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Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

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Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#581

Post by seanmcdirmid »

BurningFrog wrote: post #561
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Bottom living standards were a lot lower back then: people could live in shacks without plumbing, flop houses were plentiful. These days none of that is legally allowed, so people would have fallen into that housing 50-80 years ago are homeless today. That being said, poverty reductions between then and now are real, it’s only that our standards keep getting higher (as they should).

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#582

Post by lotsofpulp »

TrappinDatRust wrote: post #578
kbenson wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're fighting scarcity. No, they're fighting market inefficiency. A free market requires accurate and timely information to be efficient. This is literally people putting constraints on the market for what they are selling so the information is not available to one side, and the price is inflated. A rational actor should walk away from a system like this, but if that's all that's available around you because of s…

but... blind bidding is how everything works. If I was a CapEx manager at Y company, why would i reveal pricing of other bidders? It's a conflict of interest for the other bidders. Even if you were to keep the pricing entity private it's the opposite of efficient because creates this 'bit-wise' incremental bidding that destroys the price. Unless you did some kind of random candle auction, this is easily gamed for a s…

Are public stocks and bonds bought and sold with blind bidding?

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#583

Post by ska »

hello_moto wrote: post #375
ska wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless things have changed radically since I was last there, downtown is mostly not dense. But even if it were, it wouldn't solve the real problem in these north american cities, which is the "missing middle". The model of small area of highly dense towers aimed at 20-something urbanites with no kids surrounded by spaced out single family homes with a yard is just fundamentally unworkable at any real scale. If Vancou…

> it's mostly going to have to build that on top of areas that are currently full of single family detached. This is not going to make current denizens of those "nice neighbourhoods" happy, naturally. They're not happy with megatowers. They're ok with missing middle (townhouses). There is a whole stretch of roads being bought out and converted to missing middle that leads to downtown. (Oak, Cambie).

Small Townhouses aren’t really enough though , you need to go 4-5 stories at least in part. I’ve seen zoning fights about even duplexes, let alone anything bigger - not sure if Vancouver is more accepting of that than other places .

Is it the case there that people are ok/happy with mid rise places along busy corridors only , but want to maintain SFD on all the side streets? That really doesn’t work either , it’s just people making a noise etc. barrier on “their” neighborhood…

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#584

Post by FredPret »

TuringNYC wrote: post #572
crooked-v wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the market efficiency in the world won't stop the continual increase in prices from bad zoning and missing middle housing.

>> All the market efficiency in the world won't stop the continual increase in prices from bad zoning and missing middle housing. I disagree. Depending on the jurisdiction (in the US), part of the issue is the 10% net loss you end up with. 5-6% on the agent fee(s), another 1% on "mansion tax", in NYS/NYC there is a 1% and 1% transfer tax and 1/2% mortgage tax. Different jurisdictions are less (or more). Throw in more…

All this is true and bad but the Canadian market is primarily driven by supply issues, not red tape. There just aren’t enough houses/condos.

The resulting price boom isn’t a mere 5-10% increase, but hundreds of percent over the course of only 5-10 years.

I’ve seen condo prices double three times in five years in places.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#585

Post by chaostheory »

dirtybird04 wrote: post #195
tomatowurst wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

The comment you're referring to blamed "capital flight from Asia" and "local or foreign millionaires". How did you get to "literally blaming Asians"? That's a pretty big jump there bud. Also, capital from China must be at least an order greater than capital from all of Middle East combined. Not defending their decision not to do anything when your Arabs and Iranians were buying up real estate, just that it was a drop…

As an Asian, I agree that embezzled money from China was a big problem, even in the big US metros, though I’m not sure it’s still a problem anymore even before this law passes. Why? China has been preventing capital flight for about two years or more now. I know several millionaires (USD) living in China either as citizens or expats and they all have the problem of not being able to legally get their money transferred out of China.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#586

Post by FredPret »

woah wrote: post #574
kbenson wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're fighting scarcity. No, they're fighting market inefficiency. A free market requires accurate and timely information to be efficient. This is literally people putting constraints on the market for what they are selling so the information is not available to one side, and the price is inflated. A rational actor should walk away from a system like this, but if that's all that's available around you because of s…

These kind of little tweaks to symptoms of the housing shortage are ultimately useless band aids. After a decade of stopping foreigners and corporations from buying houses, slapping the wrists of landlords who have vacant units, and mandating that the bidding process is emotionally nurturing, house prices will still be higher if there is more demand than supply. In a world where there was enough housing supply, you w…

This, 100%. The rules can be whatever they are, but the participant with the most market power will always end up having the upper hand somehow

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#587

Post by arrosenberg »

tomatowurst wrote: post #527
arrosenberg wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, it kind of seems like I do. My city has the same land use issues, without the alleged xenophobia and we still target foreign wealth way more than domestic. Its just easier.

> I dunno, it kind of seems like I do how?

A common fallacy when you don't have a good argument is to handwave things away as "you just don't understand". I've already made my arguments very clearly - there maybe a xenophobia issue in Vancouver, but average people didn't wake up and decide to be xenophobic for fun. They woke up and found that they had been outcompeted by wealthy foreign buyers and domestic buyers with money from sectors like finance or technology. Thirty years ago average people could buy a house on a regular wage and now they can't.

That competition is driving the anxiety, and the anxiety is driving the reaction. Wealthy foreign buyers are the easiest target. Wealthy Asian businesspeople have been stashing their money in Canada for a long time, so it's not surprising they've been targeted for as long as you claim. It may be xenophobic, but inherent xenophobia isn't what is driving the behavior, it's a reaction to the class and land use issues, and it gets more intense as the divide grows more obvious.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#588

Post by elevaet »

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…

>Like it or not transit will probably always lower property values in the US too. For whatever reason the more violent people here tend to take it and anywhere it goes becomes more violent so building it into suburbs like these is always going to be unpopular.

This smells of the coded racism that is so rampant in the USA. It's sad because there might be some element of truth at its root, but it gets exaggerated and the attitude creates more and more segregation, exacerbates the divisions and creates a hostile society.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#589

Post by TuringNYC »

FredPret wrote: post #584
TuringNYC wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> All the market efficiency in the world won't stop the continual increase in prices from bad zoning and missing middle housing. I disagree. Depending on the jurisdiction (in the US), part of the issue is the 10% net loss you end up with. 5-6% on the agent fee(s), another 1% on "mansion tax", in NYS/NYC there is a 1% and 1% transfer tax and 1/2% mortgage tax. Different jurisdictions are less (or more). Throw in more…

All this is true and bad but the Canadian market is primarily driven by supply issues, not red tape. There just aren’t enough houses/condos. The resulting price boom isn’t a mere 5-10% increase, but hundreds of percent over the course of only 5-10 years. I’ve seen condo prices double three times in five years in places.

>> All this is true and bad but the Canadian market is primarily driven by supply issues, not red tape.

My point is that if you reduce the red tape (and deadweight loss) there are actually people who want to sell, but wont sell if they are losing a ton of money on the sale. Reduce the loss and more supply appears.

In the US this is a huge issue. If you switch cities twice and sell each time, your entire downpayment has disappeared in fees/taxes. You literally have nothing left to buy your next home with. So people stick around in houses they dont want in cities without ideal jobs because they have no choice.

Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes

#590

Post by fartcannon »

davidw wrote: post #140
VincentEvans wrote: post #7

I don’t know the specifics on Canadian real estate market and the specifics of the problems there, but based on my understanding of the problems facing your neighbors to the south - I feel like it’s almost an attempt to appease citizens by blaming the issue on “foreigners” (always a move that is popular with politicians) to redirect attention from the much more likely cause - massive investments made by hedge funds,…

> massive investments made by hedge funds, private capital, REITs I can't recommend this article enough on that subject: https://www.vox.com/22524829/wall-street-housing-market-blac... "The role of institutional investors is still being studied, but the popularity of the narrative strikes at something dangerous: People want a convenient boogeyman and when they get it, they often ignore the structural problems that ar…

'Historically low supply' because it's been bought up as investments?
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