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Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

bloomberg.com

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Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#561

Post by BurningFrog »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #304
BurningFrog wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. The question is why they didn't do that until ~1970, which is when I think that era started. It sounds crazy today, but the vastly poorer US society of 1960 supplied pretty everyone with an indoor place to sleep and call home.

That isn't true. The housing projects of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society poverty reduction efforts didn't start until mid decade. Before that, you could infer that there was an actual need for it (even though it ultimately failed).

I don't think the people who moved to the housing projects were typically sleeping on the streets.

I think it was more a case of upgrading to modern sanitation standards etc.

That said, I have no real detailed knowledge, and would be happy to learn how wrong I am about this :)

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#562

Post by chaostheory »

paconbork wrote: post #353
ericmay wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know someone who commutes from Kitchener to Toronto on GO, so they don't even have to put up with driving, and they're debating moving back home to Winnipeg for a 40% salary cut just to not have to put up with it any more. Isn't this a good thing in some ways or maybe many/all ways? Now wealth is less concentrated in one or a few locations. Every dollar not spent commuting is a dollar spent at a local coffee shop…

In theory, yes it would be nice to have the wealth more spread out, but jobs aren't concentrated in Toronto just for lack of creativity. The agglomeration of talent causes firms to be more productive, earn more money, and pay employees more. If a company moves to Winnipeg, the lose some access to the most productive employees and their employees have fewer companies to move to where they'll be more productive themsel…

If corporate culture embraced remote work, this wouldn’t be an issue

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#563

Post by dijit »

exfascist wrote: post #496
hnlmorg wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is you’re comparing the commute by public transport in the current status quo and missing the point that fixing the car culture means improving public transport so that it does become more convenient than taking the car. Plenty of European cities have achieved this. I work in London and I wouldn’t even dream of driving into the city. It’s far more convenient to get the train.

I think you should read my comment a little more carefully. 1 and 2 are due to serious physical and economic constraints that are very unlikely to change and apply to all but the absolute most dense areas. Remember, this is in DC. It's unusually dense and is supposed to be the best we have. 3 and 4 are additionally due to cultural, historical, and demographic problems that are becoming worse rather than better and th…

It is. But the problem is that the US is about 80-100 years behind Europe in this.

Personal economies are literally built on the idea of driving, it will be painful to solve that, but unfortunately it’s necessary to solve it otherwise you end up losing enormous amounts of your life to traffic and the infrastructure cost grows exponentially.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#564

Post by ipaddr »

bogota wrote: post #440
ipaddr wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The level of immigration is over 1%. Pretending people are just blaming foreigners misses the reality.

What do you mean by the level of immigration is over 1%? (Genuine question) and why does that matter?

Adding 500,000 new people a year where the majority settle in one or two cities and not building housing matters. Blaming the lack of housing on foreign buyers is misleading.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#565

Post by woah »

liketochill wrote: post #540
woah wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously? What's the mechanism of this magical connection? Rental prices go up if there is more demand in the rental market.

Landlords don’t buy properties to rent at a loss. Before they buy they make sure they will be able to charge the rent they need to cover costs. Or at least I do.

Exactly. Corporations are buying houses because rents are high. Rents are not high because corporations are buying houses.

Rents are high because there are not enough houses on the rental market, because not enough houses are built.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#566

Post by _carbyau_ »

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.

I agree it is car culture... but I feel that too often people treat it similar to self-driving-car predictions.

Sure, we have a good option for a significant majority of the time. But those many edge cases are non-trivial to resolve so a large majority of people will keep their cars for simple practicality sake.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#567

Post by chaostheory »

qball wrote: post #535
chaostheory wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would this change due to climate change? I’ve been looking at the climate trends in major cities and there are some drastic temperature changes in the coming decades.

No, and this ( https://d3d0lqu00lnqvz.cloudfront.net/media/media/9d427dba-c... ) is the reason why. The area in the red is one continuous granite slab called the Canadian Shield. The US has no comparable geography. There's almost zero topsoil, and building any community there involves a lot of very expensive blasting. It's bad land for the opposite reason that the Australian continent is largely uninhabitable: there'…

Thank you - that is very insightful.

I was going to say, there is still a lot of land both outside and inside the “Shield”.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#568

Post by wnolens »

gregable wrote: post #281

I've been looking at the Toronto real estate prices a bit, and I'm convinced the real issue is primarily interest rates, not immigration, or construction. Don't take my word for it, ofc: Immigration: - Rent has not increased like real estate: https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/toronto-on - In 2020, immigration dropped by half to 184,500. Real Estate prices went up. https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citi…

I've been watching it a while and I agree that the last 2 years are all interest rate driven.

But before that, and after the rates rise again, we will still see incredibly expensive home prices compared to the salaries of Canadians. There are lots of possible factors that make up this "floor price", all throughout this thread.

In the end I think it's just that Toronto is _the_ large city of Canada, and there aren't many others to choose from, AND in my experience Canadians won't relocate as readily as Americans do. So the demand to live in Toronto is VERY high. I don't see this changing.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#569

Post by liketochill »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #550
liketochill wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying rent to the bank ends after 25 years though.

It won't for most of the young people buying today, because they'll have to keep refinancing to afford what they've bought.

In addition to thinking that banks should be smart and act in their own self interest of not lending money to people who can’t pay it back, there are government mandated stress tests for qualifying for mortgages at higher interest rates.

While rates are historically low and a return to the rates of the 80’s would cause a lot of defaults, I think the market has tuned itself for maximum extraction of labour from those buying houses. You will pay as much as you can afford out of the income of your career to live in a desirable place.

There are many undesirable places with cheap land, few jobs near by, no amenities, schools, restaurants, etc. so everyone pays as much as they can afford because it is worth it.

But they are only allowed to afford what they can pay off with a 30 year amortization and meeting the stress test.

I’m considering moving to the Yukon.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#570

Post by chaostheory »

hello_moto wrote: post #361
stjohnswarts wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you cut off foreign buyers then you absolutely will have cut out some competition for the purchase so I don'd see how you can possibly say what you're saying? I mean it's a basic economics principle.

Might not move the needle. Plus there are a few stories of rich int'l students eventually becoming PR holder and get their monies from parents.

Sure if someone wants it bad enough, they’ll jump through all the hoops. I feel that while deterrents aren’t full proof, they do their job of limiting the overall amount of undesired behavior.
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