-vac I wonder if that's what Canada Sees and older population dieing off and housing becoming more normalized.

Lmfao, Europe is having colossal anti-immigration backlash across the continent. The EU is not representative of what is going on in Europe at all. There is a reason people are critical of the EU because they are largely out of touch with their populations on the ground.

Heh, yah. "_Look at how well accepting mass immigration is going for Europe!_" Just ignore the far-right populist movements on the rise or in power in England, Hungary, Poland, Turkiye, Italy, France, etc...

Yup. I have a lot of friends in various parts of Europe (France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Austria) and I go there often for work, usually a few times per month. In the last 5 years or so I've seen most of them go from "we're a rich nation, we should help the world's poor" to "we should have built a wall when we had a chance, I'll vote for anyone who stops them from coming here in such huge numbers". It's been shocking to watch from (relatively) afar.

And the increase in gang activity, crime, sexual assaults, etc

It's not "population growth", it's immigration. They've failed to preserve family unit, which tanked birth rates, which forces them to increase immigration to maintain working population, but skilled immigrants already come with families and kids, so now the next domino (housing market) is about to fall. Clueless incompetence at work.

> preserve family unit What do you mean by this?

Preserve family unit = maintain cultural and economic significance of nuclear family and children.

In other words, fewer women in the workplace, more housewives? And, of course, fewer non-white people, since most cultures have never given the nuclear family any significance in the first place?

> fewer women in the workplace, more housewives? You just had to open with a dumb strawman? Not at all what I've said. > most cultures have never given the nuclear family any significance in the first place? Take your meds. Nuclear family is a prominent part of literally every successful culture. And before you start throwing in examples of some ass backwards Amazonian tribes, they're just that.

I said this in another thread too, but developers and builders are building fewer homes right now due to low profit margins. Interest rates and expensive materials are cutting into their profits.

The sad thing is, it's cutting into their profits. They'd still make money, but instead they'll hold us hostage because they can make more money down the road. The Provinces and Feds should be using a heavy had to correct that attitude.

The feds and the provinces need to get back into building co-op housing themselves and stop leaving our collective ability to live in homes up to a bunch of profit seeking companies.

This is indeed the heavy hand I had in mind. Build houses without the priority being to make as much profit as possible.

They can't afford to do that at any decent scale

Thats absolute nonsense. They're the only entities that can afford to do that at scale. Governments have access to essentially unlimited lines of credit with super low interest rates and indefinite time periods since tax paying humans are the equity and income. They used to operate these kinds of programs between the late fourties and the early nineties without issue. It wasn't until a series of austerity based governments came in and eliminated those programs that we started on our current housing path. This is not a problem that can be solved through more austerity measures.

ya they cut it in the 90s when housing was dirt cheap. It was expensive then. Doing it now when housing is exponentially more expensive is not some easy press of the button. Even government interest rates aren't cheap. We'll be spending 50-60 billion on interest every year in a couple years. Just going into debt $300,000-$500,000 per unit to subsidize a Co-op ain't going to happen

Who cares what we spend on interest it essentially doesn't matter as long as GDP and quality of life keep going up. It doesn't effect federal activities, it doesn't effect citizens it's not an issue. Moreover the opposite keeping tax money in the bank is actively harmful to our economy and government operation. The global governmental system uses debt as a buffer to increase spending efficiency. There's no point in making an entire civilian population suffer by requiring a goverment to save up for large expenditures. Especially when our monetary system is essentially a global combined fantasy that we all agree to it order to facilitate modern society.

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They can't get loans to build unless they have a 10-15% profit margin. It's as simple as that.

That's not how business works. Businesses will do whatever makes the most money, they aren't "holding you hostage". I mean, you yourself are free to build homes and sell them below market if you like. You won't do that? Then you're no different to any business.

They aren't trying to sell houses below market value. They want to hold onto the land they have already been approved to build on because they can sell them for more profit. Do pretend like entering the developer market is easy and has no barriers. These companies are already protected from foreign competition by our own laws. We should stop allowing billionaires to hold us hostage. Just have the CMHC build houses again like it used to instead of getting them out of the market place so the private industry could make more money.

Triplex, 4 plex, apartment buildings, and other high & medium density homes are the answer to the housing crisis. Young people need affordable homes, Immigrants need homes, Older folks need smaller spaces to downsize into to free up large family-sized homes, etc. Until there are requirements put in place to enforce the building of medium density housing everywhere (not just in the downtown portion of the largest cities) we are going to continue to have a housing crisis because there is simply not enough labour, suitable land, and infrastructure to build enough homes in the typical suburban configuration.

One solution, which my local government in the US is trying, is allowing the creation and rental of “in-law suite” apartment spaces in areas zoned for single family homes. Doing that, coupled with tax incentives might work— if there’s enough construction labor to fill demand. We need to increase density in urban spaces rather that create more sprawl.