struggling to get affordable housing, and the number of people who need affordable housing is increasing

The human brain is bad at noticing the fact that one of those numbers is really huge and the other comparatively very small, and tends to equate the two or put them at the same order of magnitude.

It's like the distance to the moon vs mars. Given we need foreign workers to shore up the shortfall we're expecting to see, as our own population declines below what's needed to support an ageing and increasingly long-lived population, all calculations need to take into account that expected increase. At least until we tax the rich like we used to.

I feel that it's more complex than just the interest rates... That only explains part of the demand.

Then there's the supply. New housing construction in the US bottomed out after the 2008 recession and has never returned to where it needed to be since. At least here in the PNW we have a major shortage of housing (both affordable housing, and just new home/unit construction in general) that has been more than a decade in the making and is not trivial to overcome. It would likely take a huge investment in new/affordable housing construction incentives to get us anywhere close to where we need to be.

On top of that, immigrants are not a problem, but institutional investors (both foreign and domestic) are. There are many American homes being bought by people and firms merely as investments, which means they wind up expensive and empty. I've seen this happen in Vancouver BC, Seattle and Portland, and I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if it's happening elsewhere. We really need laws and tax benefits that help put regular people in homes that they will actually live in. Homes are one of the few kinds of assets that have really appreciated in value over the last couple of years, and because of that regular people who simply want a place to live or raise a family are being priced out of the market by rent-seekers or investors would would be perfectly happy to leave a house empty.

Housing prices skyrocketed here in Ontario when people escaped the big cities, and rushed to buy houses in smaller cities and towns. This caused a huge supply problem, as there weren’t enough houses for sale to meet demand, so bidding wars erupted.

It was a period of utter lunacy and mania for both buyers and sellers. I think we reached almost 100% price increase over pre Covid.

Once everyone had bought that wanted to buy, the market slowed down and houses went for under asking or sat on the market unsold. I don’t think anyone cared about the interest rate.

It's literally the most traditional Vancouver business. When the city was incorporated and built around the region today known as Gastown, as early as 1870 everyone was encouraged to go in debt to buy two pieces of land, then next year sell the second to finish paying for the first one. BC's economy has been sustained by sky high returns on real state for more than 100 years at this point.

The US had their real estate investing moment in the 2000s.

We're behind only because we, the most educated nation on earth, are much, much, much more likely to attend a post-secondary school, and, as you recall, we went on a dorm building frenzy in the late 90s/early 2000s to accommodate the influx of millennials who make up the echo baby boom. That buffered us for a while.

But the buffer was only so good for so long. Eventually post-secondary schooling comes to an end and people set out to find a place to call their own. As such, we eventually caught up with the US in not having enough homes to handle the millennial baby boom, and as such there was more competition for homes, price went up in response, and soon it started to look like a good place to park money for mom and pop.

I see that take every week on this instance. Used to be everyday on Reddit, but still.

Visit any of the local community subs on Reddit. Lots and lots of people blaming immigrants for housing issues.

From Wikipedia:

The Breach is an online, Canadian news outlet launched on 10 March 2021 to provide reader- and viewer-supported reporting, analysis, and videos on issues such as racism, economic inequality, colonialism, and climate change. Its contributors include the Indigenous writer, lawyer, and professor Pamela Palmater, journalists El Jones and Linda McQuaig, legal scholar Azeezah Kanji, and documentary filmmaker Avi Lewis.[1]

So it's basically their thing. Like any other news media, they're just trying to attract clicks by saying people are blaming immigrants for the housing crisis. The reality is that we need immigration to keep our economy afloat. However, like you said, the immigration system is not working in our favor because it set the limits too high and everyone and their grandmother are moving to the only couple of large urban centers where every other immigrant decided to live: Toronto and Vancouver.

It's not the immigrants' fault. It's the immigration system and the government who can't manage their shit well.

If you go on Canada Reddit it’s every other comment on housing

I imagine Facebook and Twitter are the same

Cutting immigration is a sure-fire way to prevent over-demand for a scarce resource.

Sure! At the cost of no longer having skilled immigrants advancing Canadaian industry and economy. We'd also go into a population decline which, while great for housing, would cause lots of problems with job shortages and government benefits paying out way more than they collect.

Immigration is far too much of a benefit to Canada to stop it instead of just building more places to live. We are one of the largest land masses on the entire planet. I think we can fit a few more houses in.