That's a red herring.

Housing prices went up because since COVID most companies have been making record profits. These all went to shareholders/hedge funds who are flush with cash and bought up all the properties. They're doing it because "it's good to own land". In Ottawa, in most neighborhoods, the cost of the empty lot is the same whether or not there is a house on it.

This is combined with the inflation and layoffs that affected the regular people who aren't shareholders. Politicians have been freezing or cutting municipal taxes rather than keeping them tied to inflation to "try to help the little guy". Unfortunately that benefits the rich more than anyone else.

Without strong tax revenues our cities have been cutting back on public transit, amenities, and even road maintenance.

This happened regardless of immigration.

The only way to fix our material base is to tax the rich and reinvest in cities, and public housing to drop housing prices. But the middle class sees housing as "an investment" instead of "a place to live" and would rather their 3br townhouse be worth a million bucks than have their kids and grandkids be able to afford a house. So anytime the government talks about public housing they lose the election.

Immigrants would be a huge asset if we wanted to fix the problem because they're significantly overrepresented in the trades we need to build our way out of this if we find the political will to do so.

Think about it from a different point of view. If you had a big piece of land and a bunch of construction workers asked to live on it with you, wouldn't say "we can't invite you in until we build you a house first" you'd say "here's some lumber, get cracking". We haven't fixed the base capacity problem because we (the rich and to some extent middle class boomers) don't want to.