> From what I can see it justifies itself by saying that "existing residents,
> be they of a city, or a nation, have a moral right to set limits" -
> (presumably a right you get when you colonise, and a power to enforce limits
> which you only gain by setting up an alliance with a nuclear power) .... in
> order, as the article says, to maintain a certain standard of living and
> 'liveability'.

> Surely there is a moral argument for sharing the earth and redistributing
> its wealth through immigration/ refugees, but we end up with have strange
> bedfellows in the property lobby.The article identifies the self interest of
> developers and property investors in increasing demand through immigration.

> Chris

> ________________________________
> From: national.n...@thenexus.org.au
> To: national.n...@thenexus.org.au
> Subject: THE UBIQUITOUS RATIONALE OF GROWTHISM - [NATIONAL NEWS 8793 - 2009,
> 29 JUNE]
> Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:54:01 +1000

> TSN NATIONAL NEWS
> PLEASE NOTE: THIS EMAIL IS DELIVERED BCC TO MULTIPLE RECIPIENTS]

> THE UBIQUITOUS RATIONALE OF GROWTHISM
> Monday, 29 June, 2009
> By Time Murray
> Online Opinion

> It’s uncanny. Two cities on two continents, but “growthists” in Vancouver
> and Melbourne seem to be reading from the same playbook.

> Lance Berelowitz, an urban planner who chaired Vancouver’s planning
> commission, praised the Mayor’s so-called “Eco-Density” initiative as the
> answer to the city’s ever-increasing house prices. Given that between
> 800,000 to one million new residents are expected to come to Greater
> Vancouver in the next 25 years, it can be assumed that developmental
> pressures on the city’s limited land base will steeply drive up land costs.
> It follows then, that “housing prices in Vancouver will keep going up,
> unless we substantially increase the housing supply to match the ageing
> demand.”

> For Berelowitz it is unconscionable that Vancouver, currently representing
> about 27 per cent of the metro area’s 2.2 million citizens, continues to
> throw up a kind of cordon sanitaire around its perimeter and not “shoulder
> its load” by accepting its share of growth. To do this he offers several
> European solutions to shove more innovative housing units into the area. But
> what is interesting about his plan is that he failed to mention Vancouver’s
> housing surplus. Between 1991 and 2006 Vancouver grew by 126,000 people who
> required 15,000 new dwellings to house them. But developers built 69,000
> units. According to activist Randy Chatterton, judging from BC Hydro
> statistics, 18,000 units are unoccupied, and MLS listings are up 26 per cent
> while sales are down 10 per cent. Now there are seven unoccupied apartments
> for every homeless person in Vancouver.

> “Accepting our share of growth” is a standard line of urban planners and
> politicians. What they never reveal is their role in not only accommodating
> growth but promoting it. Developers build houses on spec. They are built on
> the expectation that compliant governments will continue to provide
> international clientele (migrants) and the monetary and tax policy necessary
> to lubricate investment in real estate. It is a case study of Say’s Law -
> supply creates its own demand. Berelowitz never once thought to question the
> necessity for Vancouver to grow by 45 per cent in the next quarter century.
> He never thought to consult Dr Michael Healey’s landmark 1997 study of the
> Fraser Basin ecosystem that recommended a halt to immigration and a
> Population Plan to defend the region and others like it from runaway
> population growth. That’s because the ideology of urban planning is not
> growth-control but “growth management”.

> Former real estate developer and media mouthpiece Bob Ransford recently
> “despaired” of those in Vancouver with, are you ready for this old chestnut,
> a “drawbridge mentality”, that is, “who think we can resist the global flow
> of population and somehow sustain our lifestyle”. One wonders what kind of
> lifestyle Ransford imagines for the Vancouverites forced to live like
> sardines in a sardine can just so more migrants can move in and buy the
> bachelor suite closets that his developer friends would obligingly sell
> them. It seems logical that the law of physics would place a limit on the
> process of densification that Berelowitz, Ransford and the Mayor would set
> in motion, but so far they have shown no apprehension of it. And the law of
> “livability” would surely fall well short of that physical limit.

> One wonders how Ransford would behave if he were the last of ten passengers
> on an elevator that safety regulations set at ten. Would he hold open the
> door for more people in the lobby who wanted in because he feared being
> accused of “Nimbyism” or having a “drawbridge mentality”? Would he suffer an
> urban planner who insisted that the elevator could hold 12 or 15 people, or
> a real estate developer who sold tickets to more people than could safely
> ride on the contraption? Would he listen to a human rights advocate who said
> that every person of colour from another country had a right to jam on board
> regardless of the elevator’s carrying capacity because it was a matter of
> social justice? If it was a matter of profit, one suspects he would.
> Growthists can’t grasp the concept that existing passengers, existing
> residents, be they of a city, or a nation, have a moral right to set limits.

> Ransford ices his argument with more tired clichés. Cliché number one: “Our
> kids will not be able to afford to live in a city where no new housing is
> built.” Trouble is “our kids” aren’t buying that new housing. In Greater
> Vancouver 85 per cent of new housing is occupied by immigrants, while 70 per
> cent of new housing in other Canadian urban centres is occupied by “new”
> Canadians.

> Cliché number two: “If we halted growth we will have a real labour shortage
> with our rapidly ageing population.” Fact: the C.D. Howe Institute
> demonstrated that it would take an unsustainable immigration rate 28 times
> higher than its present rate for the next 50 years for Canada to maintain
> its present age structure. Postponed retirements and higher productivity
> will greatly lessen the impact of this over-hyped bogeyman.

> Lastly, Ransford recruited the words of retired planner Peter Oberlander who
> said that compact settlement patterns were an inevitable feature of urban
> growth especially where we were committed to preserving agricultural land.
> “The city is humanity’s supreme achievement”, he maintained, in dismissing
> fears about continued growth. Apparently Oberlander never heard of the
> failure of “smart growth” in America or the compromise of British greenbelts
> by developers or he might be less confident in his “compact settlement
> patterns.” And when it is recalled that a Greek polis was ideally imagined
> to consist of 5,000 citizens, one shudders to think that today a city of
> five million is considered a “supreme achievement”.

> In a speech that could have been ghost-written by any of the aforementioned
> Canadian growth-a-holics, Premier John Brumby of Victoria spoke of his
> government’s plan to “manage growth”, because you see, growth is inevitable,
> and growth projections must be treated as, if anything, “pessimistic”, i.e.
> conservative. Thus Melbourne is going to grow at least 44 per cent by 2030,
> with 6.2 million people by 2020. “Demographer Bernard Salt has projected we
> will regain our title (sic) as Australia’s largest city within 20 years.”
> Note that the Premier treats a population growth plateau like a sports
> trophy to be raised aloft in triumph. Melbourne will regain its “title” like
> Mohammed Ali regained his title against George Foreman. Similarly when
> Victoria was “losing” people in the 1990s, presumably the state of Victoria
> was a “loser”. But now “the exodus has been turned around and people are now
> voting with their feet in favour of Victoria”. It is as if Premier Brumby is
> fighting an election campaign and people moving to Victoria are casting a
> vote for him. A commonplace illusion among Premiers, Governors and Prime
> Ministers

> But he does acknowledge the strain that in-migration places on
> infrastructure and states that a million extra residents will require
> 380,000 new houses or apartments. Given Melbourne’s growth rate, he projects
> only a 17-year supply of land, and housing affordability, planning and
> supply issues demand full attention. He confesses that “the faster we grow
> the greater the demand on land supply”. Yet the one option that Brumby will
> not consider of course is to lobby the federal government for a severe
> cutback on immigration. Out comes a variant of Canadian Cliché number two:
> “we are facing a skills gap of 123,000 jobs over the next decade, which
> could curb our ability to benefit from the climate change economy.” Victoria
> attracts 27 per cent of Australia’s skilled migrants, and Melbourne 25 per
> cent of migrants of all categories. It is curious that the Premier would
> think that the importation of workers would be key to fighting climate
> change, when research clearly indicates that the best climate change
> fighting strategy is reducing population growth.

> Certainly the Vancouver experience leads one to question the party line of
> housing lobby groups that releasing more land is requisite to housing
> affordability. Australian Property Monitors operations director Michael
> McNamara argues that “demand for housing is extremely flat and developers
> haven’t been able to sell the projects that they’ve got, let alone launch
> new projects - so we totally dismiss the argument that releasing more land
> on our cities’ outskirts is going to affect affordability”. ANZ Bank senior
> economist Paul Braddick says “there is no strong evidence to suggest that a
> lack of land supply has been driving up prices. The proof of that is house
> prices have gone up across the board - indicating it is not just land
> availability that is the culprit here.” Macquarie Bank analyst Rory
> Robertson attributes the fact that city house prices have grown 75 per cent
> faster than wages in the past 20 years to a halving of interest rates, the
> halving of capital gains taxes in 1999 and massive immigration which chose
> to settle in the eight capital cities.

> Of relevance here is a study done by Bob Birrell and Ernest Healy of Monash
> University in 2003 entitled Migration and the Housing Affordability Crisis.
> While the authors acknowledge that Melbourne’s housing price spiral “cannot
> be attributed to recent migration levels,” they qualify their statement with
> significant findings. “The impact of migration varies sharply by metropolis.
> For Sydney the share of household growth attributable to net migration in
> 2001-2002 is 47.8 per cent Migration makes the next biggest impact in Perth
> where it is projected to contribute 33.5 per cent of household growth, then
> Melbourne where it constitutes 28.6 per cent of growth in 2001-2002.” By
> 2021, however, migration will account for 63 per cent of Melbourne’s
> household growth.

> “Developers and builders are already heavily dependent on immigration to
> sustain their activities in Sydney. Within a decade those operating in
> Melbourne and Perth will be dependant on immigration for nearly half the
> underlying household growth. This will apply to Australia as a whole by 2021
> when 48.4 per cent of household growth will derive from overseas migration.”
> It is in this context that the idea advanced by population sociologist
> Sheila Newman that property developers are key lobbyists for the country’s
> ecologically suicidal policy of high immigration becomes very plausible. As
> Birrell and Healy state, “It is no wonder that the housing and property
> industries in Australia are so keen for high migration”.

> That immigration has a crucial impact on housing affordability is not
> immediately apprehended in any correlation of housing price increases in six
> major Australian cities with a given volume of migrant settlers. From 1989
> to 2002 Sydney increased 30.7 per cent, Melbourne 20.5 per cent, Brisbane
> 45.8 per cent, Perth 23.5 per cent Adelaide 28.1 per cent and Canberra 34.8
> per cent. What must be understood, however, is while certainly investors and
> speculators played a major role in the housing price spiral, immigration
> boosted their confidence, and without that the spiral would never have taken
> off. That is why, Birrell and Healy explain, Sydney’s housing bubble
> remained the strongest, for even if immigrants demanded mainly rental
> accommodations, “this is still vital to investors if they are to fill their
> properties with tenants”.

> “In the case of Sydney, the intuition of residents and some politicians that
> immigration is a factor in the housing affordability crisis, is correct. The
> absence of the immigration component of household growth in Sydney would
> significantly reduce the underlying gap between demand and supply. There is
> little doubt that a reduction in the national immigration intake would
> improve affordability in Sydney.”

> The authors conclude by saying that “Immigration is an important underlying
> factor shaping growth in demand for housing prices because of its role in
> household formation … By 2021, according to our projections, the migration
> component of household formation in Sydney will be around 75 per cent, in
> Melbourne and Adelaide 60 per cent and in Perth 54 per cent”.

> As a rule of thumb, according to Albert Saiz of the University of
> Pennsylvania, “an immigrant inflow of 1 per cent of a city’s population is
> associated with increases in average rent and housing prices of about 1 per
> cent .” (Journal of Economics, Volume 6, Issue 2)

> By that token then, immigration has added 18 per cent to the price of
> Vancouver real estate, or to put it another way, it has reduced the supply
> of housing stock available to resident buyers and the price mechanism has
> adjusted accordingly.

> The logic of growthism calls for an increase in supply, for more housing
> units through more density and/or the release or development of more land.
> The logic of common sense, however, calls for a decrease in demand, that is,
> a decrease in tax incentives for real estate investors and speculators and a
> reduction in migrants.

> Whether it be Vancouver or Melbourne, throughout the Anglophone world, the
> issues are the same, cloaked in the same euphemistic code language of
> growthism. The choices are ours to make.

> About the Author
> Tim Murray blogs at (We) Can Do Better. He is Director of Immigration Watch
> Canada, and Vice President Biodiversity Canada which he co-founded. Tim is a
> member of Sustainable Population Australia, the Population Institute of
> Canada and Optimum Population Trust UK. His personal blog is at
> sinkinglifeboat.blogspot.com.

> http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=9020

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