Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes • Hacker News Board

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#421

Post by liminal » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 8:58 PM UTC

loceng wrote: post #8

This is nothing but pandering for votes before an election for those who don't understand this won't have any significant impact on affordability of houses for Canadians. There's a reason why we still also pay the highest telecommunications bills in the world - industrial complexes have captured our government, and even it's far worse that that; regulatory capture. Edit to add: 3 points down to 0 points; downvotes ar…

Canada just had an election and the Liberals are secure in power from their deal with the NDP. This isn't pandering, it's them trying to advance their agenda. (Whether you agree with it or not)

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#422

Post by tomatowurst » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 8:58 PM UTC

arrosenberg wrote: post #389

tomatowurst wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument makes no sense and its just playing into the xenophobic narrative. There is nobody looking to buy a condo under $1MM mark competing to purchase the 8 digit figure homes in West Vancouver. The rich people selling and buying them aren't hurting at all. Local Canadians are competing to expand their real estate portfolios and they aren't looking at homes in Langley because they sold their mansion in West Va…

It's not xenophobic, it's classist. I'd make a similar statement about domestic rich people, but at least they can make the argument that they contribute to the civics of the city in some way by actually being present and involved. If you expropriated all of the unoccupied mansions and replaced them with normal-priced, mixed housing, the cost of housing in the city would broadly go down, as supply would massively inc…

The crux of the issue are zoning laws that artificially suppress supply. in particular the city of vancouver have resisted rezoning to high density low rise homes because it hurts their voter base who are NIMBY multiple property home owning Canadians who turn around to sell them to whoever will buy them.

and then the masses turn around to blame that group. its straight up xenophobia one that has been in Vancouver for a very long time, anti-asian xenophobia in Vancouver is not new. 80s, it was the japanese, 90s, hong kong & koreans, 2000s, taiwanese and mainlanders.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#423

Post by davidw » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 8:59 PM UTC

llbeansandrice wrote: post #378

dionidium wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but one thing causes the other and it's not in the causal direction people intuitively think. Foreign speculators and investment firms like Blackrock are only entering the SFH market because supply constraints mean ever-higher prices. It's not like nobody thought to buy up houses 40 years ago. You don't have to be a genius to think of it. I can remember being a teenager and thinking, why don't big firms buy up a…

I'm not contending that supply isn't the real issue, just that there's no way you're going to be able to change the culture around individual home ownership, nimbyism, and zoning laws on any reasonable time-frame. A better current solution that likely has wide-spread support would be to limit the demand rather than throw more money into the demand side. Limiting large investors does not solve the problem, but it coul…

I'm not so sure it's not possible. There are large numbers of people getting priced out, and YIMBY groups are springing up all over. Here in Oregon, we passed HB2001, which re-legalizes up to 4-plexes in our cities. One of the city councilors where I live is a huge YIMBY.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2022/03/31/where-p...

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-yimbys-are-starting-to...

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#424

Post by voisin » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 9:00 PM UTC

cameronh90 wrote: post #392

techsupporter wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's what the person you replied to mean when they wrote: > hitting the limits of sprawl (congested highway commute time) There's only so far you can bus, train, drive, bike, walk, seaplane, helicopter, hyperloop, or transporter in to go to work. Canadian cities are, just like cities in the US, hitting this limit rather aggressively. In cities where sprawl isn't physically prohibitive, like Calgary or Toronto,…

> There's only so far you can bus, train, drive, bike, walk, seaplane, helicopter, hyperloop, or transporter in to go to work. Canadian cities are, just like cities in the US, hitting this limit rather aggressively. Canada's largest urban area is 5.6 million people. London, Paris and Seoul are around double that, NYC is 19 million and Tokyo is 37 million. Why are Canadian cities hitting this limit at such a comparati…

Car culture. It is insanely inefficient at moving people and at land use.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#425

Post by jefftk » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 9:01 PM UTC

Beldin wrote: post #311

jefftk wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not sure if buyer or seller is better off using them. There's a theorem an auction design that says that, under some vaguely reasonable assumptions about bidder information, it doesn't matter what form you use for the auction. Open auction, sealed auction, even second price auction should all give the same winner and same final price: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vickrey_auction#:~:text=Revenu...

That's not entirely correct. The theorem says that in Vickrey auctions (sealed bid 2nd price), each bidder's optimal strategy is to bid their actual valuation of the auctioned object. It doesn't work with open bidding, because then you could bid artificially much as long as the 2nd highest bid was at your real valuation or below.

Sorry, that's not the theorem I'm referencing. See the section "Revenue equivalence of the Vickrey auction and sealed first price auction".

(Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_equivalence)

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#426

Post by manbackharry » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 9:02 PM UTC

Ensorceled wrote: post #352

manbackharry wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your last line is pretty much my exact opinion. I'm an idiot, but I struggle to see how significant taxes (and I mean SIGNIFICANT - something like having all rental income and cap gains on secondary residences taxed at the highest rate ~54%) in these cases wouldn't have extremely broad appeal. Make the sector unappealing as an investment class and you should stop seeing unfettered speculation. The idea of housing bei…

> I'm an idiot, but I struggle to see how significant taxes in these cases wouldn't have extremely broad appeal. It would have broad appeal, but not to the developers etc. that are buying 10K plates at fundraising dinners ... > The principal residence tax exemption is also a joke The problem is that without that exemption, you literally can't afford to move. The 6% "tax" for real estate fees are already painful if yo…

> It would have broad appeal, but not to the developers etc. that are buying 10K plates at fundraising dinners ...

Definitely true and thought it would go without saying haha

The rest of your post is totally fair and I can't really disagree.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#427

Post by jl2718 » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 9:02 PM UTC

joshlemer wrote: post #406

jl2718 wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of home owner occupant tax advantages were specifically introduced to disadvantage landlords. If you get rid of them, it may make the problem worse because there will be no way out of the rental trap. Separately, there are many tax laws that are written specifically to benefit landlords, and these disadvantage renters directly. The whole ‘fair share’ of taxes argument presumes that the aggrieved group would pay…

Well I guess in that framing, I as a renter am expressing that I am not willing to bear this tax burden, and so will be voting accordingly.

You should always vote for less taxes on yourself.

Voting for more taxes on other people does not reduce your taxes.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#428

Post by CPLX » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 9:02 PM UTC

wnolens wrote: post #239

CPLX wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shouldn't matter all that much. Rented homes are an excellent (not perfect but very close) substitute for purchased homes. People don't like to rent because of instability or unpredictability of pricing. But a large and growing long term rental market where it's straightforward to find a new place and nobody has an incentive to kick you out or raise your rent is really just fine. You might be thinking, right but i…

I like the conclusion, but I've created some elaborate financial models to compare buying versus renting (+ investing the difference in S&P500). And so have a few very intelligent friends. It almost NEVER works out in favor of buying except for some crazy flukes like pandemic accelerating prices in Toronto. I think it's largely cultural? Canadian's (more than any of my American friends) are fed the idea that owning a…

Your models are almost certainly missing something.

In a perfect world that would be true but in the actual world where lending is subsidized and tax-preferenced and the supply of housing is artificially constrained buying is just clearly a better scenario if you can do it.

Some people do this by comparing a 5:1 leveraged portfolio of the S&P 500 against a home purchase or something but that's not a real comparison that exists as a choice in the real world.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#429

Post by imtringued » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 9:03 PM UTC

rank0 wrote: post #380

slg wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think that blind bidding is a bit of a scape-goat here: Almost everything mentioned in the various comments here is a scapegoat. These all might contribute a little to the escalating prices at the margins, but they are not the root cause. The root cause is that many capitalist societies have decided that purchasing a house is the most expensive and important investment most people will make in their lifetime. Ther…

Speculation isn’t great, but let’s not pretend this is some elaborate scheme orchestrated by all the homeowners. If it’s feasible and profitable to build new homes, then developers will do so. Everyone loves the simple solution of “build more houses”. Very few actually consider the execution of the master plan. What would it take for you to start building homes? It’s an enormous risk, requires tons of upfront capital…

> Speculation isn’t great, but let’s not pretend this is some elaborate scheme orchestrated by all the homeowners.

No, but real estate companies wouldn't be able to lower property taxes alone. It's only happening once there is a critical mass of homeowners that is voting themselves a tax cut. Large real estate companies get exactly the same tax cut and since they have more property they benefit more than the average homeowner. One could have a tax cut for owner occupied housing but no, there is no limit to the tax cut. Everyone including billionaires gets it. That's incredibly unfair.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#430

Post by a_shovel » Thu, Apr 07, 2022, 9:06 PM UTC

crooked-v wrote: post #368

boplicity wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can go on longer than you think; it leads to "ghost cities" -- huge areas full of empty housing bought by speculators. https://allthatsinteresting.com/chinese-ghost-cities

Those "ghost cities" have been fairly consistently been filling in over time. Some of the originally-reported ones are by now more or less completely populated and are now just... cities.

That sounds interesting. Do you have an article or something about that?