Housing shortfall, costs and affordability

[dtkvictim]

This video is making rounds. It's taken outside of St. Louis Adult Learning Centre downtown...hundreds of Indian students lining up desperately to try and get a job at McDonalds. No wonder houses are hard to come by!

https://www.reddit.com/r/CanadaHousing2/...ne_up_for/

This less cause and more effect of high housing costs: students from lower-income countries pay high tuition fees and then need to deal with rising housing costs, so they look for additional income, from McDonalds or elsewhere.

Ac3r's post is a bit of a non-sequitur, but the presence of international students (and well, people generally) directly affects housing prices. People need places to live, and with our current population growth rate that demand for housing is growing faster than our housing stock, simple as.

Not to mention, international students are supposed to prove they can support themselves before being allowed to come here. We used to limit the amount they could work with the stated reason of not negatively impacting the balance of existing labour market, though those rules been thrown out, at least temporarily.

It's hard for struggling (especially younger) Canadians to see the current developments as anything other than wage suppression and throwing fuel on the housing crisis.