That's a start. Next we need to ban the Chinese from buying more than the $2B worth of farmland they already own in the US.
$2B of farmland doesn’t sound like much for a continent.
Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes
671–680 of 817 posts
Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes
#672Earlier quoted context omitted.
You wrote: > That sounds pithy, but it overlooks all the maintenance work done on the system. Have you ever looked at pictures from the NYC subway in the 1970s? It was hell. (You can Google it.) My father lived in NYC in the 1970s and said the subway was like the "Fourth World" (vis-a-via first/second/third world!). Also, how about PATH, Metro North, NJT, LIRR, AirTrain JFK, or AirTrain Newark? These are not the NYC…
Also, you don’t need to add a ton of subway stations when you already have an extensive network. 3 stations in 50 years would be a much worse outcome in say, Cincinnati.
That just made me appreciate how much greater value still might be unlocked by simply building as few as 3 stations in metro areas that don't currently have any at all, and then expanding from there. That would be an interesting study if it hasn't been done: what is the MVP of underground subway networks? How many stations do you need for a given area is probably a budgetary concern as much as a passenger capacity concern.
Have any metro areas built entirely new subways where there were none before in recent times? I know a lot of places are looking at light rail too, so have there been any greenfield light rail deployments in USA either?
It seems like a uniquely American problem, which leads me to believe that there just isn't political will to overcome the massive car lobby in most places, which is all the more reason to advocate for it, in my view.
Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes
#673Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Antisocial behavior on public transit isn’t just a matter of policing and funding. It’s also a matter of civil liberties. In California, people have a constitutional right to defecate on the streets. In was once in a San Francisco bus and watched a young woman of West Asian descent break down in tears because a homeless man was calling her a “sand n***”. She screamed back at him the Trump was going to put him in a co…
I think that's just a think that happens where people are, and the more people you run into in your travels, the higher the likelihood that you'll run into them.
Public transit is one of the few public spaces we have left, ironically. Perhaps especially so post-Covid. I think that it's worth the investments necessary to make it usable. You can't blame public transit for the lack of effectiveness of homeless programs, and some folks are homeless by choice. It's a fraught situation, and that's why folks choose cars a lot of the time. It's more convenient for them and I guess I don't fault folks for that, but the built environment shows a lot of deference for cars in many metro areas, and that doesn't help with the traffic issues, or with zoning issues, or with housing affordability.
Yet, if you improve those other issues, then property values will probably just go up even higher than they already are, but at least that money will benefit more than just the buyer and the seller; it will benefit the entire community.
Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes
#674Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know how real estate market works in Canada, but I can totally see how 5% of buyers could mess up the market in the U.S.. House pricing is set based on 'comps' (comparable homes and the price they sold for). That means that a small percentage of buyers can essentially bump (initial) pricing for all homes.
The problems of the housing market is the exact same as any other expensive city in the US or anywhere else. Home-owners with local power messing with zoning laws to limit supply and boost the price of their homes. It's always a supply issue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OZJClSdZ28
The fundamental issue is the incentives. When someone who owns a home says no to increasing zoning, their net worth goes up. It's verrry hard to go upstream and fight that. I'm for those changes, and would vote for them, but the people incentivized to fight will gish gallop till the cows come home. If you shut down one, they will invent some other reason that zoning should not be increased.
The only way to fix this is to tax the land equal to what it's worth - occupying or not, foreign owned or not - such that the sale price of the home is equal to the cost to build the housing on top of it. Once that's true, and saying no means they pay more, they will only actually say no to things that actually make them happier, and I'm all for that if they are willing to pay for it. But the most likely cause is that they would suddenly vote to up-zone and would allow for denser housing, and over time the tax would drop.
Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes
#675Earlier quoted context omitted.
>This is not the result of a hushed down societal decision. The refusal to allow housing construction the cause of the ever increasing prices. And what would you say is the cause for that? I would generally say it is people trying to protect their existing investments in housing.
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.
Population has more than doubled and the proportion of urban population has increased by more than 50%.
1960:
Pop: 3,034,949,748
%Urban: 34%
2020
Pop: 7,794,798,739
% Urban: 56%
Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes
#676Earlier quoted context omitted.
>In many countries, including Europe, new properties are quickly snatched by investment Demand for housing is not infinite, and supply of capital is not infinite. Building more units will always help. The quantity of units which are bought and then kept empty long term is tiny in relative terms.
>> In many countries, including Europe, new properties are quickly snatched by investment > Demand for housing is not infinite, and supply of capital is not infinite. Building more units will always help. The quantity of units which are bought and then kept empty long term is tiny in relative terms. I think it's kind of pointless to argue over which one policy to pursue to fix this problem, why not try a multi-pronge…
1 and 2 will essentially prevent any sort of a rental market, and rentals clearly play a valuable role for lots of society.
Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes
#677Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personally, I think the problem is more a question of the sort of business development that happens downtown vs the surrounding areas. If you look, for example, at development on highway 7 over the decades, there's definitely densification going on, e.g. this area[0] used to be farmlands back in the day, but now those red lanes are public transit lines and there are condo buildings sprouting up along that corridor. A…
People want to live close to work, because it's hard to multitask while commuting, and if you're paid hourly, it's essentially unpaid work time. Higher paying jobs allow those higher earning workers to bid up prices on the land closest to their high paying workplaces, which tend to be in desirable areas, because those areas have other amenities that the highly paid workers are able to pay to enjoy. It's a ratcheting…
I mean, for a market like the SF Bay Area, sure, the political landscape wrt housing is notoriously difficult to navigate, but at least for Toronto, I never got the impression of housing construction being deterred to as significant of a degree. In fact I'd say condos have been going up all over the place for decades to the extent that people were even voicing concerns over disappearing parking lots as construction companies gobbled them all up and turned them into condo projects.
I think at some point, even if the government were to scream "let there be more housing", there still needs to be private capital poured into these very expensive projects, and surely there must be a significant amount of analysis done to determine where it makes sense to put up condos, where amenities and other businesses sprout up in response, and rinse and repeat.
The side of supply where I think things get dicier is wrt wealth inequality. The real estate agent I used to buy my house had 3 mortgages of her own, it's an incredibly common thing for well-off people and real estate insiders to over-leverage on rental property mortgages. My wife had friends from China buying up property with corruption money given to them by their parents, it's been a thing since forever. There's no easy way to regulate who gets to buy houses and who doesn't.
Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes
#678I 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,…
Action for home affordability needs to be taken, but I’m always weary of simply blaming foreigners, especially in Vancouver where there was always (since the 1800s) a lot of ethnically Chinese people. Way too many people use “foreigners” as a dog whistle term for “Chinese” and include Chinese Canadian ownership but exclude American foreign ownership (which is quite high if I remember correctly). I recall one controversial article from about 5 years ago that investigated “foreign ownership” by checking records for Chinese-sounding names since at the time citizenship wasn’t publicly available in real estate records. Clearly the wrong way to check, given that there are hundreds of thousands of ethnically Chinese Canadian people in the Vancouver area.
Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes
#679Earlier quoted context omitted.
> NIMBYs need to realize that allowing more housing isn't going to tank prices. ... When they tell you that they don't want their neighborhood to densify they actually mean it. Ya, a lot of NIMBYs don't care about housing prices since they aren't thinking about selling anytime soon, they just don't want the traffic and (perhaps) crime that goes along with density. I get what they mean since I became home owner. I don…
> they just don't want the traffic and (perhaps) crime that goes along with density. Something I've been trying to think through recently is that people clearly have some kind of proximity theory of crime. If there is a murder in the building next door to me, then that's going to make me uncomfortable, whether there is one family living in that building or 10. The obvious urbanist (or generic intellectual) response t…
in general, per capita crime is higher in cities though. some of that is misleading: truly random murders are rare pretty much everywhere. but you're a lot more likely to be the victim of crimes of opportunity (armed robbery, car/home break-ins, etc) when you live in a dense area.
Re: Canada to ban foreigners from buying homes
#680Earlier 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…
No one is required to pay a 5-6% commission. Use a discount real estate broker. You won't get much in the way of marketing or staging service, but in a hot market that hardly matters.
Looks like a valid for a non-canadian, why is this downvoted?