Should migrants be “blamed” for rising house prices? Or should we set aside blame and acknowledge that population growth, whatever the source, has some negative impacts?
I recently had the good fortune of visiting Vancouver, a city where I used to live a long time ago. While still beautiful, it appeared to me almost unrecognisable: everywhere, high-rise buildings, each more futuristic and imposing than the next, were rapidly replacing the pretty wooden houses I remembered, and swallowing green spaces. In spite of this building frenzy, real estate prices in Vancouver have risen madly; houses now sell for about 1,000 Canadian dollars per square foot, making it one of the most expensive cities in the world to buy a property.
Looking at the data, it appears that the metropolitan area of Vancouver has gained over 650,000 more people compared to when I last was there two decades ago. It’s not just this particularly desirable city: the country itself gains hundreds of thousands of new residents every year. In Canada as in most other wealthy countries, after decades of below-replacement birth rates, the only reason the population is growing is international migration.
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