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Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

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Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#551

Post by chaostheory »

ashtonkem wrote: post #411
cameronh90 wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Why are all the major cities in the western world seemingly hitting this limit at the same time, even though they all have different populations? I can’t speak for Canada, but in America the answer is always cars. Car based transit is wildly land inefficient, and the main reason why all car based cities hit their limit at the same time. In particular there are two huge shortcomings with cars in urban design: 1. Par…

A lot of people don’t like public transit for several major reasons:

1. It takes a lot longer to get to your destination even accounting for traffic.

2. The potential for harassment based on your gender or race.

3. The potential for sexual assault.

4. The potential for violence.

Unfortunately, Western society at large is not collective and conformist like the one in Japan, which would heavily mitigate 2 out of the 4 problems stated above. Even then, Japan has a huge problem with harassment and sexual assault when it comes to female passengers.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#552

Post by kazinator »

robocat wrote: post #546
kazinator wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is such a huge deal. Probably, less than people think. Sealed bid auctions do not increase revenue to the seller, according to auction theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_equivalence > gives all of the information to one side (the sellers) Well, not all the information; just what other people are bidding. But all that matters to the bidder is that that other bidders do not have access to more informa…

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_equivalence Auction theory has so many assumptions that it really can’t be applied to buying a home. The link above assumes the highest bidder knows[1] the highest price the underbidder would pay, which is extremely silly. Apart from the fact that if you know the highest price of another bidder, then the seller also probably knows your highest price, and the seller can just ask…

Most of the people crying foul over the blind real estate bids have no idea about auction theory and what those assumptions are, and who is favored by the ways in which those assumptions do not hold, and how much.

> The link above assumes the highest bidder knows the price of the underbidder, which is silly

The first price auction and second price auction types are understood to be sealed bid. The English auction is open: bidders can bid more than once and see other bids.

In the second price auction, the underbidder's price is revealed when the auction ends, not during the bidding; the highest bidder pays that price.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#553

Post by bradleyjg »

ashtonkem wrote: post #488
voisin wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s amazing how many downvotes pointing this out gets. People have quite the kneejerk reaction when the downsides of car transit are pointed out to them.

It’s a lazy slogan that gets us nowhere. I live in NYC and we’ve built three brand new subway stations in the last fifty years.

It’s not just a matter of people’s preferences for cars, it’s not possible to build a non car city anymore due to pathologies that have nothing to do with “car culture”.

The number one issue is that we’ve allowed too many people and interest groups to effectively bring any major project to a halt. This is not some inherent feature of democracy either, you can have a democracy where the majority gets to do things. We just don’t have one of those in the US, or Canada it sounds like.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#554

Post by cscurmudgeon »

ashtonkem wrote: post #488
voisin wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s amazing how many downvotes pointing this out gets. People have quite the kneejerk reaction when the downsides of car transit are pointed out to them.

This is pointing out a symptom. Car transit exists due to massive NIMBYism spreading people out and corrupt governments that don't build good transit.

https://www.nationalbcc.org/news/latest-news/1737-ca-high-sp...

Pointing out obvious symptoms without pointing out the causes can get this "kneejerk reaction".

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#555

Post by 3qz »

vkou wrote: post #314
CountSessine wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're fighting scarcity. You still won't win the bidding war - it just won't be as one-sided. Stop championing scarcity by blaming scapegoats. Either we limit Canada's crazy-high immigration rate (1% of population every year) or we build more homes which is mostly gated by illiberal zoning laws passed by municipalities. But both of these policies are very popular so you'll be swimming upstream, politically. While yo…

1%/year is not a crazy-high rate, considering that Canadian fertility is below replacement. If the country can't figure out how to deal with a population growth of ~1%/year, the problem is not the growth, the problem is somewhere else.

It’s not population growth, just immigrantion. 1.3 million in the next 3 years and 430k this year when the population is not even 40 million. That’s not even including the hundreds of thousands of foreign students and temporary workers. There are several cities where the majority of residents were not born in Canada so it obviously has an enormous strain on everything.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#556

Post by chaostheory »

cameronh90 wrote: post #487
exfascist wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I hate driving and actually moved to DC for work and also partly for the transit. Here's what I found: 1) Taking the metro many places (for example, from my apartment in an urban "luxury" apartment building a couple blocks from the initial station to my boat near the waterfront in downtown DC) doubled the time it took to get there. It was actually faster to drive there even during rush hour where you'll sit motion…

Almost everything you're saying is a symptom of poor investment in public transport. I have no doubt that the car works better for your commute, as is the case for millions of other people. Unfortunately, stick millions of cars on the road and you have a huge bottleneck for growing the commuter belt, which means only houses in a relatively small area are useful, and they get extremely expensive. Historically, and in…

> Regarding the violence and antisocial behaviour, that's really a problem of policing and allocation of funding.

Japan has one of the lowest crime rates in the world with heavy investment in public transportation & policing, and yet they still have issues with sexual harassment and sexual assault on their trains. It’s a hard problem to fix related to population density.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#557

Post by CRConrad »

exfascist wrote: post #461
ashtonkem wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why are all the major cities in the western world seemingly hitting this limit at the same time, even though they all have different populations? I can’t speak for Canada, but in America the answer is always cars. Car based transit is wildly land inefficient, and the main reason why all car based cities hit their limit at the same time. In particular there are two huge shortcomings with cars in urban design: 1. Par…

So I hate driving and actually moved to DC for work and also partly for the transit. Here's what I found: 1) Taking the metro many places (for example, from my apartment in an urban "luxury" apartment building a couple blocks from the initial station to my boat near the waterfront in downtown DC) doubled the time it took to get there. It was actually faster to drive there even during rush hour where you'll sit motion…

> and b: now I can't use that time for anything other than programming projects.

Read a book.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#558

Post by charcircuit »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #419
Spivak wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Escalation clauses are dumb anyway. If you tell me “I’m willing to pay you up to 100k for your house” then my offer just became $100k.

You can require proof of competing offers in your escalation clause.

Just get the realtor or some random person to bid $99,999.99

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#559

Post by ipaddr »

tomatowurst wrote: post #438
ipaddr wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Canada the landlords are of many colours. Many are Jewish.. would you hold that against them because they are white?

Why are you mentioning Jewish community here?

Because if you filter for only colour you miss diversity.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#560

Post by totony »

tomatowurst wrote: post #207
arrosenberg wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not complicated, it's a second negative externality. Foreigners buying and not-occupying large amounts of valuable real estates drives up the cost of new housing, with no benefit the city, even if you squint really hard. A lack of new housing means high prices for the existing housing that the locals are "just bidding against themselves" on. It's a practice that should be taxed into oblivion.

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…

>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.

The reason it's worth 8 figures is because of demand. If there was rich people to buy it they'd have to sell it for a reasonable price that locals can afford.

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