People don't all want the same amount of space. Someone who's fine living with their parents or with roommates in their early 20s is going to want to live on their own in their mid-to-late 20s or early 30s. As people get older, they want more space. As people get richer, they want more space.
On top of that, with Covid and the surge in people working from home, there's suddenly a *lot* of people who want more space at home. So we have a massive shortage of residential space (and a surplus of office space). This isn't going to unwind itself.
Covid and remote work also means that housing scarcity is no longer confined to Metro Vancouver. It's suddenly spilled over to the rest of the province. Smaller centres like Nanaimo and Nelson are used to having cheaper housing without having to build much. But they're now like suburbs of Vancouver, with prices and rents to match. https://morehousing.ca/spillover
Even after we cut way back on population growth, we need to build a lot more housing *everywhere*, not just in Metro Vancouver, for the next 10 years or more. Our pre-Covid housing stock no longer lines up with where people want to live and work.
Over the last two decades we've been more housing than our population growth. Prices still soared.
"The Housing Supply Myth", Dr. John Rose
https://www.kpu.ca/sites/default/files/The%20Housing%20Supply%20Myth%20Report%20John%20Rose.pdf
You can't build your way out of asset inflation.
Have central banks stop the money supply growth and see what happens to prices.
Oh, we're seeing that now.
People don't all want the same amount of space. Someone who's fine living with their parents or with roommates in their early 20s is going to want to live on their own in their mid-to-late 20s or early 30s. As people get older, they want more space. As people get richer, they want more space.
On top of that, with Covid and the surge in people working from home, there's suddenly a *lot* of people who want more space at home. So we have a massive shortage of residential space (and a surplus of office space). This isn't going to unwind itself.
Covid and remote work also means that housing scarcity is no longer confined to Metro Vancouver. It's suddenly spilled over to the rest of the province. Smaller centres like Nanaimo and Nelson are used to having cheaper housing without having to build much. But they're now like suburbs of Vancouver, with prices and rents to match. https://morehousing.ca/spillover
Even after we cut way back on population growth, we need to build a lot more housing *everywhere*, not just in Metro Vancouver, for the next 10 years or more. Our pre-Covid housing stock no longer lines up with where people want to live and work.