NYTimes: Immigration Spikes Housing Costs

Mass migration has quickly spiked Canadians’ housing prices and rapidly reduced the share of Canadians who can own homes, admits the pro-migration New York Times.

“Basically southern Ontario has become unaffordable” amid a massive inflow of immigrants, real-estate agent Bryan Adlam told the newspaper for an October 8 article, and added:

“I have two clients I have right now whose budget is $500,000 to $600,000, which is not chump change,” he said. “Are they going to be renters for life? Probably. Has owning a home become unattainable for someone on the lower income echelon? I would say, yes.”

The impact was also admitted in a 2021 report by the government-run Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation:

House price surges in Toronto and Vancouver between 2015 and 2019, partly owing to much higher international migration, [and] were the catalyst for significant changes in domestic migration patterns within their respective provinces.

The rising house prices also help push young Canadians out of the major cities, the 2021 report noted:

Since 2015, a greater share of people from nearly every age cohort moved out of Toronto and Vancouver to live in other regions of their respective provinces.

…

For people 25-44 years old, surging house prices in Toronto and Vancouver led to a greater incidence of “drive until you qualify.” Homeownership had become too expensive in Toronto and Vancouver for many potential first-time buyers in this age group

“Census data released this month showed that the [homeownership] rate fell to 66.5 percent last year from a peak of 69 percent 11 years ago,” the New York Times reported.

The newspaper’s pro-migration editors downplayed the role of immigration, but the reporter repeatedly hinted at the relationship, writing:

HAMILTON, Ontario — Even with a budget of 1 million Canadian dollars, Ritu Choudhary and Nippun Goyal, a newly married couple living in Toronto, discovered that buying a house there would be impossible. The competition inside the city and nearby was so stiff that they had to consider 50 properties, before finally outbidding everyone to pay 995,000 Canadian dollars, or about $730,000.

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Canada’s housing costs are already among the highest in the world, driven, in part, by robust real estate markets in its largest cities, like Toronto and Vancouver, that have a global appeal.

On October 7, the Wall Street Journal also admitted migration’s role in pricing ordinary Canadians out of good housing:

Population growth, a shortage of housing stock and low interest rates helped push up house prices in Canada’s biggest centers, prompting would-be buyers to look farther afield and drive up prices in smaller, far-flung communities unaccustomed to housing booms.

The WSJ also quoted a low-wage immigrant — with eight other family members — who are helping to drive up real-estate prices:

Kanishka Noorzai and his wife, his four sons, his parents and his younger sister arrived here in February, from Afghanistan via Albania, and settled in the Waterloo region, an urban center of a half-million people west of Toronto. After a monthslong search that took him to apartments, townhouses and other domiciles, he found a three-bedroom bungalow — at a cost of nearly $3,000 a month for a one-year lease, or “really, really above our budget,” said Mr. Noorzai, 43 years old. He is currently working part time as a security guard but is seeking full-time hours.

“I really was surprised,” he said, “because I did not think it would be that difficult to find a house in Canada. It was a nightmare.”

Noorzai’s group can likely pay for their expensive housing because it includes at least five working-age people who can pool their low wages.

Immigration is also changing the housing markets for Americans as it shifts more wealth from wages to Wall Street.

Wealthy investors are using their immigration-related profits to buy more housing that would otherwise would have put young Americans on a road to middle-class housing wealth, the Washington Post reported October *

ROUND ROCK, Tex. — Adam and Tahnya Gaston arrived in this Austin suburb in June with a toddler, a dog and enough money for a down payment. But within days they scrapped their plans for buying a house, deterred by soaring home prices and rising mortgage rates. Instead, they’re paying $4,000 a month to lease a three-story house in a new development aimed squarely at renters.

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It’s one of thousands of “build-to-rent” developments springing up around the country, billed as an attainable route to single-family homes and front yards at a time when homeownership is increasingly out of reach. Developers are expected to add 105,000 homes in such communities this year, and 50 percent more by 2025, according to real estate consulting firm Hunter Housing Economics.

“We fit the demographic of people who, five years ago, would’ve bought a huge house in the suburbs,” Adam Gaston told the Post. “But now prices are crazy, and we’re making different decisions.”

Nearly all corporate-run media outlets in the United States favor migration. So their editors hire pro-migration reporters for the immigration beat. Very few of those immigration reporters want to recognize Americans’ views about migration, or the damaging impact of international migration on Americans’ pocketbooks, housing, and wealth.

But many ordinary business reporters want to follow the money, and they are freer to sketch migration’s economic impact in articles that are not directly about U.S. migration. Their articles tell careful readers about immigration’s impact on housing prices in Canada, or about fights over zoning regulations.

Breitbart News, however, extensively covers the U.S. government’s economic strategy of extraction migration and has covered the impact of migration on housing costs in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

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