When migrants enter the housing market or invest in real estate, local housing, urban and migration policies are all naturally brought into play. But what people do not realise often enough is the emotional and social cost of such investment.
As an educated middle-class Iranian woman in Toronto told me: ‘I wasn’t necessarily keen on buying property. We’ll be in debt for 23 years and can't send our son to a private school because everything goes on the mortgage. We won't necessarily enjoy it much ourselves, either – we'll be too old. It will be for our son. But it seems as if everyone here has to buy a house.”
According to a 2019 Royal LePage survey, one property in five is bought by newcomers to Canada, and a whole system of mortgages and low interest rates encourages investment in Canadian real estate. But one of the repercussions of this situation might be the emergence of a 'culture of property' as a form of social control: property ownership at all costs!
